Monday, March 4, 2019. Princess Cay, Eleuthera Island, The Bahamas

Monday, March 4, 2019.  Princess Cay, Eleuthera Island, The Bahamas

It sure felt nice to sleep in a real bed last night.  There was time to have breakfast in the dining room because the ship was scheduled to drop anchor off Princess Cay at 9AM.  The food service was quicker and there was no wait for a 2 top table either.  

The ship did launch 2 of its tenders for tender operations, but there were also two larger passenger ferries from the island that helped with the tender operations.  Princess Cay has some nice white sand beaches with plenty of beach chairs and facilities to make it easy to have a nice day at the beach.  There was a small area roped off for a Stingray encounter excursion, as well as swimming areas and a designated snorkeling area.  There are also private bungalows that can be rented, and an area for Sanctuary passengers only.  There is an exclusive area on the ship called the Sanctuary where kids are not allowed, and you can pay extra for a “membership” lasting the duration of the cruise if you want to get away from the crowds and be even more pampered.  

Ben took a brief dip in the snorkeling area while we were waiting for our ATV tour excursion to begin.  There isn’t much live coral, and although there are tropical fish to see, it all pales in comparison to what we had seen in the Galapagos.

Our ATV tour did not end up going off road at all, but just ran across the island to the Atlantic side, where we got out at a beach.  One of the guides was kind enough to offer to take Ben snorkeling to see if they could find a lobster in a reef close to shore.  This reef looked a lot healthier than the one on the Princess side of the island, but alas, we didn’t find any lobsters.

The tour then drove back to the Caribbean side of the island, stopping at two ruins.  The first was the first Anglican Church on the island, which was destroyed by a hurricane in the remote past.  The second was a packing plant where agricultural products (primarily pineapples) were prepared and stored for export.  

After we returned to the Princess Cay beach, a couple who had excursion tickets for a bicycle ride decided they didn’t want to do it because we had run into the bicycle tour group at the church ruins, and they didn’t want to do the bicycle tour and see the same things all over again.  So they kindly offered them to Janet, who accepted them and we were off to catch that excursion.  We had been counting on having lunch at the Princess BBQ buffet that was set up on the beach, but by the time we returned from the ATV tour, the buffet was taken down.  Consequently, we ended up going without lunch.  However, we were in no danger of starvation on this cruise.  

The bicycle tour was a bit of a throw back because the bicycles were single speed with coaster brakes.  We probably hadn’t been on a bicycle with coaster brakes since grade school eons ago.  The bicycle tour was very low key, and rode out to a point where we could see the ship on the Caribbean side of the island.  Then we rode back to the Anglican Church and Packing plant ruins.  There was also a wishing well next to the Packing plant ruins, but it was boarded up with plywood.  We also stopped on a causeway separating the Caribbean from a lagoon where conch breed.  There was a culvert through which all the water flows, and around this, you could see the tropical fish (tiny angel fish, baby mullet, and even some baby barracudas).  Our guide tried to feed them some hamburger buns, but the fish didn’t seem interested.  He had fed them already with an earlier bicycle group.

Since we were hungry, we hopped the first tender back to the boat and slummed our way into the dining room for afternoon tea.  We weren’t the only ones coming directly from the beach to have tea, so they were being a bit lenient on the dress code, but we appreciated it.  Princess does a nice job with their afternoon tea with little finger sandwiches, cakes, cookies, scones and tea, of course.  The baked goods on Princess are better than those on the Viking Star.  

It took a while to shower up and rinse out salt water from Ben’s snorkeling gear after tea.  Then we had to get dressed for dinner, which was at the Crown Grill specialty dining venue, courtesy of AAA travel.  In the main dining room, there is no problem with ordering two entrees if you want, other than finding room in your stomach.  We were hoping to do surf and turf, ordering both lobster and fillet mignon but discovered that the Crown Grill now charges an additional $10 if you want to do that.  But we compromised by ordering one lobster and one fillet mignon and then splitting them on the plate.  There was still plenty of food and they offered a chocolate journey specialty dessert, so that was the best meal we have had so far on this cruise.  

We finished dinner too late to attend the 7PM Beatles trivia which was billed as “Who Sang What”.  We thought that would require you to not only know the song title, but also the lead vocalist for each song, but we were wrong.  We dropped in for the last 4 questions, and found out that it was only song titles.  And there was a 10 point bonus question.  When they had gone over the answers, we figure we could very well have won that trivia because we knew the bonus question, which was how many Beatles are on the cover of the Abbey Road album, and which direction are the band members walking on the cover.  We knew from a prior trivia that there is a VW Beetle in the picture just above the cross walk, and that they band members are walking from left to right from the readers’ perspective.  The winning team only missed one song, which was from the soundtrack of the Yellow Submarine called the March of the Blue Meanies.  There was another difficult track from one of the Beatles Anthologies albums where the band is fooling around before eventually transitioning into “Come Together”.  

To top the Beatles theme for the night, we attended the early show of Beatlemania.  They are a tribute band that we had actually seen earlier when we were cruising from Melbourne to Auckland.  At that time, the group was actually not very good.  They seemed tired, bored and very unenthusiastic.  However, it looked like they replaced two band members and have managed to find their enthusiasm again, at least for tonight’s show, which was high energy, well performed and enjoyable.  

Our clocks get turned forward an hour tonight- one less hour of sleep.  But the good news is this is the last time change we will need on the cruise because when we return to Fort Lauderdale, daylight savings will spring the clock forward as we move backward geographically, so our clocks don’t have to be adjusted for daylight savings.  

Tomorrow is a full day at sea, and our first formal night.  We will probably end up doing a lot of trivia tomorrow.