The good:

Boarding the Elation: We got lucky. We arrived about 1:30pm for boarding. The "premium" boarding line was empty so we and others were told by Carnival personnel to use it rather than the regular line. I thought check-in and boarding were fairly quick (maybe 20 minutes tops). Kudos there.

Our room:Very generously sized, with a King bed for me and my spouse and a "pull down" bed for our 15 y.o. daughter. Beds were comfortable. Bathroom was also quite large and the shower had amazing water pressure. Toiletries in the shower included shampoo and body wash and a basket on the sink had other samples. Plenty to storage space (we over-packed a bit as we didn't know how much dressing up we'd want to do). The t.v. was older and its picture was sometimes fuzzy but that wasn't an issue as we rarely had it on. Read more