Brenda Ossachuk  

Occupation: Education assistant
Number of Cruises: First Cruise
Cruise Line: Carnival Cruise Lines
Ship: Inspiration
Sailing Date: August 11th, 2002
Itinerary: Western Caribbean

We booked our cruise a year and a half in advance. It was booked directly with Carnival, Alison Dorfman was our personal vacation planner. She was fantastic, answered any little question I had, whenever I phoned.

We stayed in New Orleans a day before and after our cruise. I liked the Super City Tour, but wasn't impressed with Bourbon street.

We were at the terminal at 11: 30 am. When we went to check in, our passports were taken from us. We were told that we would have to be in a certain place at a certain time to get them back. We are Canadians by the way. We were told that if we were late picking the passports up, we would be charged $250 each, that works out to be $750 Canadian for the two of us, needless to say, we were very prompt in getting our passports on the final day of the cruise.

After checking in we were sent to a room to wait to board the ship. It was about 45 minutes, but the time went quickly.

We were on the Empress deck with an inside room. We weren't in the room much, so having no window was not a problem. We are nonsmokers and couldn't smell any smoke in our room. There aren't many places for smokers, besides the bars. We went and checked out the rest of the ship. Our belongings were delivered to our room by 6:30 that night.

We booked our shore tours right away, didn't want to take the chance of not getting them by booking after the tour talk. My husband did the advanced diving in Grand Cayman and Cozumel, he said they were fantastic. He booked them with the ship and it was a good thing, if you book with private people and you are late getting back to the ship, you could be stuck on the island. The dive tour was back at the pier at 5:20 pm and the ship was to sail at 5:30. We booked a tour in Jamaica with Carolyn Barret at Barret adventures. Our tour guide Andrea was fantastic, she took us to where the locals go, as well we went on the Appleton Estate rum tour. When we got back and were talking about our day, a few people said "we're jealous of you". We were never harassed or asked if we wanted to buy drugs. Jamaica was my favourite day in port. I took the Atlantis submarine tour in Cozumel and the highlight tour of Grand Cayman. They were both great.

We had most of our meals in the dining room, we loved the experience. We had never had service like we did on the ship. There are two formal nights, everyone wore their "Sunday best", even kids. Every other night, we wore nice pants and tops but never wore shorts for dinner.

We met a few people who worked on the ship, they were very friendly. We gave our waiters, room steward and one bartender extra tips, besides the ones that were put on our Sail and Sign card. They bent over backwards for us. I wrote little notes to thank them for the extra effort that they had put forth in an envelope along with the extra tip.

We went to the tour talks and the shopping talk, it was a good idea as we learned lots. The shows were just like Vegas, great. Because some of the shore tours were late in getting back, we were glad that we'd picked the late sitting for dinner.

There was nothing that we would complain about, our experience on the Inspiration was far better than we could have ever expected. We are planning our next cruise already, but we'll take the kids with us. If you have any questions I will gladly answer them for you. My email address is oscar@gokenora.com .