Ruby Princess Eastern Caribbean 3/27-4/3/11 review

[Vexorg]

So, by (somewhat) popular demand, looks like I've got to finish this now. And I suppose I should really try to finish it by the time I go on my next cruise (wait, didn't I say that before? Oh, that was only a one-day cruise, so it kinda' doesn't really count... sort of.) Anyway, onward to the next day..

 

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Grand Turk, 4/1

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When the Ruby Princess makes its stop at Grand Turk, it doesn't arrive until approximately 1pm, so I think most of the people in our group ended up sleeping in a bit that day. Eventually, most of us found our semi-regular gathering spot up at a couple of tables near the Neptune's Reef pool, and there we hung out, ate stuff and played Scrabble for a while again until we started to approach Grand Turk.

 

As the ship approached the dock, I took up a spot at the upper Promenade deck to watch the docking operations, and took a number of pictures. Unfortunately, my camera decided that this would be a good time to run out of battery after going through the previous five days of the cruise with no problem, leaving me with no camera to use on shore. This means that once again, I don't have too many pictures of my own, although other people in the group did have their cameras with them. One other ship (Carnival Glory) was docked at Grand Turk that day, and had arrived before us.

 

I had originally planned on a boat tour and snorkeling shore excursion, but since nobody else from the group was going I ended up cancelling it the previous night, with the caveat that I would end up having to take it (or at least pay for it) if they couldn't find someone to resell it to before arrival. It seemed like a lot of the Grand Turk shore excursions had sold out, and I heard nothing back on this and didn't get charged for it, so I would assume that they did manage to resell it.

 

Once I got ashore, I ended up waiting on the dock for about 20 minutes or so for my brother and parents to get off the ship. You actually have to go through a big duty free shop here to get off the dock and into the rest of the cruise center area, which mostly contains all the same tourist trap shops you'll find at the other ports, plus a few we didn't see elsewhere. The Margaritaville seems to be the tourist-trappiest tourist trap of them all here, so we just kept our distance.

 

Nobody really had much of anything planned here, so we were pretty much just winging it. Eventually we found the car rental place out at the edge of the cruise center, and my parents decided that it was good as anything. After taking a couple of the add-ons (insurance and the offer to fill the car with gas when you get back for $10) we got to the car. Now normally when you get a rental car somewhere, you'd expect to find something reasonably new, reasonably clean, and reasonably reliable. To be honest, I'm not sure this one would have qualified for any of those. The car was a JDM 1994 Toyota Corolla which had apparently been imported from Japan at some point after it had been used there for some 10-15 years or so (it appears a lot of the other cars in use on Grand Turk are Japanese imports as well, although a few newer cars do show up here and there.) Owing to its origins and the British influence on traffic design, it was a right hand drive car, which my Dad had apparently never driven one of before. My Dad had to remind himself more than a couple of times to stay on the "wrong" side of the road, and my brother got a couple of good photos of him accidentally turning on the windshield wipers while trying to use a turn signal. Fortunately, there wasn't a whole lot of traffic for him to run into anywhere on the island, and nobody seemed to really even notice. I'm guessing the locals have probably dealt with enough freakin' tourists that they're used to it by now. On the plus side, the air conditioning actually worked, and there was a vaguely official looking roadworthiness certificate issues by a local government official just three days before, so what could possibly go wrong? Anyway, we got one car, and several other members of our group got another car (an old Daihatsu SUV or some sort, pretty sure they haven't sold those in the US since the 1990s.)

 

Anyway, after getting the car, our first stop was the space capsule by the airport, one of the items on our Amazing Race list. We then continued into Cockburn Town, following along the shoreline. Our first stop here was an area where there were a number of small shops set up, and although a lot of these seemed to be geared less toward tourists than locals, there were a few places with some trinkety stuff as well. Following this we continued on, pausing at a few different beaches along the way, but not really spending a whole lot of time at any of them since nobody was really too interested in making it a beach day. There are a couple of reasonably nice beaches on the island, but the one by the Cruise Center seems to be about as good as you're going to get, so if you want to make a beach day out of it I wouldn't go out of your way. Anyway, after the beach stop, we continued wandering around the island in the general direction of the lighthouse (pausing briefly so my Mom could go chase some feral donkeys, long story.)

