Sep 23

Sep 23 Day 01 - Embarkation

Ship: Princess Cruises’ Sun Princess
Itinerary: 16-Night Transatlantic - