Saturday, December 28, 2019; Los Angeles (San Pedro), Embarkation onto the Royal Princess

Saturday, December 28, 2019; Los Angeles, Embarkation onto the Royal Princess

We’re off on another cruise, but this time, we are traveling with our adult children, John, Price and Ciara.  Our “children” are all in their 20’s and we decided to give them the cruise for a Christmas gift since memories take up very little storage room in a small apartment.  Because they are all working full time, it is hard for them to get away for too long, so this is a short cruise of only 7 days, starting in Los Angeles, running down to Cabo San Lucas, Mazatlan and Puerto Vallarta.  

The demographics of this cruise are quite different from some of our more recent journeys.  The vast majority on this cruise are Americans, and most are from California.  The second largest group is Canadians, although they make up less than 5% of the Americans.  There are a smattering of people from Australia, India, the UK, and a few from another 30 or so countries around the world.  That this occurs during an American Holiday season is quite evident by the large number of children on board.  There are also a lot of young adults like our own children.  Most are with parents and many are with grandparents.  These cruises make a convenient destination for family reunions.  

First and last days of any trip are always the least pleasant or memorable because they entail a lot of fatiguing travel.  In this case, we had to leave our home at 2:30AM to arrive at Seattle Tacoma International Airport 90 minutes before our scheduled departure to clear security.  That leaves us feeling a bit like zombies for the rest of the day, even though this trip only involved a 2-1/2 hour flight to Los Angeles.  Because we were traveling as a group of 5, we drove down together and parked the car in an off-airport lot with 24hr shuttle service.  But that also means driving for over 2 hours in the wee hours of the morning, long before daybreak.  

Our flight arrived about 30 minutes late to Sea-Tac, but fortunately, we had a significant tailwind heading south, and our pilot was able to land on time, having made up the 30 minutes in the air.  It is always comforting to see the Princess representatives at the baggage claim area when we go on our cruises.  The bus transfer from LAX to the cruise ship terminal at San Pedro takes nearly an hour in light traffic.  

Princess seems to have been working hard to iron out the bugs in their Ocean Medallion system, so the check in process did go more smoothly than in the recent past. They have made the medallion scanners faster and more reliable.  We had no troubles getting onto the ship in time to have lunch in the buffet.  Our room stewards were still in the final stages of cleaning and preparing our rooms, but they were kind enough to allow us to drop off our stuff in the rooms.  

The Royal Princess is the first of the Royal Class ships, and older sister of the Regal Princess, which we sailed in the Baltic and Caribbean.  She lacks some refinements that her younger sibling has, such as the upgraded food venues on the Lido deck (no Ernesto gastropub- just the Trident Grill with hot dogs and burgers) and to our surprise, the room was not as nice as the one we had on the much older Sapphire Princess.  The Royal Princess balcony was a tiny fraction of the size of the one on the Sapphire Princess (4’ deep vs 10’ deep), so it is just barely big enough to sit two chairs and a tiny coffee table on it.  There is certainly not enough room for more than one person to try to lay out to do any sunbathing.  The furnishings are also not as up to date.  Most notably, on the Sapphire and Regal Princess, there are USB power ports in the walls and bedside lamps.  Not so on the Royal Princess.  There are only two accessible 110v grounded outlets above the desk.  Fortunately, the desk still has 3 real drawers, and the night stands each have two real drawers and a enclosed shelf.  The closet is a tiny bit smaller, but there is still plenty of storage room for all our clothes.  

Our kids have an identical room adjacent to ours.  There is a bunk that folds out of the ceiling next to the sliding glass door. This is not nearly as useful as the bunk beds that have folded down from the ceiling adjacent to the closet wall because it obstructs access to the balcony when the bunk is down.  The kids were able to crouch under it to access the balcony, but the ladder has to be removed to allow this.  The bunk will only be left down in the evening after dinner, and will get restowed into the ceiling after the room is made up, usually while we are having breakfast.  The Caribbean Princess, which we took on the British Isles cruise had a bunk that was adjacent to the closet wall and could be left down the entire cruise like a real bunk bed. 

The buffet has a terrific selection, and the food quality is excellent. We were happy to discover the fruits to be properly ripened, and the layout of the buffet is identical to the Regal Princess, with multiple Islands serving different types of foods.  

The ship does seem more crowded than what we remembered from the Caribbean or Baltic on the Regal Princess, but perhaps this cruise is simply running closer to full capacity, or the larger percentage of younger people make it seem more crowded because they are more active and move faster.  Still, there are plenty of strollers, scooters and walkers to deal with in the hallways and elevators. 

After lunch, we toured the ship from top to the Plaza deck, and from the Princess Theater to the Horizon Terrace overlooking the wake. We got in a game of crochet on the golfing green, which on this ship is a multi-purpose patch of astroturf with a variety of lawn games, in addition to putting.  

We had our mandatory muster drill and then our first sit down dinner.  The dining room is large and elegant, but for some inexplicable reason, the large pillar behind our table is illuminated an obnoxious blue color, which casts an ugly hue over the table.  We will have to see if we can be reassigned to a table further away from the blue pillars.  The featured entree was prime rib, which Ben and Price enjoyed, while everyone else sampled the other fine menu items. Nothing was a disappointment.  

Our first evening’s entertainment started with a comedian from Puerto Rico.  His act was a bit novel, but he spoke very quickly and used a lot of inner city idioms and colloquialisms and mannerisms that would seem more at home in the body of a Brooklyn gangster wannabe.  It unlike any other comic we have ever seen on a cruise ship, and he probably did appeal more to the younger elements of the audience.  

We wound up our evening with a Name that Company Logo trivia.  We scored 19/22, but the winning team had managed 21/22, so we were soundly beaten.  But it was fun and challenging.  

Our clocks move forward an hour tonight. Tomorrow is a Sea day and our first formal night.  There are so many activities to choose from that we will have to do some picking and choosing which will certainly mean there will be several trivia activities that we will be passing on because of conflicts with other things, and we will see how willing our kids are to indulge us in our trivia habits.