 

Although I haven't seen a whole lot of Caribbean islands, my Mom (who is a frequent cruiser, but hadn't been to Grand Turk before) says that Grand Turk is one of the ones that seems the most Caribbean to her. Compared to a St. Maarten or a St. Thomas it's definitely a much quieter place, and in spite of the relatively recent addition of the Cruise Center at the southern end of the island and Carnival's other various investments, it still doesn't feel much like a tourist spot compared to other Caribbean islands. It's probably a good thing we took the gas option on the car rental though, I think we found all of two gas stations on the island, neither of which looked particularly open at the time. Then again, I suspect they're making money on the deal anyway because the island is so small I don't even know how you'd use $10 worth of gas seeing the whole place anyway.

 

After continuing to drive around for a while, we eventually reached the lighthouse, and we followed a walking trail out to some ominous looking cliffs at the northern tip of the island (there's a walking trail that goes from the lighthouse to here, and past some industrial ruins of what I seem to recall being an old power plant. Maybe if I'd write this stuff in a timely fashion I'd recall more.) Interestingly enough, there was a local fishing from a small and somewhat precarious ledge below us on the cliffs, and none of us could figure out how the heck he even managed to get down there in the first place. Perhaps the most interesting thing about this particular spot was the color of the water. Instead of the kool-aid blue waters you'd expect to find on most Caribbean islands and beaches, the water up here was a rather ominous shade of green, perhaps an indication of the treacherous nature of the waters in this area that have resulted in hundreds of shipwrecks over the years.

 

After spending some time here and seeing just about all there is to see (there is a small gift shop next to the lighthouse that also happens to sell souvenirs for the nearby prison for some reason) we got back in the car and headed back toward the ship. We did consider visiting Conch World along the way, but one of the signs pointing to it warned that they were closed (I later learned that broken generators had put them out of commission for several weeks) so we just continued back to the ship. We got back to the cruise center and returned the two cars, hoping that they wouldn't notice the words "Sirrines are stinky" that some random person that absolutely none of us have any knowledge of whatsoever wrote in the dust on the other car's back window. Anyway, after this we wandered around the cruise center for a bit, noting that the Ron Jon Surf Shop in the cruise center didn't actually appear to have any surfboards available for sale (well OK, I think they had one, but I'm pretty sure it was just there for decoration.) The group kind of got split up at this point, but since it was getting close to departure time anyway, we all made our way back to the ship on our own.

 

After getting back to the ship it was getting close to dinnertime, so I went back to my room to change, at which point I found a notification (hand-signed by Commodore Romano no less) that I had been selected for the Ultimate Ship Tour to take place tomorrow afternoon. This was lobster night in the dining room, and although dinner was well enjoyed by all, I think this tends to be just about the point on a cruise that I start getting sick of all the fancy food. I don't recall what I did for the rest of the evening after this, but I think I mostly just took it easy, tried and failed to understand how to play Craps for a while (just watching, not playing) and went to bed relatively early. With the final sea day and the Ultimate Ship Tour coming up the next day, rest sounded like a good thing to get.

[Woobstr112G]

Wow, sounds like a very enjoyable day.....:):):)

 

Bob

[Vexorg]

OK, got a couple more days to finish up here...

 

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Sea Day / Ultimate Ship Tour, 4/2

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As the final day on the ship before disembarkation the next morning, most people in our group were just taking it easy today. Unlike the just about perfect weather we had for the entire trip so far, this morning was cloudy, and even managed a few light sprinkles of rain, although this didn't last long. A number of people in the group did sleep in, but I was up fairly early, and eventually I caught up to my parents, who were out doing laps around the Promenade deck. I think I managed to get about 2 1/2 miles of walking in, spending most of that time regretting my choice of footwear (see also: St. Maarten.) Eventually, most of the group congregated once again at a couple of tables near the Calypso pool and was mostly just taking it easy and breaking out the Scrabble board again and snacking on stuff from the grill. I remained with the group up until about 1pm, when it came time to meet in one of the conference rooms near the theater to begin the Ultimate Ship Tour.

 

We ended up with a group of 10 people on the tour. I'm not going to go into too much detail on the tour itself because there are already quite a few threads on it, and it also seems to vary from ship to ship, but here is a rough outline of the areas we went through:

 

* The theater stage (where they discussed quite a bit about the automated scenery moving equipment, the lighting and the sound system);

* The theater dressing room (where they had a number of costumes on display, and discussed some of the logistics of putting on the various performances, some of the blocking, and other things like that);

* The forward mooring deck (one of the bridge officers came down and talked about some of the docking procedures. To be honest, it was a bit hard to hear much down here due to the noise);

