Embarkation day! We still woke up too early today, but did manage to sleep until 4am, so things are improving. Although we wanted to be ready to leave the hotel by 5:30am, and set an alarm, we knew we’d be up before it went off, and we were. We kept checking the location of the Golden Princess on Sea-scanner.com, and when it had sailed about one third of the way into Sydney Harbour, we made the 2 minute walk to the Overseas Passenger Terminal. Things were already active there, with lots of workers preparing for the Golden Princess’ arrival. Line handlers were in place, forklift operators were starting their machines and using them to haul queuing barricades and we could see agents inside preparing to greet the disembarking passengers.
The location of the Golden Princess sailing past the North and South Heads
at the entrance to Sydney Harbor.
We walked along the north side of the terminal to the waterfront and watched as the Golden Princess came into view. It was about 5:50am and the first streaks of dawn light could be seen in the sky. It’s rather eerie to watch a ship slowly and silently make its way toward a berth. Forward, midship and aft hatch doors were opened and the silhouettes of crew members appeared, illuminated by the bright lights inside the ship. Eventually, a monkey fist was thrown onto the pier and caught by the line handlers and used to guide the lines on to the pier.
The Golden Princess and the Sydney Opera House at the first light of sunrise.
The Opera House at sunrise
Making the turn to port into Circular Quay.
The Harbour Bridge at sunrise. Under the bridge in the middle distance is
the amusement park Luna Park.
Midship and aft hatches are opened
Waiting to throw the monkey fist, a tightly wound knot around a weight that is tossed
to the line handlers on the pier. The heavy lines are attached to it and pulled onto the pier.
The first aft line with the guide rope attached.
Pulling in the second aft line.
Setting up the ramp for the midship hatch.
After the Golden Princess was docked, we returned to the hotel for coffee and breakfast (boy, will we miss that juice bar!). We still had a few hours before we had to leave our room, and used them to pull some things out of our large suitcases to be hand carried onto the ship. G rolled the large suitcases over to the terminal while I continued to organize what was left. I phoned Mom using Vonage (For free! Get the app!!), except I need to change that to Vonage (For 1 cent per minute!! Get the app!!) because they’ve raised the price. Still, our conversation lasted about 20 minutes and that’s a bargain.
Our room at the Holiday Inn Old Sydney was pretty darn close to the Overseas Passenger Terminal!
We checked out of the Holiday Inn Old Sydney and by 11am were checking in on the ship. We were in the first group to board after passengers needing assistance. Within 30 minutes we were on board and at noon we were sitting down in the Donatello Dining Room and napkins were placed in our laps as we were handed lunch menus and suddenly my world made sense again. ;-)
View from our lunch table. Life is good. :-)
Embarkation day lunch menu, page 1
Embarkation day lunch menu, page 2
I am quickly running out of energy tonight (in fact, I’ve fallen asleep several times already, mid-keystroke). I am going to wrap this up now and finish this post tomorrow morning.
Ok, it’s eight hours later and we slept hard until 5am. Progress is slowly being made on that. I looked back at what I had typed last night and it was nearly indecipherable, so I’ve cleaned it up and will move on now.
G went to meet with the Maitre d’ Carlos Justina about our dining table right after lunch.. We had been confirmed in 5:30pm Traditional Dining but had requested a table for two. Our cruise cards showed we were in Anytime Dining. That wouldn’t do at all. Since we began cruising for longer periods, it’s been tables for two with the same waiters every night for us. One simply can’t stand in line every night for three months waiting for a table to open up and then be seated with a different group of people every night. What’s fun and interesting for a week gets very wearying when done for a longer period of time. G was told that the computer takes all early dining confirmations for tables for two and moves them into Anytime Dining. It’s just the way it works. No matter; we were assigned a nice table for two in Anytime Dining at 5:30pm every night. If we’re not there by 5:45pm, we lose it. We can live with that.
