Carl and I spent Friday night as guests of his friend Tom in Ft Lauderdale. Tom has a lovely mid-century house in a quiet neighborhood and a lovely new Mercedes S580 in the garage. He gave us a tour of Ft Lauderdale Saturday morning, which gave me a better sense of the city than my combined experience from all previous trips. It also gave me a severe case of auto jealousy as his high-tech automobile was larger, quieter and WAY more sophisticated than my lowly Toyota. I offered to swap cars, straight up, but he declined.
So the basic embarkation plan was to drive to the cruise terminal, drop off Carl and the luggage, take the car to the long-term parking lot, take the shuttle back to the terminal, then accompany Carl through security and check-in. We got to the terminal right on schedule at 12:30pm and everything else went pretty much according to plan, except that Carl didn’t wait for me and went through security and check-in by himself. But the whole process was amazingly swift and efficient and I boarded the ship at 1:17pm – less than 45 minutes from start to finish. Compare that to the more than 4 hours that it took for me to complete the embarkation process for MSC1. I was pretty thrilled. Quick and painless is always thrilling.
Carl and I checked out the cabin – very nice, with an unexpectedly spacious feel to it. Then we went up to the Lido Deck for some lunch. My first impression of the ship: very elegant, very tastefully decorated. After lunch we sat in the grand atrium and listened to two very fine violinists playing some popular tunes. I also had my first cup of Americano coffee from the international cafe there – a place that Jett would have loved. A cute barista that she would have loved too. The coffee was less expensive than on the MSC cruise and the pastries were delicious and free. Gotta love things that are delicious and free.
One quirky feature of the ship that I discovered while on the Lido Deck (on the 16th story of the ship): There are sections of the floor that are made of (hopefully very strong) glass that you can walk on and look straight down at the ocean about 100 feet below. A bit scary, but interesting.
We jumped right into the activities on board, going to the trivia contest at 5:15pm (which we won, though it was more due to our inability to score correctly than to outsmart the small number of other contestants), then to the Solo group (singles on board) at 6:30. Met some nice people at the singles group, but no future wives.
We had dinner in Estrella, one of the two open dining rooms (the third was closed because the ship sailed with about 2,000 passengers – 50% of capacity). I had a very tasty shrimp-and-scallop fettuccine. The dining room was also elegant and very tastefully decorated. Overall, I think the Sky Princess is much nicer than the MSC Meraviglia.
We ended the day at a comedy show that was mediocre. I actually dozed off for a bit. Hopefully future shows will be better.
I was concerned about getting access to the internet so that I can post to the blog – because I know that my readers wait impatiently for every new post. On that score I got four pleasant surprises. The first was price. Because Carl is an “elite” Princess customer, I got the internet package for half price – about $50 for the entire week. Cheap. The second surprise was that the “one device” plan, while allowing just one device at a time to connect, could easily be switched between devices. So I could carry my phone and have access to the internet while walking around the ship but could also switch to the laptop to do these posts. Very convenient. The third pleasant surprise was that the internet access had no data limit. On previous cruises I had to buy a package of maybe 100 minutes and carefully monitor my usage. No such constraint here. A lovely surprise indeed. The final surprise: the Princess internet is AWESOME. On previous cruises the connection was slow and balky. On the Sky Princess the internet is arguably faster than my internet connection at my home in Ft Myers. This is due, apparently, to Princess using communication satellites that are in a much lower orbit than the geosynchronous ones.
We got a very nice sunset as we left Ft Lauderdale. A good start what I expect will be a very nice cruise.
