20241219 Thursday & Friday, December 19-20, 2024. Headed to the Caribbean for Christmas 2024
This Christmas we will be cruising on the Enchanted Princess in the Caribbean with our sons John and Price. Ciara and her fiancé Tom are in the Mediterranean on a cruise from Athens to Istanbul on the Viking Star. That was our first Viking Ocean cruise ship. We had taken her from Miami to Los Angeles via Cuba and the Panama Canal while Cuba was still open to US tourists.
Janet, Ben and Price all chose to drive down to the airport rather than take the shuttle. For shorter trip durations, it ends up being about the same price but more with a lot less waiting around since the shuttle only runs every two hours.
The weather earlier in the day was nice enough that we could all get in a little exercise before spending hours cooped up in a plane. Price went for a 6 mile run while Ben and Janet did 3 miles of trails.
We made a lunch stop at Dairy Queen and a quick stop at Costco on the way down so that Ben could buy a replacement for his Sonicare toothbrush which decided to die just in time for the trip. We also made a gas and quick gamble stop at the Angel of the Winds Casino where Janet plays penny slots and came out 75 cents ahead. As we continued south, the weather turned bad with heavy rains. Traffic heading out of Seattle was at a standstill in the northbound lanes as far as Marysville. The southbound traffic jammed up at Northgate. We pulled off had had dinner at Chiang’s Gourmet to let some of the peak rush hour traffic play out.
After dinner, traffic southbound through downtown was still pretty heavy, but it was moving consistently, if slowly, and not stop and start. We got to the off airport parking lot at 7pm. There fortunately was plenty of parking available at this time. Next week, closer to Christmas, the lot will be completely full. It took 15 minutes to get the shuttle back to the airport.
Janet and Ben each got to check one bag for free. We were all flying Premium Economy, but Price didn’t get a free bag. It took a while to figure out that Ben and Janet had gotten a Delta Skymiles American Express credit card sometime in the last year, but we had never actually used that card. We had forgotten all about it. But it was nice to get free checked bags. We’ll just have to remember to cancel the card before it renews with a $150 annual fee. It did save us $140 on baggage fees this trip, although if we were flying business, the bags would have been free anyway.
We got our bags tagged and dropped them off when we discovered that Janet’s boarding pass was not TSA Pre-Check approved. We showed the agent Janet’s NEXUS card which has the TSA Known traveller number printed on it and she discovered that Janet’s birthday was entered incorrectly on her ticket. After correcting the birthdate, the agent still wasn’t able to get the TSA Pre-Check added. We thought we could show the Known Traveller number at the TSA Pre-Check screening line, but they rejected Janet and sent her on a wild goose chase to go through general screening. It only took her 15 minutes longer to get though general screening. We then went to a Delta Airlines agent to investigate the problem and ultimately discovered that the other agent had entered Janet’s NEXUS number and not the TSA Known Traveller number. Once that was sorted, we were able to get her boarding pass reissued with TSA Pre-Check. We may not need it for the rest of this trip, but we certainly don’t want to go through this trouble on our return trip. We did manage to all get to the boarding gate by 8:15, or not quite 2 hours before the boarding gate opened.
There was some sort of security breach at the airport which trapped our flight crew outside the secure zone for quite some time. This delayed our embarkation and departure by about 45 minutes.
We were in an Airbus A321 in row 12. This is a bulkhead row immediately behind the toilet separating the first class from the premium economy zones. On the plus side was good leg room and nobody reclining their seats into our personal space. It also made it extremely convenient to tell when the bathroom was available and super easy to get to. On the negative was there was no storage below the seats in front of us so our bags all had to go into the overhead bin. We were able to check all our carry on bags for free, so all we had were our backpacks.