* The main kitchen (the head chef discussed some of the logistics of running the food operations of the ship. Perhaps the most interesting thing to come out of this is the fact that even if the MDR menus * are set by Princess corporate, the head chef on each ship determines what is served in the Horizon Court. We were kind of in between the lunch and dinner period here, so there wasn't a whole lot going on in the kitchen at the time);

* The bakery and food prep areas (not a whole lot to see here either since we caught them at a quiet time);

* The food storage areas (More discussion of the logistics of acquiring and storing food on the ship);

* The photo lab (mostly they talked about the big developing machines that print all the pictures, and some of the photo gear the ship's photographers are equipped with);

* The print department (Demontrating the use of the presses for various printed material used aboard the ship. It turns out the printing presses that they use for all the printing on the ship are smaller than you would expect them to be);

* The engine control room (most of what they showed here was the various monitoring systems they had available for keeping track of ship functions, including things like the main engines, the thrusters, the desalination systems, the HVAC and other things like that, as well as the emergency response systems);

* The medical center (The ship's doctor gave us a tour of the area, including surgical facilities and the ship's intensive care facility. Fortunately, none of it was in use at the time. There was also some discussion of the logistics of a medavac while at sea; which was somewhat interesting because the Emerald Princess had to do a helicopter medivac just a couple of weeks previous to this cruise);

* The laundry facilities (actually one of the more interesting parts of the tour, it was cool to see just how much automated equipment they had for this);

* And finally, a tour of the bridge, conducted by Commodore Romano himself. For as big as the bridge of the ship is, it's a bit surprising how much of it is actually just empty space, with almost all of the actual equipment being limited to just the maneuvering hardware in the two wing bridges and a couple of consoles in the center of the bridge. The Commodore explained a fair bit about the overall operations of the ship, answered our questions, and we even spotted whales from the bridge, and one of the officers on duty had the ship maneuver around them. After the tour, champagne and chocolate covered strawberries were served (I don't drink, so I had a soda instead)

 

All in all, the whole tour took about 3 hours, and it was a bit past 4pm when it ended. Unfortunately, this was just about the point where I needed to start packing up my stuff to disembark the next morning, which I began doing after the completion of the tour. The bathrobe and chef's jacket included with the tour came shortly afterward, delivered by our cabin steward so I could allocate space for these in my luggage, but the photos didn't come until later after I had finished packing up my big suitcase. It turned out they also came with a photo frame, which proved just a bit tricky to find room for in my other bag.

 

After packing up and leaving the suitcase outside the room for collection, it was time to head to dinner. I don't remember all the specifics, but I had the steak for dinner, which turned out to be a fair bit larger than I was expecting it to be. After the Baked Alaska parade made its way through the dining room, our waitresses decided to have a bit of fun with some of the people in our group at the other table. My uncle, who had been eating all sorts of food on the cruise and had ordered multiple desserts a few times, was given a rather large portion of our server's Baked Alaska. My cousin then said he wanted a smaller piece, and ended up with an even bigger piece. Finally, my aunt said she didn't want any, and somehow ended up with the entire remaining 2/3s of the Baked Alaska in front of her!

 

After dinner, I spent the rest of the evening hanging out with my brother and cousin, who spent the time hanging out with some new friends they had met the previous day, basically hopping around from lounge to lounge watching the various entertainment, then hanging out above decks until it was fairly late. This is usually the point where you find yourself wishing you had booked the 10 day or the 14-day cruise instead of this one, but even though we were disembarking in the morning, at least there was still another day of vacation remaining before it was time to make the long trip back home.

 

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Anyway, this just about concludes the cruise portion of the trip, but I still plan to write one more entry to finish off the trip and discuss some of the stuff we did in Fort Lauderdale and Miami the next day.

Edited July 29, 2011 by Vexorg

[nutcrackers]

Thanks for your interesting details. Can you tell me, in the Cays, when you snorkeled on your own, was it good? Was it worth bringing out your snorkeling equipment? What did you see? Would you recommend it to others? Thanks!

[Vexorg]

Generally the snorkeling at Princess Cays is pretty good (there are better reefs out there, but Princess Cays always seems to have a lot of fish,) but with the waves it probably wasn't the best day for it when we were there. If I did bring my own gear again I'd probably leave the fins behind, since I don't think I'd really need them there and they take up a lot of room in the luggage (and if you do need them you should be able to come up with some without too much trouble.) There was also very good snorkeling at Coki Beach in St. Thomas, and you can rent snorkel gear at the beach for $10 there.

[kendon]

Outstanding review!!

[Vexorg]

OK, one last post to finish this one up (only four months late, right?)

