talkorpi

Well we DEFINITELY aren’t in the Caribbean anymore.

So last night I got to see something pretty cool. We usually stay on the starboard side but since I did the random upgrade thing we got assigned to a stateroom on the port side. No big deal, I didn’t think it would make much difference. However, last night I saw a benefit to being on this side of the ship! Right before bed (11:30ish) I saw some lights in the distance that looked bigger than an oil rig. I figured out pretty early on that these were a couple of the ships that departed Galveston yesterday afternoon! The pictures turned out horrible and they looked much closer in real life, but it was so cool to see the Adventure of the Seas and the Carnival Vista pass by on their way back out to the Caribbean.

So I am a horrible insomniac and I rarely get more than 3 hours of sleep per night, but these beds on Princess are heavenly. I got like 6 hours of sleep last night and it was amazing!!! I’m really going to miss these beds. I even have some cariloha bamboo sheets I got from a past cruise in 2017 at home but these beds are still much more comfortable. Goodnight! In just a little more than eight hours we will be walking off the ship an I’ll be starting the drive back home 😭👎🏻😪

One last Dirty Banana 😞

You can tell we are getting close to Texas because it got cloudy and colder. A front was moving through for the last few days because I kept getting storm alerts on my phone for our house 😂 Also, IS THIS NOT A BEAUTIFUL VIEW?!?

MDR Farewell Dinner: Seafood Medley Spinach Pesto Ravioli Ceasar Salad Mahi w/ Pineapple Salsa Lamb Shank (one of the best things I have eaten all week) Cherry Sorbet. All excellent. Big shoutout to Richard and Wilson in Botticelli for being such great waiters for us. The food this week has all been FANTASTIC!!!

Sorry for being so quiet today. Trying to enjoy the last of our time onboard. It’s funny - the morning after the second port cancellation, people were screaming at the crew and fellow passengers about how horrible this was and how they couldn’t WAIT to get off the ship for good. Now, suddenly, nobody wants to get off anymore. Funny how that works…

One thing I was NOT happy to find in the galley…

It was cool to see the galley. It still amazes me how huge they are. Everything was crystal clean and it seems like everything is a well-oiled machine. Also had some cool carvings on display!

It was great! Very entertaining and very funny. It was cool to see the galley too. Was probably the best thing we saw in the theater all week.

Time for the Culinary demo! Bummed I have to miss trivia and the egg drop for it but I have been looking forward to this all week so I’m excited!

Yeah I can agree with this sentiment. I just graduated college and I still have a pretty nasty monthly student loan payment. I know I really shouldn’t be spending this much on travel but I have always wanted to try Princess ever since I was little and I figured I could justify this as my “one-time first adult purchase splurge” that I otherwise wouldn’t normally be able to afford. It does kind of leave a bad taste in my mouth given that I wouldn’t normally spend this much money (even if this cruise was cheaper than usual) and considering how I can’t just drop this much $$$ on cruising all the time like you also said. I’m sorry y’all aren’t having a bad time. We really did pick the worst possible week to try Princess. Whoops.

I haven’t been able to find those giant speciality cakes all week. Well look at what they decided to put out for our last day…

MDR Breakfast. I feel like this thread has gone negative lately and I was hoping I could report on a good breakfast to turn things around. No such luck. This was the worst food we have had all week. The pancakes were gummy and undercooked. The hollandaise sauce on the eggs Benedict tasted like lemon pledge. It was weird- it was like this overwhelming taste of artificial lemon flavor. Not good at all. The eggs were cooked perfectly but they were hard to enjoy with all the gross hollandaise on top! Darn it! Can’t say the food was perfect all cruise anymore.

I just realized ANOTHER thing that we didn’t get - there were ZERO enrichment lectures or opportunities all cruise! I checked Journey View before our cruise and there were definitely talks scheduled about pirates and Caribbean rum making. Those never happened. Not only did we miss a ton of ports but it sounds like we also missed some of the core elements of Princess’ onboard entertainment. No Voice of the Ocean, no enrichment, no magician on our sailing (literally never seen one onboard or anywhere in the patter), and we only got one comedian on the first night (we were supposed to get another in Roatan and while they said he would be joining us in Cozumel his show never appeared again on the patter). I really do think this was one of the worst possible sailings to introduce people to Princess. Lady Luck is not on our side this week.

Probably. They weren’t really enforcing boarding groups. I think they generally want you to get there around the time your boarding group is so they can have an idea what to expect but we were there about 30 minutes early and it didn’t cause any problems.

Ugh, I know, it’s really annoying. I’m a Gold on Carnival but I have zero interest in sailing on those cruises on the Miracle. The ports are nice but the ship is (IMO) the ugliest in the fleet and the prices for those cruises are SUPER expensive even with my discounted VIFP rates. At that price I might as well fly to Miami for an 8 day southern that costs half as much and goes to the exact same places. I’m hoping to start building my Princess loyalty but the terrible itinerary choices from Galveston are not making it easy. I like some of their itineraries from Ft. Lauderdale but I don’t like how it adds $1000+ to my trip cost.

