Our cruise initially started out as a traveling nightmare, but thanks to NCL, the Jewel's onboard staff, and some wonderful CC friends, it turned out to be the cruise of a lifetime! I feel that it's important to share the background of our trip before/as I do my review.

We are both in our 50's and this was our fourth cruise, all with NCL. This time we were meeting my son and his girlfriend (both in their mid-twenties) in Fort Lauderdale and then heading to the ship together for our cruise. We always fly a day ahead due to the weather here in Upstate New York, and this year was no different. When we arrived at the Buffalo airport on Saturday morning for our flight to Fort Lauderdale, we were told that our flight was cancelled (they gave us each a round-trip ticket for our trouble) and we could be put on a stand-by flight (which was already overbooked) on Saturday evening. An Air Tran supervisor saw how upset I was and offered to arrange a flight for us from Akron, Ohio (a four hour drive) to Fort Lauderdale on Sunday morning so we would not miss the cruise. I contacted the NCL number on our cruise docs to be sure that arriving after 2:00 PM would be okay. We arrived at the Akron airport early Sunday morning, and while waiting to board our flight, an announcement was made that our flight would be delayed. We finally flew out of Akron at 1:00 PM and arrived at Fort Lauderdale at 3:30 PM, too late to board the cruise. We spent nearly five hours at the airport trying to make arrangements to get to Roatan for Tuesday (impossible, we were told) or Belize for Wednesday. Again, I contacted NCL and they told us it would be possible to meet the ship in Belize on Wednesday morning. A very nice Air Tran supervisor, not only made arrangements to get us to Belize on US Air, but because it was Air Tran's fault that we missed the ship, they flew us at no charge!

We arrived in Belize on Monday afternoon and stayed at the Princess Hotel and Casino, which was arranged through our trip insurance representative. The hotel was nothing fancy, but was clean and acceptable. We spent Tuesday at the Belize Zoo, a trip worth taking, also an excursion option from the ship, which we arranged through the hotel. It was a nice way to spend a day and the tour guides were knowledgeable and pleasant. Read more