Our 5-day Disney cruise out of Miami was our first Disney cruise (we have been to parks twice and also sailed with Norwegian in the Mediterranean before we had our son) with our 8 year old son. We travelled with 2 other families (one with an adjoining room) - one had 2 boys (9 and 5) and the other had a 4 year old girl. We stayed in stateroom 7540/7542 (adjoining) and our other friends stayed in 7568.

I will start off by saying that our rooms were in an excellent location - just 2 short flights below the arcade and one of the family pools (also close to the adult only pool) and 2 flights above the kids club area. The rooms were fabulous - no complaints at all, except that adjoining rooms should have adjoining balconies - when the kids are asleep and adults want to enjoy a quiet glass of wine on the balcony is one of the main reasons for 2 families to share adjoining rooms (IMO)....so we moved the 2 chairs to one balcony for a tight (but quaint) arrangement of 4 chairs on one balcony.

The activities were plentiful, the service was great. Port excursions were hit and miss - we did our own thing in Cozumel (mistake!) and of course Castaway Cay was FABULOUS. We almost didn't make it in due to high winds/currents, but the captain got us in - better late than never! We were only disappointed once when picking up our boys when the club staff allowed them to stay in front of the computer for 3 hours straight...yes, it's what they would have wanted to do ... yes, it's vacation for them too .... but I kind of expected that ECE's would have encouraged more interactive play at some point during the evening. We ended up feeling a bit guilty about enjoying our evening out to Palo (which was totally amazing). Read more