Narrowing down the choices

We started trying to narrow it down by price. Well, Miami is the cheapest embarkation port for most cruise lines (I'm pretty sure this is because of the huge number of ships leaving from there). It's also the farthest (on East coast) from our home in Indiana--24+ hours to drive. Yikes! Last resort.

It took much hemming and hawing. Hours and hours of me agonizing over amenities, activities, room size, location, price, distance to drive, dates. You think I'm kidding? Ask my husband. I'm sure I drove him absolutely insane.

We decided initially on a cruise out of New York. 8 days on a Carnival ship. Longer than we wanted (my husband has limited vacation time from work), but the deal was amazing. And the New York terminal is only 13 hours from our house. Then it came to budgeting.

The thing with cruises is--you have to pay them off WAY before you even start packing. Like 75 days before. That's the good thing about planning a cruise years in advance--longer to pay them off.  However, this cruise was pricing at $3200, and that was just slightly over our possible budget without making us eat beans for 7 months.

So then what?

In saunters @CruisesForLess. Simon, the lovely TA that has held our hands, found us an awesome deal on Disney. Disney, which we pretty much dismissed out of hand because of the high prices. But, as pretty much all of my cruise people on Twitter told me, Disney is worth it. From what I was told, even though Disney is almost double (if not more) the price of Carnival, Disney is worth 4 times as much.

So back to researching Disney Cruises.