About Us : My husband and I are 60 & 58 respectively but are "young" for our age. We're growing older but not up as the Jimmy Buffett song goes! This was our 5th cruise with Carnival and our 44th cruise overall. Living in New Jersey, we've been sailing only out of the NY area for the past few years since it's so convenient and we don't have to put up with all the headaches of flying. We chose this cruise not only for the NYC embarkation but also for the ship itself. We like big and new. Not many ships are bigger than the Dream and you couldn't get much newer. And our last couple of Carnival cruises on the Legend and Valor were great.
Embarkation: We had car service pick us up at out house at 10:00AM and we were at the pier in by 10:55AM. Can't do that when we have to go the Florida or elsewhere to pick up a cruise. Check-in was quick, but the boarding process was incredibly slow. They began boarding at about 11:20AM. We were in group #10 for boarding and didn't get on until about 1:30PM. We were told that the problem was that the gangways could not reach deck 3 as they could not handle ships this big. I sailed on the slightly larger QM2 from the same pier and the gangways worked fine. You had to enter the ship on deck 0 which is the crew deck rather than in the main atrium, so we didn't experience the initial "wow" factor that you usually get when first boarding a ship.
By the time we boarded, our staterooms were ready, so we headed there, dropped off our carry-ons and headed to the Lido for lunch.