I returned to our cabin after lunch to start unpacking the items we’d carried on board with us. I love that the vanities in inside cabins on the Golden have drawers, not shelves as on the Emerald Princess. So much more can be stored in them. We started to unpack in the same way we always do on these Grand Class ships: G takes all the cubby shelves, the three narrow shelves at the end of the vanity and his two nightstand drawers. I get the three drawers in the vanity and my two nightstand drawers and I hang up all my shirts, slacks and shorts. I had carried on board the new over the door shoe rack (it’s a little smaller than our old one and works perfectly to hold makeup and sunscreens and sundries such as the first aid kit and Q-Tips). We stuck our suction cup tubs up in the shower (and, unlike on the Pacific Princess, they stick to the shower walls on Grand Class ships) and the small stuff was unpacked long before the large suitcases arrived.
With a small amount of time before our 3:15pm muster drill, we did a quick walk through of the ship. Except it wasn’t quick. This ship is huge (compared to the Pacific Princess we’ve cruised on for three winters) and the embarkation day surge of people made it feel very crowded. It appears that most of the Aussies on board (definitely the largest passenger demographic) travel in small groups or family groups, and they move about in those groups, which always slows things down. The elevators were packed (so un-Pacific Princess-like!) and often arrived full. But when we went out on the Terrace Deck to look at that beautiful view of the Harbour Bridge, it was nearly empty and there is a huge amount of seating space back there behind the Horizon Court Buffet. I think that the passengers on the current cruise will begin to spread out after today, as they always do, and once we are in our cabin on the back of Aloha Deck, it will feel like a different ship to us.
Then it was forward and down again to grab our lifejackets and attend the 3:15pm muster drill. Our muster location is in the Princess Theater (give me a minute to change that shortcut. For three winters on the Pacific Princess, ‘pt’ meant Panorama Terrace; now it’s back to meaning Princess Theater), which is a very comfortable muster location. We heard the voice of Captain Domenico Lubrano Lavadera on the PA to start it off. Yep, for the third winter in a row, we’re sailing with Captain D. There is no one I would trust a malevolent Tasman Sea to more than that man who safely steered us around the Mediterranean and the North Atlantic when winter storms raged last year. Muster took 30 minutes (I’m not sure what caused the delay) and we had barely enough time to take the stairs to our cabin to return our life jackets and then get ourselves to our chosen sailaway position back on the Terrace Deck.
While the sun had been out earlier in the day, it was largely overcast when we sailed, but I’m just happy we didn’t have the rainy, blustery weather of yesterday morning. Sailaway from Sydney is really tops in my book. It even beats out sailaways from Venice (though that’s close) or Papeete with a sunset behind Moorea or Rio de Janiero. And aren’t we fortunate to do several more before we’re done?
Sailing by the Sydney Opera House
The Opera House and Harbour Bridge
The Royal Botanic Gardens in the foreground and the Sydney Eye tower
Once we passed the Sydney Opera House and the Royal Botanic Gardens, we moved up to Skywalkers for the Platinum, Elite, Suite (PES) Lounge and to watch the rest of the sail out of Sydney Harbour. As for what has been done to the PES Lounge, I’ll leave that for another post, but the views from Skywalkers are still fantastic and we stayed until we passed by the North and South Heads at the entrance to the harbor.
And then we ran back to our cabin at the other end of the ship and down seven decks (again) to get the ticket with our new dining table number on it. Our luggage had been delivered by then and we opened it long enough to replace the shorts we were wearing with slacks and headed toward the dining room.
No issue getting in 10,000 or more steps a day on this ship! And let me take a minute to talk about our cabin.
Our cabin for this first cruise is the only one of our back to backs which is not on the Aloha Deck aft area we love so much on these ships (equivalent to the Riviera Deck aft on the Emerald Princess). Oh, I tried- hard- to get us back there, but when I booked these cruises in early May, our Dolphin Deck forward cabin was the only IE category cabin still available. Knowing that it’s easiest to later be switched from one cabin to another in the same category, I booked this, but had long believed that something better would open up and we could make a change. Alas, nothing better has opened us. Well, that’s not quite accurate. Aloha 520 did open, and we were ecstatic and tried to get it, but, after a long wait on hold with Princess, were told we couldn’t, simply because that muster zone had reached its limit of passengers. I guess that means that too many third and fourth berths in the cabins that could accommodate them were filled, and we were out of luck. That was as close as we ever got, though. Five months after I was certain something better would become available, I was printing luggage tags with our cabin on Dolphin Deck forward in them. It happens.
