Despite our late night, I was up fairly early. Although I didn’t hear room service knock on the door at 6:30am, I did hear G answer it and bring in our coffees. He fell back asleep and I didn’t. Instead I put on my swimsuit and soaked in a hot tub in the covered Calypso pool area, and then alternated between that and the pool for over an hour. The sun was shining brightly, but the air temp was quite chilly, just 51F this morning. We have had extremely calm seas the whole way so far, and, frankly, if it wasn’t for the constant low hum of the ship’s engines, I would think we were on land.
I guess that is a good enough segue to offer some impressions about the Sapphire Princess. I mentioned that I was on the ship in its inaugural season, and remembered it was beautiful, but most ships are beautiful in those early years. It’s obvious now, 14 years later, that the ship has been meticulously maintained. Everything still looks like new in the public acreas, and our cabin is in very respectable condition. The carpeting throughout the ship is gorgeous, large, flat panel screens with deck plans and advertising are on walls in the public areas around the ship, and, as we anticipated based on information on Cruise Critic, the cabins have all been fitted with very large (42”?) flat panel TVs with extensive on demand programming. How nice is that? I’ve been hearing about the new on demand TV system for a few years, but only experienced it for 5 days on our one Royal Princess cruise. I think it has spoiled us for any other kind of TVs at sea. .
The ship has the new Princess mattresses and bedding. I’ve made my peace with the mattresses; they’re softer than I would prefer, but, as long as they’re not broken in too much, I can tolerate them. What we’ve tried (and tried, and...) to tolerate, but can’t, are the linens. We’ve slept soundly so far on this cruise, with minimum tossing and turning, and despite that, we awaken every morning with our top sheet one direction, and our duvet pulled out of that ridiculous topper with a pocket at the top. This means we’re touching a comforter that does not get laundered between passengers, not a pleasant thing to think about. Like last year, beginning tonight, we are going to sleep on top of the whole mess and loosely cover up with a freshly washed blanket.
Naturally, having Generoso as Maitre d’ and Godwin as Assistant Maitre d’ (we caught up with him in the Horizon Court Buffet after we returned from Paris), aka The Dream Team, means that the on board dining service is impeccable. Crissy Reid from South Africa is the Captains Circle host, and she has long been a favorite. And, as I’ve previously mentioned, it’s always wonderful to see some familiar faces among the crew. All in all, we’re extremely happy on board, and are especially happy that we’ll be returning to the ship on November 28 (and, G would add, not doing the repositioning cruise with all the sea days).
We have booked a cabin on Lido Deck for the Southeast Asia cruises. Actually, we had booked that cabin for the repositioning cruise, too, but it was unavailable for this first cruise, and our favorite cabins on the back of Aloha Deck were not available for all the cruises either. So we had resigned ourselves to moving one time, after this current cruise, and marked this cruise’s booking as receptive to an upgrade. Quite a few months ago Princess called offering us a balcony cabin on Aloha Deck “because we know how much you like that area of the ship”. That was rather unusual, but, yes, please, we’ll take it. And it’s been nice, although we have not really had balcony weather until this evening. We’ve only really been out there for sailaway from Southampton (we arrived in Le Havre and left in total darkness) and tonight’s sunset. And our opinion is unchanged...the space in a balcony cabin is not as well utilized as in an inside cabin made up with two twin beds. This layout is much more cumbersome. I feel like I have about 18” of space on my side of the bed in which to dress and put on shoes; two of us in the space by the vanity, with that superfluous barrel chair and round table, is just too crowded. When we were on the balcony at sailaway, it was noisy and echoing and we heard our neighbors on each side and below too well. I would always book a balcony in Alaska, but for most other cruises, a well located inside or ocean view cabin is still our favorite.
We spent some time after lunch today (International Dining Room, Greek salad without feta cheese) walking the upper decks of the ship from forward to aft. This ship, in my opinion, is the best of the quasi-Grand Class ships. It fixed the errors of the three original Grand Class ships (especially Skywalkers as a shopping cart handle), but kept what worked well (such as the covered Calypso Pool area). And it doesn’t contain the extra 500 passengers of the Caribbean, Emerald, Ruby and Crown. There is an abundance of deck chairs and pools and all the hot tubs are open and are actually hot. I think it’s accurate to say that this ship may be our favorite larger Princess ship.
I spent the rest of the afternoon watching the pre-recorded destination lectures for Lisbon and Gibralter on TV and reviewing some information for those ports I had downloaded on my iPad before we left home. G went to the Grapevine Wine Tasting and held down a hot tub (to date, I’d spent more time in one than he had, which is a real shocker). I also packed a day bag for tomorrow in Lisbon, as we had a busy evening planned and we arrive in that city at 7am tomorrow.
For the first time this cruise, we went to the Platinum, Elite and Suite (PES) Lounge held in Skywalkers from 5pm to 7pm...except it wasn’t held in Skywalkers tonight because they were preparing that venue for the Most Traveled Guest Party. Instead we were directed down to Club Fusion (we really need to pay more attention to the paperwork we get on the first day of each cruise, because I’m sure that change was pointed out in it). The PES Lounge doesn’t hold as much appeal for me since I no longer drink alcohol, and, with dinner at 5:30pm, we hardly need to eat at 5pm, but we have already met new friends on board and it’s a nice place to get together for a chat.
Just one of the reasons we cruise
We ate lightly at dinner (I had just a seafood soup in a broth base), because the Most Traveled Guest cocktail party began at 7pm. We had never before met our Finnish captain, Heikki Laakkonen, nor any of the other senior officers either, for that matter, and the cocktail party is my favorite way to get to talk with several of them and our fellow guests. As always, the hors doerves that were served were out of this world, and I was glad I saved some appetite for the party.
We had tentative plans afterward to go to comedian Jeff Stevenson’s show in the Explorers Lounge at 8:15pm, and then vocalist Peter Horwarth’s 10:15pm show in the Princess Theater, but, as always, we stayed and chatted after the party until nearly 10pm. I am in bed with contacts out and an alarm set for 5:30am. G decided at the last minute to go to the show in the Princess Theater. We’ll have a long day of sightseeing tomorrow, and, even with less sleep, he’ll outrun me ten times over.
Life is good, but not quite fair. ;-)