I booked Carnival Horizon's westbound TA for 5/9/18, then some cruise friends discovered that rather than flying to Europe days early, we could take this Star eastbound TA and have 3 nights in Barcelona in between sailings. Wasn't sure I could get that much time off, but went ahead and booked everything.

For some reason, I'd never been interested in sailing NCL. Now I'm sorry I didn't try them earlier. The majority of my 30 cruises had been on Carnival and I've been a bit burned out on them lately. Love them, but wanted a change and, honestly, all the mass-market lines are pretty similar, so I wasn't expecting anything to be drastically different and it wasn't.

Embarkation was a mess. Apparently, Immigrations had decided on a major inspection of the returning passengers on that Sunday morning so it was very congested and slow. One thing I will say about NCL was there didn't seem to be a lot of communication to passengers on what was happening. We had a delay disembarking in Lisbon and it was also just a confused mess with no one really keeping us informed. OTOH, the Captain was great with his announcements. He'd tell stories and talk about the upcoming ports. He was quite entertaining. Read more