It was OK but not impressive.

We stayed at the Four Seasons pre-cruise (cruise line recommendation). Dinner in the room was $100 with tip for a bacon cheeseburger, chicken wrap, fries, and two cokes which included a 22% service charge and $7.50 room delivery charge (which probably explains why they insisted on a $150 deposit when checking in). Pretty sure the in-hotel dining would have been even more expensive. Complimentary breakfast in the freezing cold restaurant consisted of scrambled eggs, overcooked bacon, overcooked small potatoes, a tiny cup of fruit, and coffee or tea (everything else was extra). Service staff was super nice. Hotel bedding was awesome and I'm glad they sell it online. We were told to have our luggage outside the door by 7:00 a.m. but we saw that we could have brought down our own luggage to the bus which would have been preferable to having to get up early for luggage issues (bus left at 9:00 a.m.). There were only about a dozen of us staying at the hotel.

There was only a main dining room and one smaller casual eating area with a buffet. Seat yourself dining in both areas. Dress was casual to begin with and became even more casual toward the end of the cruise (shorts and jeans). The dining room always felt way too cold for us and would have been uncomfortable without a sweater or jacket (66-68 degrees). There were limited food choices. One soup, one salad, three entree choices, and three dessert choices. There were no standard menu items if you didn't like any of the main entrees. Some of the food was great and but most was just OK. They changed out the chef in the middle of our cruise and the food was better after that. There was limited roll variety at first until they changed the chef. We had to wait for rolls on one occasion because they didn't have enough made for the entire dinner seating. There were no rolls one night. One of the layers in my layered dessert cake was stale. They ran out of things like bacon at breakfast. You have to ask for water. Kitchen service was often slow even when the dining room wasn't crowded. They asked you to make your dinner food selections in the morning to give them an idea how much to make. No one held you to the choices you made; it was just to give them an idea how much to make so they wouldn't run out of things. Snacks were available at all times. "Cookie time" wasn't very impressive. The cookies were on the smaller size and looked store bought (but probably weren't). They ran out of some of the tea varieties by the end of the cruise. There were no servers for cocktail hour which meant a long line waiting to get a cocktail. The hors d'oeuvres were unimpressive with a small selection of fruit, cheese, and crackers served in a buffet line. We only went once. I really liked their Moscato choice (Beringer Main and Vine). This was the first cruise for many of the waitstaff and you could tell, though things got better as the cruise progressed. We found an super nice, experienced server we liked (Terika) and always tried to sit in her section.

We only went to happy hour once. The "fitness center" was quite limited.

We didn't attend any of the entertainment activities.

No children. There were 144 passengers who all seemed to be between 60-80 years old (or older - one woman was almost 100 but in great shape). There were frequent "traffic jams" of walkers and scooters during busier times.

All the staff were super, super nice. Most of them seemed to be from the U.S. I was happy to learn they were paid fairly and that U.S. labor laws applied to them. The cruise management deserves extra credit because they had to accommodate a hurricane and that required a lot of juggling. I heard that one of the Graceland tour busses broke down and one of the people on that excursion was not happy with the way the that was handled but we had no complaints about any staff on any of our tours. Some of the rampways were quite steep, and the staff offered golf cart shuttles up and down. I saw a staff person lift the back end of a scooter with an overweight woman on it because she got stuck on a bump in the ramp on the way into the ship. She was able to walk around the ship with a cane and should have gotten off the scooter but didn't. The guy who lifted the back end of the scooter with her on it to get her over the bump could have gotten injured but cheerfully helped anyway. I also saw staff walking with passengers who were unsteady to get them on and off the ship (like an orderly might do in a hospital). They were extremely patient with infirmities. The captain did a brief remembrance on 9/11 which was very nice. The cruise office was rarely staffed.

The ship was nine years old and showed its age. It is a paddleboat, which was kind of cool. We didn't notice any unclean areas. We were happy there were two washers and dryers on our floor. Lots of dehumidifiers in the hallways. No cruise app. No ATM machines, they couldn't change bills for tips, and the excursions rarely took electronic tip payments such as Venmo. There were thousands of fish flies at one point in the journey, which I suppose is a good thing because it means the water is clean. It was kind of annoying because we had to keep our balcony door closed all the time. We had paper cards with a QR code inside a flimsy plastic sleeve on a cheap lanyard that looked pretty awful. (I unclipped my plastic sleeve and kept it in my pocket.) The rooms used the standard plastic key cards. No security screening to embark but they did scan everyone in and out using the QR code at the ports (which was similar to our AmaWaterways river cruise). This ship was a disappointment compared to AmaWaterways. We might choose to cruise on ACL again, but only because ACL has so much of the US river cruise market. If we do go again, we would try to find an itinerary on one of the newer ships.

Our room was a comfortable size but always very humid even with the air conditioner on. To give you an idea what it was like, the cruise newsletters always felt damp, and it was hard to put makeup on over the perspiration. We found a leftover energy drink from on the balcony and an empty water bottle next to the bed that were left by a previous guest. I found someone else's baseball cap behind one of the chairs when we were double checking before departure to make sure we hadn't left anything behind. Our sliding door lock was broken and took a couple of visits to be fixed, though they did come promptly when we called about it. I had to repair a really loose draw handle with a travel screwdriver. There was a fairly big carpet stain in one area. The room had a Keurig with a selection of coffee and tea. There was one two-prong plug and one USB outlet on each nightstand. There were additional prong plugs available in the room. The alarm had two, two prong plugs and two USB outlets. There was one full-length closet with a top shelf. There was an iron but no ironing board, and the iron spit out black flakes when you pushed the steam button. There was ample drawer space for two people. There were two small drawers in each nightstand and a cubby, a dresser with three wide drawers, a desk with six drawers plus a center drawer, and two drawers in the bathroom (though the deeper drawer had a blow dryer in it). There was an emergency medical pull button and two grab bars in the shower. The cabin had fairly good soundproofing. We hardly heard anyone else, even though we were close to the snack area. Our balcony was on the smaller side but not super small. There was a sliding glass door, two chairs, and a small round table on the balcony. The beds were too low to put a larger travel suitcase under. I thought the bed was very comfortable and this was one of the few times I didn't wake up with a backache on a cruise. The pillows didn't have much substance. There was only one life preserver in the room, and I had to ask three times to get an additional one. There was no safe or refrigerator. Television reception was periodically awful even though they use Starlink. They block streaming services due to bandwidth issues. We were told the ship's internet was completely offline for a week in the recent past because of bandwidth issues caused by too much streaming, but we didn't experience any complete failures for an extended period of time.

Everything went smoothly.