We've been on a few cruises (13+) but never even considered a California coastal cruise. We live near SF, so it seemed silly. The price was too good to pass up, so we went ahead and booked, and we're very pleased.

We invited a friend for BVE and the traffic happened to be horrible that morning, so he just barely arrived and got checked in by the time we could board (11:30ish) We had arrived at 10, early as usual, because we figure, why waste even a minute that we could be on the ship. No showing up at 1:30 for us!

The Grand is a little older, and could've used a few furniture replacements/updates, and we did experience a few drips here and there on the ship, but nothing earth shattering. We felt comfortable and never felt it was too old. One thing we both were interested in checking out was the one-five, which replaced skywalkers. We loved it!!! The setup is awesome for socializing and it's just so different than what we were used to. I honestly wish all ships had this change! We had read many crybaby reports of people who didn't even wish to cruise on this ship because of the change. Read more