For my wife and I, this was our fourth cruise. It was our kids' third and my mom's third as well. It was the first cruise on a Carnival ship for all in our group. We chose the 5 day Ecstasy cruise because it was an easy 1 hour drive to Galveston from where we live. My wife and I wanted to be home for Christmas and New Years and the price was reasonable. My wife's birthday was during the trip so I preordered some cabin decorations and a cake on the Carnival website prior to the cruise.

Embarkation: We drove the hours drive to Galveston and used Galveston Park N Cruise for our parking paying $40 online for an indoor parking space. They were great. A gentleman directed us to our parking space, we loaded our bags onto a large golf cart and he drove us to the corner of New Strand and 25th where we took a 5 minute walk to the terminal. We were a little early at about 11 AM and once we dropped off some of our bags we went into the terminal and quickly moved through security and received our Sail and Sign cards. This was quick and effortless as the online registration apparently worked as intended. (There were some glitches when we did the online check in for our RCL cruise last March and we had to repeat the process at the port.) We directed to wait in an area set up for embarkation for about 20 minutes until 12 noon when we were permitted to board. As we did not have access to the cabins until 1:30, we headed up to the Lido Deck where we had lunch. Galveston was cool with intermittent drizzle so we were glad to have a nice, warm spot to sit and relax.

Cabins: When 1:30 came about we headed to the cabins. My Mom and daughter were in a Class 1A Cabin on Riviera. It was small, but an easy walk to the elevator. With the top bunk down, the beds were placed in a "T" relationship with the lower bed extending out from the wall under the top bunk. The problem with this was that there was no way for an adult to sit up from the bed without having to duck under the upper bunk. We partially solved this by sliding the bed forward, but grandma still managed to take a dizzying hit to the head while packing her bags the last night of the cruise. The rest of us had a 6B OV cabin just around the corner. The room was spacious compared to the standard cabins we had on our RCL cruises and we were impressed with the size of the bathrooms - particularly the shower. Closet space was well organized. My wife was surprised by the nice birthday decorations set in the room. There was much more to the decorations than is shown in the ordering pictures. Again, when navigating around the upper bunk, we had to be constantly careful about watching our heads. On the RCL ships, the upper bunks were lowered from the ceiling. On the Ecstasy, there was a wooden frame against the wall that the upper bunk lifted up and out from. The edges of the platform that the mattress sat on also had sharp corners to it. The safety rails to the upper bunks in both our room do not lock upright and easily fold down towards the mattress. This was a problem when the kids would use the rail to pivot onto or off of the mattress as they maneuvered to and from the ladder. Both experienced minor accidents due to this design. (My daughter fell off the bed as she was trying to get off the bed and onto the ladder and my son got bumped when I stepped up to the side of the bed and as I leaned into the rail it folded down onto his forearm and wrist. I instantly lifted the rail and thankfully, neither had any injuries. We also had a problem with the temperature being WAY TOO COLD in our cabin. When we bought that to the attention to our cabin steward, he said it would be better was we reached warmer weather. He showed us that we could regulate the vent that was over our bed to limit the cold air coming in, but it would not close completely so we weren't thrilled with our prospects until he brought us 2 extra blankets. After the first cold night huddled under the blankets it DID get warmer and the temperature was never a problem again. Read more