Princess Cruise Day One: Welcome Aboard!

Well, we’ve already used “smooth sailing” so i guess we can’t use that again. If we could we would. Getting from hotel to pier to boat was a total piece of cake. We left our hotel at noon and were sipping our first on board cocktail by 12:30. Seriously, 30 minutes after we left the hotel we had made the bus trip, gone through security, checked in and secured our cruise cards. Welcome aboard! Following our annual tradition we headed right to the first bar we saw, “The International Cafe” for the cruise kickoff cocktail. Delish!

It’s a nice and sunny 75° day in Ft. Lauderdale today, way better than the sub-zero temperatures at home!

We then mozied to the cabin which although small is exceptionally well designed. Plenty of room for us and our stuff. The closet is a real step-up from Royal Caribbean boasting a nearly as wide as our room hanging area and set of floor to ceiling shelves deep enough for folded clothing, Our state room steward, Chet, greeted us promptly and assured us that all of our requests would be honored. Chet is energetic and nice, he’ll be certain to ensure we have everything that we need. At that point two of our three bags had arrived.

Unfortunately we ended up missing dinner and the show because the luggage tag came off one of our bags and wasn’t delivered. It’s hard to dress “smart casual” when your garment bag is missing. We inquired at 6pm about the bag and were told they were still delivering. We went back down at 8pm and retrieved it from the desk…actually Mike did that while Jody took her 2nd nap of the day-can you say ‘wind-down? Or maybe it’s a function of the Transderm Scop Jody uses to combat motion sickness. Although never motion sick before, cruising kicks her ass, but this little miracle patch stuck behind her ear every 3 days cures her of any symptoms. While the fatigue is a common side effect, after a day it diminishes for her (maybe because we sleep like 10 hours a night).

Back to the luggage story…kind of annoying that they didn’t look at the name on the I.D. Tag and just deliver it to our damn room. I’m pretty sure that I’m the only Michael Johnson who lives in Rochester, NY on the boat with that particular street address.

We departed around 5:30pm from Port Everglades, Ft. Lauderdale and the ship took an easterly course for the Caribbean.

We enjoyed a nice buffet. Lots of great tasting seafood. Jody woke long enough to eat and unpack…then we called it a night.

Cruise Tip: When packing for a cruise, don’t pack “his and her” suitcases, combine all of your stuff. And don’t pack all of your dress clothes and shoes in a garment bag. That way, if a piece of luggage goes missing, you still have something reasonably nice to wear to dinner and to the show that night.

Smooth Sailing

So far our Princess Cruise Lines experience has been very impressive!

First of all, our flights out of Rochester, NY on AirTran were on time and we made it to Ft. Lauderdale in no time flat. We always go down the day before because several times we almost missed the boat by relying on the “package” deals we found online where the layover times are incredibly tight and the time allotted to get to the ship from the airport are even tighter. Those deals are hyper-optimized for efficiency, but one monkey-wrench in the scheduling can ruin a vacation. For example, we’re from Upstate, NY, and one year we almost missed our layover because of a 45-minute “de-icing” of the plane. And last year, there was a storm in New Jersey, and all flights were cancelled…we had to drive 4 hours to Cleveland to make it to the ship. Without that 1-day buffer, both vacations would have been ruined.

We arrived in Ft. Lauderdale and we were immediately greeted at the baggage claim by a Princess Representative named, Francy. She was great. She was expecting us, knew we were due to arrive at that time, and actually called us by name. She gave us all the details of what to expect as a Princess customer and quickly made sure we got to our hotel. We had opted to purchase a hotel and transfer package for the first time and I have to admit, it made this part easy peasy. We were escorted to our air conditioned bus…sort of overkill as we were two of three passengers, but it worked. (Perhaps a greener approach would be smaller vehicles when there are fewer passengers arriving…something to consider.)

Our driver was kind of gruff, but that was easily overlooked since we were in good spirits, enjoying beautiful Florida weather.

We stayed at the Marriott Ft. Lauderdale North and we received a warm welcome from Carla as soon as we walked in the door. She knew we were on a Princess Cruise, and gave us the information we would need to get our luggage and ourselves to the ship easily.

So far, Princess has make the whole experience a piece of cake. All we have to do is tag our bags (don’t forget your stapler) and put our luggage outside our door at 9am. From there they will come pick it up and get to our cabin for us…way easier than Royal Caribbean, where we have to lug our own luggage to a busy, chaotic terminal fighting hundreds of other passengers. All we have to do is hop on a bus at noon and away we go! When all is said and done, it’s been smooth sailing thus far…thank goodness.