This was a 2nd cruise for my husband and I, the first being on The Pearl. We were celebrating my turning the big 5-0 as well as a 10 year anni for us. While we have not sailed any other line, we both love NCL for the free style and, while it is not so free style on the larger ships (you must make reservations if you want a specific time for dinner as well as shows) it still is "Free Style" in that you don't have a specific dining time or sitting with any particular people (though you can request that), and the dress code is not quite that enforced, though yes, you get dressed up biz casual for specialty dining. Plus, we just love NCL for it's very friendly employees (most times) and general overall relaxed I'm On Vacation feel.

We cruised out of NOLA. We had also read some pretty worrisome stories of that port, and therefore we prepared ourselves for the worst (with a relaxed attitude that it would be okay.. we were on vacation any which way!), all for not because it was ridiculously smooth!!! Now, I'm sure that others after me will have their horror stories, but as for this day, we could not have asked for a better experience! NOLA port was quick, efficient and wonderful. We had a set time of arriving between 10-10:30, however we got to port around 9:30 via LYFT who we had drop us off near the port on Julia St by Mulate's (a restaurant) and we were to walk from there. We could literally see the Getaway (insert hearts for eyes emoji:) from there. A pretty awesome thing happened then and that was a porter who had a luggage rack with him happened to be right there and asked which ship we were getting on. We told him and he told us to put our luggage on his rack and he'd walk over with us as that is where he was going! Perfect! Found out he was a couple blocks out as he had just helped an elderly couple get their luggage to their hotel. Pretty amazing guy and awfully nice. We tipped him well and thanked him more then a couple times. (side note... NOLA was a busy bustling city, but it is filled with amazingly nice, helpful people. A pleasure to visit and we will be back!) Once we checked in and got our key cards (whoop whoop!!) and all that jazz, we sat in the holding pen with Boarding Pass #3 and were walking on board at 11:15!

The Ship: I will start off by saying, although I loved the Getaway, our personal preference as we now know is for the mid-sized ships. She's HUGE and with a 5 days cruise there is no way you can do everything, plus with the amount of people onboard (I believe we were close to standard capacity?) there were troubles getting into some of the shows. I did my homework though and knew to expect this and really this vacation wasn't a hurry and do things vacay or we HAVE TO do this, so it worked for us. She was beautiful. As we all may know she just got back from a refurb, and I guess it showed because she was quite clean and spruced up. I had recently read comments about the employees not knowing what they were doing... can't attest to that. We had a great steward (received a Hero card from us and a extra tip at the end) Raj who went above and beyond to take care of us and always had a big happy smile on his face. Several workers would not make eye contact or just stayed busy and attentive to what they were doing and ya know, that's okay. We don't expect everyone catering to us (and they were!) to be all happy happy, joy joy all the time. As for getting around, well, we might be a bit older but it took us a bit to get with it on where we were going or need to be, but the maps all around came in so helpful. Read more