I wonder how many of the 1956 first timers will ever take a Princess cruise again after this week’s chaos… 🤔😂😂

Oh yes, thank you for reminding me. So make that FOUR ships that are all doing the EXACT same itinerary. Like literally they do not change. Only 4 choices of ports - Roatan, Belize, Cozumel, or Costa Maya. No more Grand Cayman, no more Jamaica, no more Key West. Of course, Carnival and Royal Caribbean have added some 9-12 day cruises in the winter season on some of their smallest, oldest ships that still visit these places and even go to the ABC islands or Grand Turk. The problem is that these cruises are so prohibitively expensive and so hard to come by that it’s probably easier and cheaper to just fly to Florida and do the same itinerary in 6-8 days. If Princess could find a way to fill in the gap being left by the mainstream lines’ exit of Jamaica/Cayman as well as offer these longer voyages to ports considered exotic from Texas at a better value then I think they could be a tremendous success here. I don’t know why they aren’t doing that. There’s just no way Princess can compete with Prima, Jubilee, or Harmony. Not even the Sun can compete with those ships if you’re trying to do a “ship is the destination” type of thing, much less the Regal or Ruby. If Princess wants to be serious about competing in Galveston they should realize what the other cruise lines are having to sacrifice in order to increase capacity and capitalize on that - ESPECIALLY since it already fits in their niche. It really is a no brainer to me and to see what they are doing instead is just painful. It’s almost like they want to fail in Galveston.

I don’t either!! I’m sure it has something to do with our screwed up itinerary but it shouldn’t have affected it THAT much! That really stinks. I’ve been doing research and following along for months and it seems that every previous 7-day on Ruby has had Voice of the Ocean until now. Ugh. What a rollercoaster ride this cruise has been

Thanks! There were two of us and we ordered one item from each course. However we had a late reservation and were one of the last parties dining by dessert time which is why I believe our waiter just brought us one of everything for dessert. We certainly did not ask for that or plan on doing that but it was a nice gesture and allowed us to try a bit of everything. It was sooooooo good. Hoping you enjoy it just as much as we did on the Crown!

Their Galveston strategy is all wrong. They are trying to compete with the existing lines by doing the same boring itineraries every week on “fancy” ships. As CCL/RCCL continue to add bigger and bigger ships, the small amount of accessible ports from GLS for seven-day Caribbean cruises gets smaller as we now have to remove tender ports in Belize and Grand Cayman. Thus, these two ports (along with Jamaica) are being dropped completely from Galveston regular week-long runs at the end of this year. Seriously, go look at the schedules - Carnival Jubilee and whatever Oasis class ship is in Galveston do the same Roatan-Costa Maya-Cozumel itinerary every single week through 2025. Princess ships could fill this role of being something DIFFERENT and I have no idea why those in charge can’t figure that out. Princess had a real opportunity to be the “interesting itinerary” niche in Galveston and they blew it. Not sure why they won’t consider calls in Jamaica, Cayman, or Key West. With Carnival replacing Vista with the Jubilee, no ships from Galveston will visit Grand Cayman or Jamaica anymore except on longer 10+ day cruises that only occur a couple times a year and are astronomically expensive. So now we have three cruise lines sailing the exact same itinerary every single week to the exact same ports. Most people would probably pick the Allure/Harmony OTS or the Jubilee over the Regal Princess. Wish they would cancel this sale release and go back to the drawing board. I would book a cruise out of Galveston on the Regal in a heartbeat if it was the Montego Bay - Grand Cayman - Cozumel itinerary that Carnival is dropping after sailing it for years here. With their current offerings I’m not interested, especially considering that I’m on the cruise with the same boring Roatan, Belize/Mahahual, Cozumel itinerary that had 2/3 cancellations this week. Not doing that one again on Princess. Sorry. Rant over. It’s just frustrating that Galveston is growing as a port but simultaneously becoming super boring with nothing new to offer, and Princess for some reason wants to try to play the catch up game to some of the world’s newest, largest, and amenity-filled cruise ships (of which they can’t compete) rather that stick what they preach they are the best at, which is unique ports and itinerary variation. Please fix it, Princess, there’s still time!

I also just realized that we never got The Voice of the Ocean on this cruise. What the heck?! That sucks. I was really looking forward to that

Tomorrow’s patter. Not that impressed to be honest. I don’t know why they keep scheduling the trivias at the same time as other one-time events. Like, I really wanted to go to tomorrow’s trivia but why on earth schedule it during the cooking demo? And the egg drop challenge are also at the same time. What da heck? Those are like the only things to do all day that don’t involve a sales pitch!

It’s never fun to come back to the cabin after a long, fun day and see THIS on your bed. 😭😭😭