 

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Disembarkation / Fort Lauderdale / Miami / Departure , 4/3, 4/4

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On this morning, I was awakened fairly early by the bow thrusters as the ship made its final approach into the pier at Fort Lauderdale. It wasn't quite my normal wake-up time, but I probably needed to be up and about anyway, as we had about an hour before we were supposed to be out of our room. Most of the packing had been done the night before, so there wasn't a whole lot to do, and within a half hour or so, we had the room cleared out.

 

At this point, me, my brother and my cousin got together with some of the people we were hanging out with the night before, and went to the MDR for breakfast. This was a little bit odd, because in the three cruises I had been on by this time, this was actually the first time I had ever had breakfast in the MDR, and I wondered why I didn't do this more often. Following a relatively leisurely breakfast, I had one more item of unfinished business, to provide an extra tip to our two MDR waitresses in the trip (one of them was working in the Horizon Court that morning, and was summoned down to the MDR to receive it in person,) and after that was completed we headed to the casino, where we waited for about 15 minutes until it was time to disembark. We hadn't met up with the rest of the group yet at this point, but fortunately they all had similar disembarkation times, and we quickly got together outside the terminal after going through immigration and collecting luggage.

 

As was the case with arrival at Fort Lauderdale, practically everyone seemed to have different flight arrangements for returning home, with some leaving that afternoon from FLL, others leaving that evening from MIA, but most of us leaving the next day on various flights. Upon completing disembarkation, a couple of people took taxis out to FLL to retreive another rented 12-passenger van and another minivan to transport everyone and their luggage to their respective destinations. At this point, since people were heading off in different directions, the group began to split up. I was with the larger portion of the group (8 people) who weren't flying out until the next day.

 

It took about 45 minutes for the vans to arrive, and everything to get packed up. Our first stop on disembarkation was the hotel where we would be staying for the evening, the SpringHill Suites in Dania. The rooms weren't ready yet, so this was a fairly quick stop, and after this we headed out to our first destination for the day: Gator Park, at the edge of the Everglades National Park, where we went for an airboat ride. The ride itself lasts for about 20 minutes, and included a slow ride through some allegedly alligator-infested swamps (usually that's not supposed to be a good thing, right?) and a fast portion, where they mostly just show off the capabilities of the airboat. We did actually see a couple of medium-sized alligators and a number of babies while on the airboat, and I was even able to get some decent pictures. After the airboat ride, there is also a relatively brief (10-15 minutes or so) wildlife show, where they show off several larger alligators, as well as other animals in their collection. All in all, it was interesting to see, but this is the kind of place you'd find in the dictionary if you looked up the term "Tourist Trap". We also had a snack on some fried alligator here, getting in a few late points for our Amazing Race (which, as I mentioned earlier, nobody really bothered keeping track of the scores on.) Seems to be a bit of an acquired taste really.

 

After completing our visit to the Gator Park, we made our way out to Miami Beach, where we intended to go on the Duck tour offered there. For those of you who don't have a fleet of these schlepping tourists around your town, Ducks are basically large amphibious vehicles originally designed as troop transports during World War 2, and later got repurposed for a number of uses, the most notable being tourism. As far as I can tell the Miami Beach Duck tour doesn't use actual DUKW vehicles like most Duck Tours (including the ones in Seattle) do, but the concept is basically the same: a tour through the city on both land and water, with a moderately obnoxious tour guide providing commentary along the way. We had made phone reservations to get onto the 3:00 tour, but with heavy traffic going into Miami Beach that day, we ended up cutting it really close on making it there and finding parking in time, but we did make it aboard the tour. I had actually been to Miami Beach before when I was down here for my previous Caribbean cruise on the Star Princess, so I've actually seen a lot of this before. Some of the sights pointed out here included Paris Hilton's Miami Beach vacation home (which, somewhat predictably, ended up being the city jail), a lot of really fancy mansions on the various islands, the four cruise ships in port that day (Carnival Glory, Carnival Valor, Norwegian Dawn and Norwegian Pearl, we started heading back to the starting point just in time to catch the sailaways) and all sorts of various other things, but mostly our guide just kept talking about LeBron James. I've always been a fan of the Art Deco style so Miami Beach is interesting to see from that perspective, but there just seems to be a distinct undercurrent of sleaze to the place that makes me hesitant to spend too much time there.

