Hi all!

We are booked on our first Carnival cruise, leaving in 11 days.  We are experienced cruisers, but we are Carnival Newbies.

Over the past 8 years, all of our cruises have been on Disney Cruise Lines, and our 2 kids love DCL.  However, between the prices, availability, and my perception that the quality of the cruises on DCL has gone down dramatically, we're trying out Carnival.

That being said, we're a bit nervous because of the "party ship" reputation.  I suspect that the drinking/raucous reputation relates to the 3 day cruises, but I hoped that someone who has cruised the Legend can give us some insight on the makeup of the passengers.  We are not teetotallers, but we're not big drinkers and want to make sure that it's more of a "fun ship" than a party ship".  We love all of the karaoke, quiz show-type games, and other family activities on DCL, and really hope that we'll find similar activities on Carnival.

Thanks in advance for your input! 

Hi Lou,

My wife and i are also experienced cruisers and have cruised with our kids on most of our trips. We have found a few cases where cruisers were out of control but for the most part we have never been upset that we had our kids on a Carnival cruise. If we find a group of out of control cruisers we just move to another part of the ship. The Carnival ships have plenty of games for cruisers to get involved with. The ships have games like the hairy chest contest which is held at poolside. The ships have comedy acts for all ages and karaoke. Some of the ships even have a large movie screen by the pool where they show late night movies. Some of the ships have been upgraded with mini golf. Hope this helps with some of your questions.

We've taken our two girls (19&13) on the 3 day carnival cruise and we never felt like it was a "party ship.  But I guess you find what you are looking for.  We usually just hung out by the pool, or on a part of the ship where there wasn't alot of activity gong on.

Thanks so much for both of your responses.  I've seen a lot of random trolling and Carnival-bashing on this board, which worried me at first, but it sounds like most people have a phenomenal time.

 Thanks again!

 We just got back from the Legend with our 6 and 8 year old daughters.  We absolutely loved the ship and the Camp Carnival program was very enjoyable for our kids.  They have lots of families on board!  Our girls made many friends and we all had a wonderful vacation.  Enjoy your trip!

We had a grea time too and found a lot of family excursons through http://caribbeanshoretours.com I think that was the key to our cruise, we had great tours in each place.  The website I provided shows family friendly tours which makes it really easy to book.

We did incredible tours, X-stream Cave tubing in Belize, in Cayman we did a private boat trip on the Cayman Outrage Ecotour with stringray city.  In cozumel we did the dune buggy tour, all were awesome!!!