20251222 Monday, December 22, 2025- Day at Sea

20251222 Monday, December 22, 2025- Day at Sea

It was good to get a full night’s sleep in a real bed, but despite this, a lot of our party had a hard time getting out of bed in time for breakfast.  Most of the dining venues are listed has closing for breakfast at 8:30 am and opening for lunch at 11 am, but when we wandered through the Eatery, they were still serving breakfast fare.  

We were pleased to see Price and Ciara show up for the morning trivia.  We lost that by one point.  Every one then split up and did different things.  Ciara and Janet did a shopping show, hoping to win something in a drawing, but only managed to walk out with a Sun Princess pendant that was advertised.  John and Iram did some exercise and then a technical lecture on the ship’s systems. 

Janet and Ben had a complementary wine tasting for Elite status guests.  It was a bit disorganized and ran late because the cheese and fruit plates somehow did not show up like they were supposed to, and it also wasn’t clear if there was going to be a sommelier to guide us through the wine selections until 10 to 15 minutes after the event was supposed to start.  The sommelier ended up being difficult to understand due to a moderately heavy subcontinental Indian accent, but we still ended up pleasantly buzzed by the end.

We did meet up with John and Iram to do a Couch Potato TV trivia, which we did manage to win.  We won a string bag and Princess wine bottle stoppers.  

There was an afternoon general trivia which we did with Ciara, Tom and Sam, which we lost by a point or two.  

Everyone got changed for formal night and we did get seated together in a relatively quiet area of the dining room with a long 10 top made by combining 2 tops.  The menu for the formal night was nothing special.  No lobster and no Baked Alaska.  Halibut, beef tenderloins and Duck L’orange were the main options.  There was a bit of excitement though after the mains when we were waiting for desserts to come out.  Price made his way to the bathroom but fainted just a few feet from our table, ending up on the carpet but uninjured.  He was diaphoretic but conscious when the closest staff had picked him up and put him in a chair.  Within a few minutes, he was back to feeling OK.  It was most likely a vaso-vagal episode brought on by a combination of too much food and alcohol.  John and Ben walked Price to the bathroom, and even though we had to go up a flight of stairs, Price was fine, aside from the embarrassment of the episode.  
After dinner, Janet, Lifen and Ciara had massages in the spa while Ben, Price, John and Iram did a Queen trivia.  We did pretty well, but there was so much confusion over how the quiz was supposed to be graded that it remained unclear who had actually won, but we were in a hurry to get to the Princess Arena to try to get seats for the last Fiero production show.  

We ended up with pretty bad seats at the very top of the arena way off to stage left so we were seeing mostly the wings and backstage areas, but Princess had tried to modify the show to work in a center thrust format.  The stage lifts were situated in the very center of the round arena, and when the lift dropped down, you could see deep into the pit as the actors and stage hands scrambled with set changes.  The show was pretty good overall.  The dancers were particularly good.  At one point, the girls were all doing ballet toe dancing moves somehow blended with pole dancing.  It was a circus themed show, so anything goes.  Some of the stage effects were not ideally viewed from extreme angles from the center stage, and the audio was also a bit off.  The lead vocals were a bit mismatched  with the vocal ranges of the songs.

Price and Ben made a tour of the late night dining options after 10:30pm, which were very meager.  The poolside pizza and grill close at 9pm. Neither the Eatery nor International Cafe had any soups, and the Eatery had a strange and extremely limited selection of seemingly random items on about 6’ of steam table space.  It seems like the late night dining on this newest ship compare very poorly with older Princess ships. 

Tomorrow we arrive at Grand Cayman, our first port of call.  Unfortunately, the weather forecast is for moderately high winds, and the ship will be operating tender service, not docked shore side.  The kids had all been booked on a stingray swim excursion which ended up being cancelled due to weather.  It looks like we’ll all just be wandering around the port area for a bit.  We’ll try to do a sit down breakfast in the morning because it is not offered on most mornings, except for Sanctuary and Suite Collection guests.