Grand Princess Mexican Riviera Cruise

Hello from the Grand Princess! Yep, we're headed out again. Two back to back cruises and our cruising year will be over. It's a great way to end it. We specifically booked this ship to see both our favorite bartender and a jr waiter who calls us his parents. Which means I'll finally get some decent drinks in my system and lots of love!

Based on how today went, clearly the Universe thinks this is a great idea.

We grabbed the hotel shuttle at 9:30 am and were back at the airport by 9:50.
Checked in with the Princess reps and were on a bus by 10:30.
Arrived at the port long before 11:30 and were able to check in right away and board the ship with very few lines anywhere.
At 11:35 I was sitting having my special drink made by my special bartender.

He went on break at 12:30 so we went to the dining room for lunch, something we rarely ever do.

Here’s the embarkation day lunch menu:

Orange soufflé for dessert, please.

When we sat down at our table for two, guess who was pulling out our chairs for us? Our jr waiter we came to see. He usually works Club Class but it wasn’t too busy so he and his waiter were assigned to the regular side of the dining room. In our section. I tell ya, that kid did not stop smiling during the whole meal. Our waiter even commented that he had been talking for days about his parents coming onboard. (Even though we really aren’t his parents, we love that kid. No matter where he is around the world, we send him care packages of snacks and candies.)

When we got back to our cabin, we had a special surprise waiting for us. A beautiful bouquet of flowers from that same “son” of ours.


Our cabin steward arrived, and (surprise!) introduced himself. Finally a cabin steward who might get it right this time.

And another surprise - we also broke the 72 hr laundry notification = no most traveled guest party streak. We received the 72 hour notice AND also the invitation to the luncheon. First time we’ve made it into the top 40 with the so many elites notice.

For those who are just looking for the entertainment, movies, and clocks forward/clocks back here ya go:

The only thing today that happened today that wasn’t fortuitous is our crew member pal leaving today got sick. The doctor has quarantined him in his cabin and he can’t leave until right before the ship leaves. So we didn’t get to see him.

After muster we’re heading back to our special bartender and I might just have another special drink. We have three sea days coming up in a row. We’ll see what kind of trouble I can get in/stay out of.

Our Itinerary (Twice)

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San Francisco Catch Up Day

Hello from sunny South San Francisco.

Usually we head right to a hotel near Fisherman's Wharf when we come to San Francisco, but this time we went the cheap route and stayed out by the airport. In a Best Western, of course. That Diamond loyalty level came in handy again as we were upgraded to a an executive level room on the top floor with great views of the bay and turn down service in the evening. Chocolates included, just like on a ship.

But today wasn't about the hotel, it was about how we spent the day at the hotel. When we return from these upcoming cruises we'll be doing the tourist thing by spending the day at Fisherman's Wharf before our late afternoon flight. That gave us today to fill with non-touristy things.

• We walked over to Costco to pick up snacks for the crew. 
• We walked to McDonalds and ate lunch outside in the sunshine. 
• I took a picture of a saying they had by the register to motivate their employees. It's very blurry because I took it stealthily from afar, but it was important enough to share anyway. It read: Do everything with a good heart and expect nothing in return. Always a good reminder for us all.

• Taking the saying to heart, as soon as we got back to the hotel I gave the housekeeper who had just finished our room a encouraging word money pocket.
• We did a load of laundry at the hotel ($1.75 wash, $1.25 dry) using the detergent we bought at the dollar store in Islamorada, Florida.
• Hubby watched football on TV.
• We found out it snowed even more back at home. It started during the Boise State game last night. (A game hubby was so happy to have on the TV here.)

Notice we have yet another crooked TV screen?

We are excited to start wrapping up our cruising year. Tomorrow we'll be heading back to the airport to take the Princess transfer to the port. We rarely take a Princess transfer and we said we never, ever would do it again in San Francisco. (We had a bad experience with it in San Francisco a few back.) We also had a bad experience with a shared shuttle service in San Francisco, too. They totally lost our luggage on our way to a 15 day Hawaiian cruise and took no responsibility for it. Try doing a 15 day cruise without any of your stuff!