 

After the duck tour it was just about dinnertime, and since I hadn't had much besides breakfast on the ship, a few bites of fried alligator and various leftover junkfood in the car, I was fairly hungry, but not really in the mood for anything fancy. We headed to the general vicinity of the Miami airport since we were going to be dropping my parents off at a hotel there for the evening and started looking. The consensus was that we wanted to find Mexican food somewhere, but it turns out that it's a lot harder to find than you'd think in Miami, since any vaguely Mexican sounding place in town was probably Cuban. The fact that most of the available cell phones had begun running out of battery by now wasn't helping our cause much (Mental note: bring car charger for phone next time, even if I don't think I'm going to need it.) Ultimately, we got sick of wandering around, and ended up at El Rinconcito Latino, which naturally turned out to be another of the Cuban places. It's definitely not a touristy place (in fact, we may have ended up being the only non-Latinos there) but the Yelp reviews were good, so we ended up waiting out the half-hour or so it took to get in, and were well rewarded for our patience. The food here was very good (the Cuban bread in particular was very delicious and served piping hot) and the portions were huge. After finishing off dinner, we dropped off several people at the Miami Airport Marriott where they would be spending the night before catching their flight out in the morning, and after dropping off my parents in Miami and my aunt and uncle at a different hotel in Fort Lauderdale, it was just me, my brother and my cousin remaining in the van. Since we no longer had any particular need to be driving a 12-passenger van around, and my brother and cousin weren't heading out until the next evening, we returned the van at FLL and swapped it out for a much smaller car. to return to the hotel. It was when we filled the van with gas near the airport that I managed to trigger a fraud alert on my credit card, causing an issue with checkin for my flight. It wasn't until I was able to plug in my phone back at the hotel to charge (it had just about run out of battery at this point, and I had it in flight mode) that I found that the bank had sent text messages, e-mail and voicemails letting me know about this. At the hotel I had to make a call to the bank to clear this up, after which I was able to check in for my flight and upgrade to Main Cabin Select for the SFO-SEA leg of the return flight the next morning.

 

The return trip home the next morning was fairly long, with a 6-hour FLL-SFO flight and a nearly five hour layover at the SFO international terminal, the second most boring airline terminal I've spent that much time in. Fortunately, Virgin America has plenty to do on the flight, and in-flight Internet on every plane, so aside from being a long flight it wasn't too bad. Main Cabin Select on the shorter San Francisco to Seattle leg of the flight was nice though, with more legroom, free in-flight movies (I ended up watching Tron Legacy, but it ended up racing between finishing the movie and reaching the gate in Seattle) and included food and drinks. The final leg of the trip was uneventful, as was the shuttle ride home from the airport. Shockingly, my apartment was still there when I got back, just the way I found it.

 

Anyway, to conclude, a few final thoughts:

 

-Although cruising is definitely a nice way to go, I really wish we had more time in some of the ports. One of these days I'll have to plan on taking a land vacation down there, probably to either St. Maarten or St. Thomas. There was a bit of talk going around among our group of looking into a vacation rental on St. Maarten, but I don't think anything has come of it yet.

-On the other hand, there's also some serious talk of doing a Southern Caribbean itinerary on the Crown Princess in January. If this happens (and it seems likely) I'll probably be along on that one too. It'll probably be less people for that one if it happens though. Given the crummy Spring weather we've had around here, we'll probably be wanting to get away around now.

-If I had the trip to do over again, I'd probably make sure to spend more time in the pools. In particular, the Lotus Spa Pool is a favorite among our group, and I don't feel like I got to spend as much time as I would have liked there. Oh, and I would have used a lot more sunscreen on Princess Cays too, but that's another story...

-Favorite part of the trip? Don't know if any one single event or activity really stood out. Mostly it was just getting to spend some time with my brother who I don't see all that often, and my parents who I see a lot more often (I still live relatively close to them) and other family. I do have to say though, if I do end up doing the January cruise mentioned above, it'll end up being four cruises in a year for me after going six years without going on one (well, 3 1/2, depending on what you call a 1-day repo.) They're the ones who really got me started on the whole cruising thing, and I've got to say, they may have created a monster...

 

And that concludes the trip report. Thanks for reading, and thanks for your comments.

Edited August 8, 2011 by Vexorg

[DVCTiff]

Greetings from Seattle and thanks for the great report. We're sailing the Ruby to Alaska next July for our first ever cruise. We're so excited, and I can already tell I'm going to be a VERYSADPUPPY to get off the ship after a week.

 

I felt a pang when I read "this is when you wish you'd booked 10 or 14 days..."

[Vexorg]

Whoa, bit of a thread necro here, but thanks. Seems like ages since I took this cruise...