First time cruisers on the Carnival Freedom

As a first time cruiser, the cruise was pretty close to what I expected.  The room service was amazing (thank you Antonio!).  Servers were great and the evening meals were pretty good.  Breakfast and lunch was like Golden Corral, to put it simply.  The ship was always clean and there was always food, coffee, and ice cream available.  There were plenty of activities to attend, but casinos, shopping, and dropping hundreds of dollars for a couple's massage is not our thing.  Cocktails are $8 something each or you can get an all you can drink package for like $50 a day or something.  Again, it's what we expected going in.  

On this particular cruise the ship was unable to port in Falmouth, Jamaica.  I understand nature happens but this broke the hearts of many people and was in my opinion, the highlight of the trip.  Carnival did refund the shore excursions, but I also assumed that they would give some sort of onboard credit for the day.  They didn't.  We had our third sea day and lots of people were going crazy.  Three days is just too long.  I was content reading my book but slightly annoyed by many people complaining about it the entire day.  

As for the ports (Grand Cayman and Cozumel), my fiance and I had a good experience because we didn't book any onboard excursions and did our own things.  I would recommend renting scooters.  I talked to several other couples who had booked certain excursions and were very let down by what they received, or had gotten to the port and discovered it was cancelled for unknown reasons.  When going in to the port, it took a long time to get it and get back out, which was expected.  

When we arrived back in Galveston and were supposed to dock at 8am, there was heavy fog and we were unable to dock until after 11am (typical mother nature).  I am patient because I understood the situation, but many people were upset because they had to cancel flights (rightly so, as it was Christmas Eve).  I'm not sure what happened with all of that since we were driving out, but I hope they made it home for Christmas.  

Overall, as easy going backpacker style travelers, this way of seeing places is just not really our style and I'm unsure we would take a cruise again.