Alaska is awesome and a cruise was the right choice for us as first time visitors. We really enjoyed the trip.
It has been over 10 years since my family has cruised. The 3 we have been on previously were all Royal Caribbean.
We liked the size of the ship (Legend is smaller than the newer mega ships). Cabin size was fine, the bed was very comfortable for me.
We really liked the Your Time Dining, especially in Alaska because you are in port at all different times.
The food ranged from very good to inedible. Most of it was decent, but we all ordered some sushi at lunch and it was weird and gummy. My husband said if he could have spit it out elegantly he would have. There were plenty of choices on the menu, we always had more than enough menu items we wanted to order.
Service in the dining room was also all over the place. We had a couple of excellent servers, most were good, but on our final night, the night we were in Victoria, everything was slow and the meal dragged out over two hours.
I didn't like the way the buffet was set up on the Lido deck, with different stations sometimes in different rooms instead of all food offered in a central location. If you wanted to sample a lot of different things you had to make visits to a lot of stations. The Chopsticks Asian selections were excellent. Except for embarkation day, lines were never bad and we could always find seating.
We booked two of the excursions Carnival offered and they were excellent (Yukon Scenic Adventure and Alaska Bear Adventure)
We didn't go to any shows, we never do, but that will change when I am on the Disney ship.
For onboard activities, we watched a sushi demonstration and we played trivia a couple of times. These activities were very crowded.
Carnival was significantly less expensive than other lines we looked at- I think it was a good value.