This was my 10th cruise but first on HAL. I have traveled with Carnival, Royal Caribbean and Princess previously. We decided to drive to Fort Lauderdale in order to make our trip be more than a cruise as well as being able to bring as much luggage as we wanted and not be constrained by the airlines. For us the main question was how much was parking going to cost us as well as a hotel. After much searching we spent the night before the cruise at the Hyatt Place North and although our room was $200, it did offer free parking for two weeks as well as a shuttle bus to and from the port. When we arrived, we found that we could have parked at the Park n Go for $12 a night or $10.50 if we were AAA members. They are right by the airport/port and will shuttle you over and back. After looking around for another hotel and finding that they were all sold out, we stayed with our original plan.

There was no problem getting the shuttle the next morning, in fact, we met our new friends on the shuttle. We did not print off luggage tags and they were quite easy to get on the curb where we checked our luggage. We proceeded into the building with our travel documents, had our picture taken, given a number and waited for our group to be called. All this by 11:30 AM. All went very smoothly and no effort on our part. We were served juice while we had a short wait for our number. We proceeded onto the boat and immediately went to Lido deck for lunch. We are glad that we did because about 60 minutes later, it was packed and there were no tables to be had inside. We met another couple and decided to make reservations for Pinnacle as well as Canaletto's - the Italian restaurant that is no charge but does require reservations.

By 1:30 we were allowed into our rooms. After having read some other reviews, I thought that storage was going to be a problem and it wasn't. All of our closets had shelves in them that could be folded up or down; two large drawers at the foot of our bed, nightstands with two drawers, stool whose lid came off that we used for dirty laundry, two cabinets over the loveseat and a shelf under the sink in the bathroom. I did bring along an alarm clock since I knew from other cruises that there were no clocks in the rooms. We were on the 5th deck, the floor above the lifeboats. We had a lovely view of the sea, sunsets and the ocean in general. Even though we couldn't look directly down into the water I felt safer since I knew that if I fell, I would land on the roof of the lifeboat. The balcony had two chairs and a little table. The room had a hair dryer so I didn't need to bring mine. I did bring a travel size steamer in case my clothes got wrinkle. I also brought extra coat hangers with me - never can have too many. We never saw our room steward and most days our rooms were not made up till after lunch even though we had the tag in our door that our room needed to be serviced. On the days that we were in port, it was not a problem but the at sea days, I would have preferred the room to be made up earlier. Read more