My husband and I, who are in our 40's, just returned from our June 2000 Carnival Inspiration Dutch Treat cruise. It was a fantastic cruise with the best port in the world, Aruba.

We left our Southern California home on Friday, because the trip takes so long. We flew from Orange County to Dallas, then on to San Juan. The trip took all day and there was a lot of turbulence (yuck). We arrived at about 8:00 p.m. in San Juan and took a taxi to the Marriott hotel. We spent all day Saturday in San Juan where we just stayed at the hotel, swam in the pool and made a donation at the casino. Having been to San Juan before, we had no interest in sightseeing or shopping, as there is not much to do or see there. Sunday morning we took a cab to the port and arrived at about 11:30 a.m. Unfortunately there was a delay in offloading the passengers from the previous cruise (something about a Customs problem). At 12:30 the boarding began and by 1:00 we were on the Lido deck having our first pina coladas! We had requested the late seating dinner, but our Sail & Sign cards indicated that we had gotten the main (early) seating. We went to the maitre'd line to put in our request for late seating. We tried to tip (bribe) the headwaiter, but he wouldn't take it! The first night's dinner is Open Seating, where you go to your dining room at the assigned time and are seated with whomever. By the time dinnertime rolled around, I had so many pina coladas that I just wanted to take a nap(!) so we skipped the first night's dinner and had pizza at about 9:00. About 11:00 we set sail from San Juan and were on our way!

I had been corresponding with another woman on the Cruise Critic message board, so we met up the first night and ended up getting along so well we hung out together the whole cruise. The first port was St. Thomas, where we went ashore for shopping. We had all been to St. Thomas previously and taken the various tours, so we decided to skip them this time. The weather was not too good -- it was raining on and off and the seas were kind of churned up. After a strenuous day of shopping, we returned to the ship and found we had been switched to the late seating dinner. Read more