So the past couple years we've been using the same private car company from Viator. We were going to use him again, but since we had additional Princess credit to use up (from the hurricane-diverted cruise) we went ahead and booked the Princess transfer. We shall see how it goes. I know we'll get there, but at what time, and how much walking through the airport terminals we'll have to do, I don't know. All we care is that we get to port before 2:00. One of our crew member pals is leaving to go home tomorrow afternoon and we'd love to be able to send him off with hugs and kisses before he heads out.

See you tomorrow from the Grand Princess!

Free Sewing & Crafting Project Tutorials

Looking for free sewing and craft projects? Need directions, supply lists, or templates? How about how-to videos to accompany each project? Every single one of these has a video tutorial to go along with it!

Cruising Resources

Glossary of Cruise Terminology

Photos to Accompany Cruising with Confidence eBook 

Royal Princess Wrap-Up

We had a great week on the Royal Princess and always love this itinerary. There were so many good things I don’t know where to start so I’ll just jump right in.

Food:

• We loved, loved, loved the choices at the buffet. I think we even ate less on this sailing because there were so many options that we could find something we liked right away. (It seems like on other ships when the choices aren’t that great we would choose one thing, then not like it and go back and get something different.) Our appetites were whetted first time around on this ship. 
• We always ate outside behind the buffet in the section of the ship called Horizon Terrace. Fresh air, nice views, and outstanding service. Servers were frequently swinging by to check on drinks. Sometimes I’d walk over to get some ice water and they catch me before I even made it there and would grab my drink for me.
• The buffet coffee is fresh ground, not from syrup, so hubby never had to once use his coffee card to get a good cup of coffee. 
• Here the silverware is also in a holder on the table. This is the third consecutive ship I’ve seen it on so I do hope it’s something Princess is doing on all ships. So much more convenient than having to pick it up in the buffet line or having it placed on the table itself where passengers would occasionally take away a fork or spoon or knife, leaving an incomplete set.
• While we love Alfredo’s, we ate there just twice this trip. Remember, you don’t have to order just from the menu. If they have the ingredients, they will make you the pizza you want. We typically share a pepperoni, extra cheese, and garlic pizza. Always tasty. 

Cabin:

• We absolutely loved the location of our cabin. It was at the back of the ship and was super quiet. We used the aft elevators that took us right up to the back of the buffet and the Horizon Terrace seating. 
• We felt like someone was trying to play a trick on us because we had another dud of a cabin steward. I swear our last one called this guy up and gave him instructions on what to do (and not to do): Don’t introduce yourself; don’t greet the passengers; do walk in unannounced; don’t clean the cabin when the make up room sign is out. By the second day things were so bad we had to contact the supervisor. Just look at this mess on the balcony we found when we arrived. How do you miss something like this and not clean it up until the supervisor tells you to? 

• After the supervisor was involved it got better for about a day and a half. Then it went back to the not-so-great way. I won’t go into details on all the negatives, but on the plus side he did keep us supplied with ice. The level of service we’ve received from cabin stewards on the six ships we’ve been on so far this year has varied so wildly, I sure would have loved to interview the head of housekeeping to get an idea of what exactly a steward’s duties are. Not to complain, but just to get a better understanding of the expectations fleet-wide.
• We liked having the sofa in the deluxe balcony. It had a firm cushion so it was easier for hubby to get up out of it. Of course, once the balcony got clean it was nice as well. We also liked the big bathroom sink that the Royal Princess has. We did laundry by hand and having the extra room certainly made it easier to do the washing.

