Our friends we traveled with booked this cruise and we decided to join them. The four of us are in our late '50s. It was a long transcontinental trip for a week, but we've done it before. We all live in San Diego. My wife and I came in a day early and rented a hotel room; our friends came in on the night before the first day of the cruise on a redeye and met us at our hotel at sunrise and crashed with us for a few hours before we all went to the ship around noontime.

EMBARKATION: Wow... fastest embarkation ever (and we've cruised DOZENS of times). From exiting our Uber from the hotel at the port to the time we had a glass of sparkling wine in our hands was literally 14 minutes!!! USE THE CELEBRITY APP and pre-enter EVERYTHING and you will be on this ship in no time.

ACCOMMODATIONS: We don't normally do verandah cabins anymore since we've cruised so much... even inside/outside cabins are okay with us. However, this time we decided to splurge this time on the much-hyped "infinite verandah"... are we glad we did it? Yeah. Would we do it again? No. Others may differ with our opinion, but the "infinite verandah" is basically an outside cabin with a window that opens. Duh. We all know that. However, the difference between this type of cabin and a "real" balcony cabin is that for one thing, the bridge can close that window ANYTIME they want to. They did it THREE times during the week. Secondly, when you open that window, the air-conditioning SHUTS OFF. If you're in a real balcony cabin, you can go outside the cabin and sit in the chair and shut the door behind you if your spouse doesn't want to sit in the heat (Caribbean). However with this cabin: window open? No A/C. There IS a door between the "balcony" and the room, but if that window is open, same deal no matter whether that door is open or closed. Plus if you want to listen to the ocean going by during the night, with a regular balcony, you just leave the door open; with this cabin, they can shut it automatically. Okay...enough of the cabin differences. You get the picture. Read more