Caribbean Princess in Grand Turk

Hello from my favorite cruise port beach in the world, Grand Turk!

How can you not love a beach when you walk off the ship and see this? And to be the only ship in port? Oh, yeah! But we didn't get to see the beautiful water shown in this picture I took years back.

Grand Turk, along with the other islands in the Caribbean, are having a big issue with sargassum this year. So today when we walked off the ship, this is the color of water we were greeted with instead.

Instead of this...

We got this...

So yeah, it was really bad. I'm so very thankful we've been there when the sea grass hasn't been an issue. I didn't swim today; I didn't snorkel. I just took some photos and headed back to the ship, knowing the pristine Grand Turk we know and love will be waiting for us another day on another trip.

Grand Turk at its finest. Just not today.

The remainder of the day was spent on sleep (and more sleep) and catching up on the on-demand movies. I don't watch TV or go to the movies at home so I have a lot of catching up to do. Hubby is feeling a bit better so he's out and about around the ship again so I can have some much needed alone time.

Not going out in port meant we had to eat back on the ship. Yet we've had it with the horrible service in the buffet. It's unfortunate the service is so dreadful as the new menu is quite good. I don't know if the problem lies with the crew working the tables, the one supervising them, or the management. But it's the worst we've ever seen on a Princess ship. We've been here on this ship going on a month now and it has been a consistent problem. Something has to change or we won't be coming back, Medallion or not. Some people are buffet people and some aren't. The buffet is something that best fits our needs when cruising so it's important that it's a good experience for us. Now that's it. I'm done talking about the buffet service.

A few more hodgepodge items:

• I talked to our steward about why the sheets on the twin bed configuration slip off so much easier than with the queen bed setup. The queen beds (which are really the twin beds pushed together) have a mattress topper on them. The twin beds just have a mattress protector which is a bit slick, which in turn makes the sheets slide around more.
• The first couple weeks of this trip we had an insert in the Patter called The Crave. It listed all the food venues, hours, and special food item times like for the Tex-Mex buffet or Ramen station. This week The Crave has disappeared. I'm guessing they received feedback that people weren't reading it? 
• We received our 20% goodwill credit for the itinerary change due to Hurricane Issac. I'm betting our 20% was the smallest credit issued to anyone on the ship - hubby and I each received a whopping $67.60. (Yeah, we paid only $338 for this last minute 10 day cruise. Crazy, right?) It can be applied to a future cruise or existing booking not yet paid in full. We have a December Grand Princess cruise hitting the final payment date next week so we will apply it to that one.

Tomorrow is a sea day, our last sea day of our 31 day long cruise on the Caribbean Princess. It's almost over.

Medallion™ Update:

To make the progression of the roll-out more clear I've grouped the posts by week. You can find today's post here.

Want to see how we got here with the Medallion? I started on Caribbean Princess back on August 18. 
Check it out:
Sept 1-8 updates can be found here.
August 25-Sept 1 updates can found here.
August 18-25 updates can be found here.

Encouraging Words Money Pocket Drop Off:
Somewhere on deck 5, of course.

As usual, if you have any questions or comments, please click on the envelope icon at the top right of this screen.