Over the course of several port days, things pop into my mind and I'll think, "Oh, I really should mention that on my blog," but when I sit down to write about our days, these thoughts really don't fit in anywhere. So here's a potpourri of things that occurred to me during our first Emerald Princess cruise this winter...
For this reason, he never sends his beloved race T-shirts, but this particular shirt had been purchased at one of the "garage sales" on board last year and held no sentimental value. The T-shirt I wore during my slip and fall has been returned in good shape, and, fortunately hole-less (it's from Samoa and not so easily replaced). We know to pre-treat with Shout Gel before sending things out to be washed, so stains are less of an issue than those little holes are.
Regarding laundry: we learned our lesson last year...many items of clothing can't stand up to repeated washings in the ship's commercial laundry. And so this year I brought with me enough unmentionables to last an entire 10 days. Each cruise, generally on turnaround day morning after the Emerald Princess docks in Fort Lauderdale, I am going to use the passenger laundry room and do a load of laundry myself, on a gentle cycle, and hang those things to dry in our cabin. This serves the dual purposes of extending the life of clothing as well as putting some much needed moisture into our cabin. I got $10 in quarters at the PSD earlier this cruise, and detergent in Fort Lauderdale. We're good to go.
We are still sending out laundry two or three times each cruise, but only shorts and T-shirts that are expendable, or items to be "dry cleaned" (we've never had an issue with the latter). Still, we've already suffered our first T-shirt injury: one of G's T's came back with two of the usual holes in it.
Bottom line: free laundry and dry cleaning are wonderful perks, but don't send anything that's irreplaceable.
There were 401 Elite Passengers on this sailing. That's way more than the typically high 300+ Elite passengers that are on the January cruises. I have no idea why, but that's the way it is. We'll see if it changes considerably on the next cruise.
The Emerald Princess has new, larger Viewsonic flat panel TVs this year, but it also has exactly the same TV offerings it had last year after the dry dock. Exactly. It's not just that it's still offering Love Boat or Modern Family or How I Met Your Mother reruns...it's offering the exact same episodes of those shows, including a Love Boat episode in which Captain Stuebing's horny uncle comes on board and sexually harasses Julie McCoy, and the rest of the crew thinks it's funny, which, I guess, was what passed for humor in the 1970s. It's like fingernails on a chalkboard to me. Surely Princess could have found a more PC episode to air eight times every cruise for two years?
Also still available: Fox News, MSNBC and BBC, so, to keep the peace in our tiny cabin, we're getting most of our news from BBC. However, we are being saved, entertainment-wise, by the show American Greed which is shown on CNBC, and which we both enjoy. If I had to do it all over again, I would be a forensic accountant, kind of an Angie Dickenson with a green eyeshade and calculator.
G, who promised he wouldn't complain about the lack of TV options this year, already is a bit. That's another thing we're looking forward to next year on the Royal Princess- its fantastic TV programming. Of the four ships we've been in most recently, we'd rank TV selections in this order: 1.) Nieuw Amsterdam (because of the 1000 DVD library; 2.) Royal Princess (because of its on-demand programming); 3.) Allure OTS (which at least had TBS, TNT and TCM); and 994.) Emerald Princess. We're working on an inexpensive solution providing access to TV shows or movies, but I'm not sure we'll be successful.
There are plenty of daytime activities on the Emerald Princess this year. I'm not certain if that's due to the cruise director, JJ Ulrich, or if it's coming from Princess. We haven't even begun to avail ourselves of most of them, but these are early days. There is certainly no entertainment drought daytimes on sea days; if we had the Royal Princess' on demand programming our evenings would also be full.
We have now been cruising for four weeks and it still feels like we're just getting started. I don't know if it's a tolerance thing (you know, where eventually we'll feel about four months of cruising the way that most people will feel about two weeks), or a result of having moved around so much at the onset. Either way, we've just returned to the cabin for the evening, and G said, "Hasn't this been a wonderful ten days?", and he's right, it has been. We seem to have encountered another perfect- not storm. Rainbow?- this year, where the three individuals most responsible for our day to day contentment- our cabin steward, waiter and junior waiter- are all batting 1000, and it definitely has us building high expectations for the winter. We have several cruise friends coming on board on Friday for at least ten days, and we can't wait to see them.
Life is good.