Activities:

• The Wake Show was filmed in Princess Live but no passengers were allowed to sit in on the taping at all. Didn’t make much sense to me. Why have it in a studio if people can’t watch it in person? 
• On the second formal night a group vow renewal was held in the Piazza. Participants even received a certificate. On both sea days there were weddings held on the aft part of the Lido deck, in the Horizon Terrace section. 
• I have to be honest here…I didn’t look at the Patter much, other than to find if any crafting sessions were happening around the ship. The only arts and crafts session happened on the last sea day. There were a few things against me going – the most traveled guest luncheon rolled into us going shopping to use up our nonrefundable onboard credit, which then placed us back in the cabin with little time to spare for me to change clothes. Plus on the Wake Show the cruise director made a weird comment about the flower making craft. I couldn’t tell if he was making fun of whoever wanted to go or was making fun of the craft itself. Since I’m totally against doing anything that might embarrass me, I didn’t rush to change clothes and missed the crafting session.  
• The entire cruise was spent either eating breakfast or dinner (we skipped lunch) on the Horizon Terrace, sitting on our balcony, watching the on-demand movies, or in port. We never went to the dining room, saw a show, hung out at the pool, drank in a bar, went into a shop (until the last day when we realized we had some nonrefundable credit that needed to be used up), or visited the casino (other than to use the ATM to replenish our cash for the next leg of our trip).

Other things:

• At the guest safety assembly (muster drill) the big monitors between the elevator banks showed important information for those needing to know where to go.

• There were some familiar Ocean Medallion faces onboard. We had sailed with some of them during the roll on out the Caribbean Princess. This cruise they were doing some filming. 
• This ship is going into wet dock (as opposed to dry dock) starting today. I can’t confirm what kind of Medallion work they will be doing onboard, but hopefully they will be working on MedallionNet. The internet this voyage really was bad. It dropped quite often and it took forever to load. Then other times it was quite decent. I thought it was bad on the Crown transatlantic voyage, but for me it was worse here. Part of wet dock will be replacement of mattresses, but I wonder if they will be replacing TVs, too. The reason I mention that is one day this week there were several TV boxes in the hallways. I doubled checked the boxes and they were heavy so they definitely had TVs in them.

• Sunsets were just spectacular this trip. Here is one of my favorites:

We would have been just fine staying on this ship for several more weeks, but with the wet dock happening we knew we couldn’t. So that’s why we decided to head to San Francisco to join the Grand Princess on December 3. We are going to see a couple dear crew members we consider family. Two cruises on the Grand will be a great way to wrap up our year of cruising.

See you Monday on our last ship of the year!

Royal Princess Last Sea Day

Geez, this week has just flown by. Can’t believe it’s our last sea day!

It’s a cloudy one today.

Going from our cruise earlier this month with 10 sea days to this one with just two sea days sure made for a different feel. A lot of activities were packed into those two sea days, activities we didn’t participate in.

One thing we did get to today was the Most Traveled Passenger Luncheon. We were pretty sure we made the cut since we didn’t receive the 72 hour laundry notification. (When we receive the notice about laundry taking 72 hours to be returned because of so many elites onboard we’ve never made the cut. No notification? We make the cut.) So I I checked with the Captain’s Circle host about it and she told us if we didn’t receive an invitation it meant we didn’t make the cut. Of course that made sense, but I asked her the cutoff number anyway. We were a bit above the number so she checked her system and said yes, we were invited. She was sure we received an invitation. Uh, no. At the luncheon another couple at our table never received theirs either, so there must have been some problem with the mail.

We had quite a nice menu today.

I went with the lobster and jumbo shrimp starter. Delicious.

Hubby had the papaya and raspberry starter. He said it was good.

For our main we both had the lamb chops. Is there a word stronger than delicious? If so, that’s how to explain these. Best lamb chops ever, if you ask me.

The chocolate and passion fruit mousse was beautiful.

Had to take off the lid to see what was inside!

We had the environmental officer at our table. I asked her tons of questions and learned so much about environmental issues at sea and in port. I even found out why we saw all the black smoke from the Royal Caribbean ship in Costa Maya the other day – it had to do with the type of fuel being used. In Mexico environmental standards aren’t as strict as in the US so ships can use the cheaper fuel, the fuel that causes more pollution.

This sailing also had the most traveled person on all of Princess Cruises. She has over 2500 days at sea. Can you imagine?

There are several things about the ship I never got a chance to mention, so I’ll do a wrap-up post tomorrow. Then off to San Francisco where we’ll be boarding the Grand Princess on Monday.

See you tomorrow!