Celebrity Solstice is one beautiful ship, 1000 feet long all clean and up to date. She carries up to 3000 passengers but there is lots of room for everyone in the dining rooms, lounges, the theater and even in the casino. She is by far the nicest ship we've ever been on.

We have a mini-stateroom up on deck 8 with a comfortable couch, a king-size bed and even better, a full-sized bathroom with a real shower and lots of cabinet space. We have a balcony where we can sit and read or eat breakfast. The balcony will face land all the way around Australia so we can see the scenery from our stateroom whenever we want.

The ship has three specialty restaurants, Asian, French and northern Italian as well as two main dining rooms and two buffet-style eating areas. The food is really good but Celebrity is known for that. There is a very well-equipped gym which we visit most every morning.

The service is very good but it has been good on every cruise we've been on. The cabin steward sometimes makes us a towel animal which appears when we get back from dinner

In our past cruises to Canada and the Caribbean, the majority of passengers aboard were Americans. But here, Americans are in the minority, mostly Brits and Aussies and Asians. It's been nice meeting people from all over the world.

Boarding the ship in Auckland was really smooth. The lines moved right along and got on the ship very quickly. It took about two hours for our rooms to be ready during which we had lunch in the deck 14 buffet. Our baggage even arived almost immediately -- a first.

The nice thing about a suite is that there is a lot of room to store everything and still leave room to move around . We can easily get used to this.