11 day California Coastal

[telecheck]

15 hours ago, jeromep said:

We did a 10-day Vancouver-to-Vancouver a number of years back.  Ports included LA, Catalina Island Santa Barbara and San Francisco (overnight port so my wife and I stayed out late and explored the city a bit).  It was a nice itinerary.  Since we live in Washington we drove to Vancouver, spent a couple of days there seeing things, then boarded the ship.  We went through customs like 4 times.  Once when we drove into Canada, then once in LA, once again in Vancouver when we returned, and then once again when drove back into the US.  It wasn't that difficult to navigate through all the customs and border crossing stuff.

 

I found the 11-day itinerary.  I don't like it as much as the itinerary we took.  The extra sea day is needed to get all the way down to San Diego (which is also the port of entry for that cruise).  We only went down as far as LA.  Plus the overnight port in San Francisco was really worth while.  The San Francisco port stop on the current itinerary is long 8am - 10-pm, but my wife and I found this jazz club in the financial district which was super cool and we spent a few hours there.  I think we left there about midnight or 1 in the morning and made our way back to the ship.  Felt like the crew and us were the only people up at that hour.

 

You could do 11 days out of LA, but the itinerary would be funky.  You'd have to hop from LA down to Ensenada immediately to get in the foreign port stop required by the PVSA.  Then your next port in on the US side would have to have customs capabilities since the ship is returning from a foreign port.  The other option would be to head north, visit ports on the California, Oregon, and Washington coast, kiss Victoria for a few hours for compliance, then return south.  The issue there is that you either have to head directly back to a port that has customs capabilities before you can touch more ports in the US, so that would mean that the ship would have to visit Seattle, or head all the way back to SF or LA to go through customs.  Seattle would be logical, from Victoria, but will still eat up most of a day to get the ship to Seattle and mill everyone on board through customs.

 

I suspect you'll see more California coastals out of LA, but they are all going to kiss Ensenada right before returning to LA.  It is the only time effective way to do that kind of trip.

 

https://www.princess.com/cruise-search/details/?voyageCode=1312

 

This is easy. I use the itinerary above for reference.

 

Day 1: Depart Los Angeles

Day 2: At Sea

Day 3: Monterey

Day 4: San Francisco

Day 5: At Sea

Day 6: Astoria

Day 7: Seattle

Day 8: Vancouver

Day 9: Victoria

Day 10: At Sea

Day 11: At Sea

Day 12: Los Angeles

 

 

 

Edited January 23, 2023 by telecheck

[polmcs]

On 1/23/2023 at 10:07 AM, XBGuy said:

 

 

Over the yrears I have taken a couple 7-day California Coastal round cruises out of Los Angeles.  Typically, we would make a port stop in San Diego, then visit Ensenada before returning to Los Angeles.  For some reason on one of those cruises we visited Ensenade before San Diego.  As a result on the morning that we visited San Diego all passengers had to go to one of the lounges and present our passports to CBP personnel who came onboard.  It was no big deal.  Interestingly, when we disembarked in Los Angeles the next day, we still had to go through the regular CBP  routine.

I’ve done a HI circle cruise out LA before when the first port of call was Ensenada to get the foreign port call out of the way first. It was a Christmas/New Year cruise, so I’m guessing Princess thought the holidays would line up better with the switch in port order. 
 

The entire ship cleared US immigration the day before arriving our first HI port of call. Some US immigration officers got a nice little jolly out of that one! They had to work a few hours one day and get to spend 5 days on a ship, at no cost to them.

 

Upon arrival in San Pedro, as we had not visited any foreign countries after departing HI, we simply walked off the ship and picked up our luggage and walked out of the terminal and were on our way home.