LIVE: Crown Princess Transatlantic Cruise, 9/22/19 - 10/8/19

[geoherb]

We've had a fun and relaxing day at sea. We slept in later than usual but still made it to the dining room for breakfast before it closed at 9:30. But because we ate so late, we weren't hungry for lunch in the dining room. We played morning trivia and tied with several other teams. It was a crazy trivia, with lots of poorly worded questions and ambiguous answers. Some of the teams in the tie-breaker should not have been. The host gave up and accepted Cheerios as a product that has a bumblebee for a mascot. It's a honeybee and not a bumblebee. We had a tie-breaker answer closer to what the National Peanut Board gives for number of peanut butter sandwiches that can be made from the peanuts from 1 acre. I do see the host's answer on other websites. 

 

I walked around the Promenade Deck several times. I'm nursing an injury to my heel and avoided taking the stairs, choosing to cut across in front of the theater. By doing so, I got to play elevator roulette several times. I played the cruise-long trivia for the first time. I did better than some teams with more players. On this cruise, they're doing a cruise-long prize and not prizes for the individual games.

 

The back-stage tour was interesting. We've taken them before. The cast captain and stage manager conducted it. They showed a movie with details of what goes into making the production shows. They then took questions from the audience. I wish people paid attention. A few asked questions that had been answered in the movie or already by the crew members. After the questions, they let people on the stage and back stage. That part felt a little bit rushed compared to what we've seen on other ships, but there were a lot of people to get through in time for the 2:00 movie.

 

We ate a light lunch in the International Café while listening to a piano and trumpet jazz duo. They're part of the band that plays with the guest entertainers and both are excellent. We played afternoon trivia. I should have joined the team of five people who asked me to join them right before DH showed up. They did much better than we did.

 

I never heard back from the Vines guy about a Stammtisch. I think they'd sell out every night if they promoted it like they did on the Royal and Regal.

 

I spoke with the internet manager about the slow speed. He said it should improve on October 4. I could not get my hometown paper to load on a PC in the Internet Café (as suggested by one of the Medallion folks). The manager made some excuse about losing the satellite connection and something about a battery. He's promising lightning fast speeds on October 4. The speed test I did on the PC in the Internet Café returned 0.52 Mbps for downloads and 0.17 for uploads. It's faster than I'm getting through Wi-Fi, but that's the speed of a 56K modem. The problem is that internet pages are designed nowadays for faster speeds. My hometown paper would not load on the PC in the Internet Café. I gave up after 8 minutes with no discernible progress on the bar. I checked the size of the previous PDFs I was able to get to load (albeit slowly) earlier in the cruise. They range from 10 to 20 Mb. 

[canadarocks]

5 hours ago, geoherb said:

 

Here are the activity pages from today's Patter. I thought I had them uploaded before, but apparently it did not work.

 

Just so you know you're not wrong.... you put them on the Princess Cruise Director thread by mistake. 🙂  Thanks again for this AWESOME report!

 

Edited September 30, 2019 by canadarocks

[geoherb]

I started a separate thread about the internet speed. I'll try to stop harping so much on here about it.
https://boards.cruisecritic.com/topic/2699840-unacceptably-slow-internet-on-the-crown-princess/

 

Would people rather see menus or Patter pages? I'm thinking Patter pages. I can write about the menus without posting a photo. But let me know if you'd rather see menus.

 

[geoherb]

27 minutes ago, canadarocks said:

Here are the activity pages from today's Patter. I thought I had them uploaded before, but apparently it did not work.

 

Just so you know you're not wrong.... you put them on the Princess Cruise Director thread by mistake. 🙂  Thanks again for this AWESOME report!

 

 

Thanks for letting me know. I posted right before heading down for breakfast and was rushed. I thought I saw the pages post, but then they weren't here. Now I know where they went instead.

[memoak]

Menus please 

[EmilyColwell]

3 hours ago, geoherb said:

Would people rather see menus or Patter pages?

I like both but i I had to pic i'm all about those menus

[Sudoku]

Also on this cruise and tonight was formal night.  We ate at the buffet and were pleasantly surprised to see lobster being served!

[geoherb]

By popular demand, here's tonight's menu. The dessert menu featured the raspberry chocolate journey, vanilla soufflé with Godiva sauce, sugar-free crepes, and coffee ice cream, chocolate marshmallow ice cream, and peach daiquiri sorbet, along with the always available selections. 

[geoherb]

I had the crawfish, an appetizer size portion of the gnocchi, and the three-bite lobster tail. Our waiters did not offer to take the meat out of the tail and did not offer seconds. One of our tablemates who was on the British Isle cruise before said that the gentleman who was previously at our table had five lobster tails one night on that cruise.

[MissP22]

58 minutes ago, Sudoku said:

Also on this cruise and tonight was formal night.  We ate at the buffet and were pleasantly surprised to see lobster being served!

Wow, that's the first time I've ever heard about that. I hope it continues & it's not just a one time thing. 

Princess actually listened to people requests all these years & followed through.  👍 

[geoherb]

Here are the activity pages from today's Patter.

 

 

[SandG]

We were at the top deck of the ship waiting for the sail away from Lisbon and saw all 5 "missing passengers" arrive at the ship before we left. First a couple, who came running about 5 minutes after 4:00 and were greeted by some cheers. Then the last three arrived about 4:15ish. They were lucky that the captain was generous with his departure time. Missing the ship here would have been awful, especially since we missed the Azores! 

 

Sailing under the bridge here was fun. 

[geoherb]

We missed seeing the late people get on board. I wonder if the captain was more lenient due to the fact that we were skipping the Azores. 

