Fun, Exciting, A Little Hectic Due to the Long Port Days and One Sea Day, Some Disappointing aspects

The ship was beautiful.  The stops, for the most part, were exciting and included some of lesser-visited places like St. Croix and Grenada.  But the itinerary gave you a lot of island time and little time to enjoy the ship.

The islands are so close together which offers advantages and disadvantages.  After leaving at 8:30 p.m. you are already at the first port of call by 8 a.m. the next morning.  And you stay until after 5 p.m.  That basically continues each day for the first 5 days of the cruise.  Only on the 6th day do you get a full sea day.  It's hard to pack in everything the ship has to offer in that time.

The ship is big with lots of open space, particularly in the 2-3 level central shopping promenade.  The cruise line obviously wants to showcase this shopping and bar area by holding many activities right on the "street" that runs through it.  A great deal was also done on the pool deck.  The "nightlife" was concentrated along that street, by the pool and/or the Viking Crown lounge. The nightclub was horrendous, bad music, very few people.  It appears the put all their nightlife energy into those other places that are more high profile.

The food was good.  Restaurant offered very good, exciting and varied dishes.  But the list of "classics" (in case you didn't want one of the featured items for the night) was always the same and included, among other things, a steak and "sliders."  The wait staff was excellent every night.  However, on the last day of the cruise we walked out of the main dining room for the breakfast service after 75 minutes of waiting without getting food.  The breakfast took far longer than any of our dinners.  Never walked out of a restaurant on a cruise before, but the delay was putting us way behind on the last (and ONLY) sea day.

Room steward was also good, but not great.  He did everything you expect: cleaned the room, replaced the towels, make a few towel animals, etc, but the little things just weren't there.  For example, I drank both Diet Coke's in the mini bar on the first day and they were never replaced.  

The room itself was comfortable with one HUGE exception.  The bunk/trundle beds that hang from the sealing have a plastic sheet on them since the beds are typically for kids.  There is a regular cloth sheet on top, but everytime anyone moved on that plastic it sounded like a bag of chips crinkling.  When my kid moved at 3 a.m. it would wake everyone up.  Made it difficult to sleep a few times.  When I asked for no plastic, the room steward said all the bunk beds were like that.  Then later that night we noticed the mattress was replaced with an non-plastic-bagged one.  

The entertainment lacked a bit too.  There were one or two nights with NO show.  And the ice skating on the last day was just a repeat of the ice skating show two days before (which we didn't find out until we were trapped at the end of a long row!).