Since this is my first cruise ever, I have nothing to compare it with so I guess I was a bit too optimistic/positive while experiencing everything and this reflected in my review. My first ship choice was the Sapphire or Diamond Princess but they were all full. So, we picked the Spirit instead of the Star and we decided to stick with it, no matter what and experience it. But, going into the cruise I felt as if it wouldn't enjoy it as much since many people have complained a lot about many things which is okay because they are probably more experienced cruisers. I can say that this was an amazing, exceptional experience of a lifetime and the ship itself was stunningly beautiful. There is always room for improvement but I think that the staff did everything that they could for the most part to please their customers. I would most definitely sail on NCL again if I get the chance to and would recommend it to anyone.

July 23 - Left home early, (at 8:30 am) and boarded American Eagle to San Juan, Puerto Rico. Reached there, went to Domino's for lunch (which is close to gate 3) and had some pizza (shouldn't have done this though because we were sitting in Business class on our next flight and they gave us a HUGE meal!). Our next flight was to Dallas/Fort Worth, TX. Took us about 5 hours and 30 minutes and we finally reached Dallas. We reached kind of late and only had about 30 minutes to run from one gate to another (somewhere in terminal A all the way to terminal C) which were very far apart and the airport was so crowded! We practically ran to the next gate but on the way there, we found out that our flight to Seattle was delayed by almost 1 hour so we were happy that we could take it a little easy. We finally reached our C gate and set off for Seattle. Arrived in Seattle around 10 pm and picked up the luggage right away and went to our hotel for the night which was Holiday Inn Express SeaTac. It was actually a nice hotel.

July 24 - First Day of cruise - Seattle When we got up in the morning, we went to breakfast in the lobby which was crowded with people since breakfast is complimentary. It was a nice meal with quite a bit of variety though all the food was basically cold stuff (cereal, muffins, bagels, coffee, juices, fruit). We then took a cab to Holiday Inn on Dexter Avenue to drop off some of our suitcases which we would not be needing on the cruise (we were traveling for 2 more weeks after the cruise). After that, we went straight to Pier 66. I enjoyed the drive from the Airport side to the city side. The city of Seattle reminds me a lot of San Francisco because of all of the dips going up and down in the roads. Before we even got to Pier 66, we saw two other ships at an earlier pier (Diamond Princess and one of the HAL ships). Pier 66 was bustling with people all over the place. The boarding process was pretty simple. We stood in line outside first with all of our luggage. We reached a point where a woman checked all of our passports and cruise tickets and then sent us front to place our luggage on the x-ray conveyor belt. We then walked out of the building and reached to the escalator and rode up, and entered an area where there was a HUGE line that moved slowly. Another NCL official checked our tickets and passports and told us to stand in the appropriate line. Lucky enough for us, we are not American Passport holders so we stood in the International visitors line and our line was completely empty. Yaay! Others were in line for a long time. Read more