sbk

Just returned from my first cruise that was 7 days. The boarding process is a bit of a mess in Galveston. First you just hand off your luggage to random porters and hope it makes it to your room. Mine was flagged because I brought an outlet cord since all the cruise blogs I read prior recommend bringing one. You have to pick it up near bottom of the ship so do not bring an outlet strip! Your room has two outlets which really was enough for me since I wasn't using my phone on board. The security line was a few hours long. We arrived at 11:30 am and that happened to be the busiest time. I think you're better off arriving at 3 to skip all the lines. You can't get into your room until 1 pm anyway. A nice lady put myself and my mom through the handicapped line, even though neither of us are, so we skipped an hour waiting in line. Then you proceed to another line to get your seapass card. This line wasn't too long maybe 30 min wait. From here you walk a good ways to the ship then you're on. On our trip we cruised the first 3 days to Honduras. For me that was too long to the fist port. By day 3 I was ready to go home lol. The best thing onboard was the entertainment. The shows for the most part were very good, but getting a seat could be challenging. There are no ushers enforcing the save only one seat per person so large families saved literally entire rows of seats every night. Expect to be an hour early to get a seat. That would have to be my least favorite thing about the cruise...the crowds! We happened to be at max capacity which was almost 6,000 people with staff included. A lot of times you couldn't tell but at dinner and the shows it was packed. For dinner it's a hit and miss who you end up seated with. We had a table of 9 which had 3 other families at. Our people were a bit of a buzzkill so dinner wasn't that fun. Expect to spend 2 hrs at dinner every night it's a very slow process. You can, like all the blogs say, order multiple plates at dinner, however I'm not sure anything we ever ate you'd want seconds of except the lobster tail on one formal night. I actually think I ate less on this cruise vs real life because the food is not very good. On day one I went to guest service to request all the menus for the week. I highly recommend doing this to plan on when to skip the dinning room. Two nights we skipped it in favor of the pizza shop, which for us had the best food onboard. The windjammer buffet was always packed. I'm not a fan of buffets but you probably will end up eating here at least once. The lunch menu was not great. Most plates I saw had burgers on them cause that was pretty much the only decent thing to eat at lunch. Breakfast was fine. We ate a few days for breakfast in the dinning room but that menu is pretty limited. We didn't purchase any drink plans so you get water, fake tea, lemonade, and coffee free. The tea took a while to get used too it's like an instant tea. I'm not sure why they can't brew real tea but they don't. The lemonade was fine and at breakfast the apple juice wasn't bad. There are a few extra $ restaurants you can eat at but I compared their menus to dinning room and they were too similar to justify paying $20-30 per person to eat at. Never tried room service but that menu was pretty limited too. Service was okay nothing outstanding or too bad. Worst was probably dinning room since it moves so slow. The one time we ate there for lunch our server took 20 min before taking our order so I got up and found him. It's good practice to order at least two entrees cause more than likely one won't be very good. We never used any pools as they are always packed and I'd rather wait to swim in the ocean than tiny packed pools. There are tons of activities especially for kids. Each day you get your cruise compass newsletter which has a breakdown of hour to hour activities. Once we reached our first port it was more fun since we got off the ship. Honduras I'm not sure I'd ever go to again. It was a sad port because it's a very poor country. We did a nature hike there which was okay. My favorite stop was costa maya. The day we docked there the waves were very high and lots of excursions got cancelled. It was a bit shady the boat didn't let guests know the night before they knew they would be as we had rough seas the day before. We ended up switching from glass bottom boat tour to salsa and salsa beach break. I wasn't too enthused about it but it turned out to be lots of fun! You make your own guac and two salsas then practice salsa dancing then get to spend the rest of the day at the beach. They also gave you 3 free drink cards. I snorkeled from the beach here which was nice. Our last stop was Cozumel. We did the secret river tour which required a 40 min ferry ride to mainland at playa del carmen. So we were never actually in Cozumel that day. The river tour was really neat. It's an expensive excursion but worth to do at least once. You gear up with wetsuits, helmets, life jacket, and hiking stick to go in caves with stalagmites and tites. You swim through fresh water little ponds too. The only bummer is they don't let you take your own photos. They charge $25 per photo of $99 for all photos on jump drive. We ended up buying one. You end the tour with a food buffet of a few items. This tour is all day we got back to the boat at 4:30, but tons of people were behind us. We pretty much always left a bit after 4:30 at every port. I was worried about leaving the ship but it went better than expected. You are assigned a number for your luggage that corresponds with an exit time. We waited maybe an hour in the theater before our number was called. The longest line was customs but it wasn't too bad. The large families block up these lines with their 10 bags of luggage. It'd be nice if they separated lines by party size. Overall it was an okay trip, but for the amount of money you spend I'd rather book a trip with less people. It kind of is like going on a big group vacation. I'm not a big fan of crowds so I'm not sure I'll be cruising again anytime soon.