 

The weather has been great. It's hard to tell there is a massive hurricane just a few hundred miles away. The seas are very calm. We had breakfast in the dining room. My new favorite breakfast combo is smoked salmon on rye toast with avocado. I may have mentioned that before. I played morning trivia with a team of two Canadian couples. One is the couple with whom we played yesterday morning. Once again, the host had some poorly worded questions. If we had a more generous scorer, we would have tied for first place with several other teams. We overlooked a misspelled answer on their sheet, but whoever scored our sheet did not count one of our almost right answers as right. It doesn't really matter.

 

We also ate lunch in the dining room. The seared tuna appetizer was very good. In between, I walked some laps around the Promenade Deck and went to the gym. I discovered that the elliptical machines are no good for me. I'm too tall, or the ceiling is too short.

 

I won another bottle of champagne in the ring toss. This time, it took my second turn to win a bottle. They gave out more bottles, but because it was a sea day, they also had more participants.

[geoherb]

For anyone on the cruise, we received a note about a location change for the book club meetings. They'll be October 3 and 5 at 10 a.m. in Skywalkers. Thanks to Sue for organizing these. 

[geoherb]

Here are the menus from tonight. There were jumbo shrimp and oysters on the half shell appearing in Horizon Court this afternoon. We did not see them, but our tablemates enjoyed them. I ordered from the bottom half of the menu: the risotto, shellfish, and cod. The lamb chops looked small and over done. Four of our tablemates ordered them. One had a main course portion of the risotto. He ate it all. DH and another man had the pot roast. I thought it was a little bit tough and not very flavorful, but they enjoyed it.

 

I had the panna cotta without the chocolate sauce for dessert. It was good.

 

Tonight's featured entertainer in the theater was a mentalist. None of us went to see him. I played the evening television trivia with a couple I've played trivia with before and their friends and a woman from Alabama whom I met at the first martini demo. We tied with four other teams. The host was going to send a bottle of champagne to a cabin for the three teams that got the tie-breaker question right. But our teammate talked him into giving us bottle stoppers instead so each of us could get one. It never made sense to me that they would give one prize to a team made up of six people who may have just come together as a team like we did.

 

 

[geoherb]

Blueberry pancakes were not possible this morning. I had hoped they would be. The plain ones were pretty good. The ship was rocking again last night. In the morning announcement, they said we had 4.5 meter seas (about 15 feet). The morning trivia host said the rough seas will calm tomorrow. He offered sea sickness packs to the people at trivia. The professional team won again with 20 out of 20 right. My team had 15. We quibbled with some of our fellow losers about some of the answers. One was a multiple choice about the distance to the moon. The choices were over a range of just 200 km total. All of the answers are the distance to the moon at one point. Another was the answer for the patron saint of sailors. Half the room had Saint Elmo. The host insisted Saint Nicholas was the only correct answer. It turns out there are several others, including Saint Brendan and Saint Francis of Paola.

 

I also went to Zumba for a few minutes. I decided walking the deck was more my speed. There was a crowd of around 70 people participating, in spite of the rocky ship.

 

 

[CruzinNoony]

My daughter is sailing on the Crown in December and she would like to know which dining room serves lunch on embarkation day.   Hope the seas have calmed down a bit!

[Colo Cruiser]

24 minutes ago, CruzinNoony said:

My daughter is sailing on the Crown in December and she would like to know which dining room serves lunch on embarkation day.   Hope the seas have calmed down a bit!

Usually DaVinci deck 6 in the atrium.

[geoherb]

It is Da Vinci for embarkation day lunch and lunch on sea days (as well as breakfast every day).

[geoherb]

We ate lunch in the dining room. It was enjoyable. We had a relaxing afternoon. The pools have been closed all day due to the rough seas. I took a little nap and then went to afternoon trivia. It was a hard one. I played with a mother-daughter pair from Australia. We came in the middle of the pack. 

 

Here are the menus from tonight. I had the salad, an appetizer size of the pasta, the seafood skewer, a few jumbo shrimp from the surf and turf, and the fruit plate. Afterward I played the Broadway music trivia with a woman who was great at it. She is the one on my team at last night's television trivia. We came in second with 32 out of 36 points. The winners had 33. They missed "Tradition" from Fiddler on the Roof and "Mr. Bojangles" from some obscure show, at least that's what I think the answer was. We missed the latter and "Ease on down the Road" from The Wiz.

 

DH has caught the respiratory bug that started on the previous cruise. I have had it a bit but never ran a fever. My symptoms were just a runny nose and congestion. He skipped going to the dining room for dinner.

 

 

[geoherb]

We received a notice that the last time to send out Elite laundry is tomorrow by noon. I had already planned to send out my last batch this morning. So far, they've been living up to the three-day turnaround for us.

[geoherb]

Winner! Winner! Chicken dinner! I played the slots for the first time this morning. I stopped when I was ahead. It's just 14 cents, but better than coming out a loser.

[geoherb]

The Cruise Critic book club meeting this morning was very nice. Today's book was Origin by Dan Brown. It starts in Bilbao, which made it a great choice for this cruise. I enjoyed hearing the different points of view about the book. Around 15 people were there. A few, unfortunately, showed up late. The organizer had to change the meeting place and time since the person she arranged the meeting space with originally is no longer on the ship. We shared the room with the knitters and natters and whoever else wanted to wander up to Skywalkers. But she had staked out a nice space for our group by getting there early.

[Little Sister]

Has there been a change in Captains? I am really hoping to have Justin Lawes at the helm for my October 18 sailing. I know it is possible that he flies into Fort Lauderdale and boards there, just curious if he happened to take over mid-cruise for you.

[geoherb]

We ate lunch in the dining room. I took photos of the menu. The chicken gumbo soup was more broth with a few pieces of okra. I did not find any pieces of chicken, sausage, or rice. They opened the youth center for game play. I played a few games of skee ball and watched some people playing air hockey and ping pong.