In one sense it makes no difference. We’re in this cabin just for the first ten days. A cabin is a cabin, right? No. This cabin also accommodates third and fourth passengers, and the upper berths hang on the walls, to be lowered at night when required. That’s fine; the bigger issue is that the bedding for those potential third and fourth passengers is stored under our beds in bags. There is scarcely room for our roll aboard suitcases under the bed and our three large suitcases will be sitting out taking up the minimal floor space we do have. We can’t even squeeze one in the closet; we’ve moved that small round table in there and there is also a ladder stored there to reach the upper bunks. And the shelf in the closet contains 2 more lifejackets than normal. It definitely feels tight in here.
But the worst part is one that we knew to expect. This cabin is located directly against the forward fire wall, and there is an empty space there open down to the Princess Theater two decks below (and it extends up to Caribe Deck above). The space is used to pull up and store scenery for the various production shows. This room was quiet as a tomb...until the show started at 9pm last night. We were already in bed (of course) and immediately heard every bass drum beat. As we knew we would. We had the cabin just above this on the Golden Princess 10 years ago and encountered the same thing. No matter. G could sleep through anything and I just stuck in the ear plugs I always travel with and we quickly fell asleep.
So it’s not a cabin that would be our first choice for many reasons, but it’s only for 10 days. I mention it to illustrate that sometimes you don’t get what you want but instead get exactly what you book, so it’s best to be able to live with it or don’t book it. And also to point out that seniority on Princess Cruises really doesn’t make a darn bit of difference in these things. If a cabin is not available, it’s not available.
So, there we were, in the Donatello Dining Room (excuse me while I set up a keyboard shortcut for that) at a large table for two in the middle of the dining room with Nemesio as our waiter (we asked if we could call him Nemo and he is cool with that) and Mark as our junior waiter (both from the Philippines) and Gabriel as our head waiter (not sure where he’s from). It’s not a window side table, but it also does not have another table located 12 inches or less away. It’s truly a table for two, and we are thrilled about that. It’s also a real dining room table as opposed to the card tables or Horizon Court tables that are sometimes squeezed into the dining rooms as tables for two and it actually has a light positioned just above it (we can actually read our menus!), so it was meant to be there. (As you can tell, we’ve seen it all when it comes to tables for two). Service was friendly and fast and I decided that if we had Nemo and Mark as our wait team for the entire season (which we probably won’t) I’d be thrilled.
Headwaiter Gabriel came over to ask about my special dietary needs and I told him I was a medical vegan/pescatarian, not an ethical vegan (I hate these labels!), so broiled fish was fine but dairy and cheese and butter, etc. were not, and he was happy to hear that. “This is easy” he said, and it truly was. I started with a small serving of vegetarian cassoulet and then was presented with a beautiful ring of large broccoli florets topped with broiled Tasmanian salmon perfectly prepared. No overcooked salmon on the Golden Princess. Yay! Dessert for both of us was a fruit plate. I’ve already seen the menus for lunch and dinner tomorrow and know that I will be safe ordering right off the menu. Thank you, Princess, for making this so simple!
There really wasn’t any question that we’d have an early evening. We still hadn’t unpacked the large suitcases and our cabin was a wreck. I needed to send out laundry from our first two days in Sydney and G wanted to talk with our cabin steward Michael (from the Philippines) about getting a second comforter (which was already stored under the beds and so wasn’t hard to find). We were in bed but not asleep when the Welcome Aboard show in the Princess Theater started at 9pm, but I still couldn’t make it through this blog post.
We really are truly here now, and I thank my support team (you know who you are, and I love you guys!) for seeing me through to this goal. Thanks for following along!