Since the flight departed after 11:20PM, there was no real meal service, although a flight attendant did come through the cabin twice during the flight offering bagged snacks like a tiny bag of chips or Biskoff cookies, and a drink service which did include complimentary alcoholic beverages. Ben stayed up a bit and watched Come Fly Me to the Moon, a movie with Scarlett Johanson, Tatum Channing and Woody Harrelson that was a humorous mixup of historical fiction, science fiction and conspiracy theory. Although we had good legroom, the seats only reclined a few degrees and it was not easy to sleep.
The sun was just starting to light up the sky in Atlanta at 6:15AM EST when we touched down. That was 3:15AM PST, so we were pretty groggy. The plane arrived late, so we had to scramble a bit to make it to our Atlanta to Fort Lauderdale flight connection, but we ultimately made it with about a half hour before boarding began. Price bought some Sausage McGriddles at the McDonalds which was just 2 gates from our departure gate. Those are pretty tasty sandwiches and a marvel in food technology.
Fort Lauderdale airport was a chaotic scene. There were 6 ships in port, and yesterday there were 10. Our Princess airport to ship transfer was easy enough, although the agent was clearly a bit frazzled. The coach used for the transfer wasn’t entirely full so we could spread out a little in the very back of the bus.
We rendezvoused with John in the baggage claim and had all arrived about the same time. All our luggage made it to the ship without drama. Ben had Air Tags in all our luggage, but for some unknown reason, the FindMy app seemed to think they were still at home all day yesterday. But when the app was fired up today, it did show the bags to be with us in Fort Lauderdale.
The check in process was pretty smooth with no significant waiting periods. For some reason, Janet had to have her profile picture retaken and her passport rescanned. We were on board the ship quickly.
The Enchanted Princess is a sister ship to the Regal and Royal Princess, both of whom we have sailed on multiple times. The Enchanted is newer and some of the venues have been updated. The most notable was Princess Live, which now was a much more open lounge with tiered seating with tables and chairs. This seems a much more useful layout than the TV Studio vibe on the Regal and Royal Princess ships.
We felt like jet lagged zombies as we hit the buffet and then went thorough the muster procedure which requires viewing a safety video, physically checking in at your muster station and then listening to the Captain’s announcement which includes the sounding of the ship’s general alarm for exercise.
By then our luggage had all been delivered and the staterooms were all ready for occupancy. We unpacked and took naps.
After naps, we watched the ship push off and sail out of Fort Lauderdale. There was a noticeable haze in the air which was probably smog.
We were able to easily get a table for 4 in the Capri Dining room (deck 6 midship) which is primarily geared towards walk in dining. We skipped dessert so that we could make the 6:30PM “I’ll Take Trivia for 100” game show. While we made a decent showing, we didn’t win.
We did stick around for the next event, which was “Couch Potato” Trivia. This was in a different format from any prior TV trivia we have done. They had sections with 5 questions from each of 6 decades. Each was a different category including screen shots, theme songs, catch phrases, plot lines, street addresses, and a jump the shark which was pretty much a variant of plot twists from various shows. We did manage to win that trivia and scored Enchanted Princess coasters.
Following trivia, we had premium desserts at the Gelateria which included fancy sundaes, fancy cake slices and also just scoops of their gelatos.
We watched their Christmas Tree lighting ceremony as we ate our desserts, and then finished the evening with a magic show by Nathan Coe Marsh. He had been featured on the Penn and Teller series "Fool Us". His act featured a blend of sleight of hand tricks and mentalist tricks which always leave one wondering “how did he do that”? It was a decent show, although between jet lag, cocktails and wine at dinner, we were having a hard time making through the show without periodically resting our eye lids. Fortunately, there were a lot of younger audience members who kept the energy level up in the room. There are a lot of Floridians on the cruise who had no jet lag issues.
Tomorrow, the ship arrives at Princess Cay, which is a private beach in the Bahamas. We will take tenders ashore. Janet and Ben have been there a few times before, but this is John and Price’s first time, so while Janet and Ben contemplated staying on the ship and making it a poolside day, we will all go ashore together.
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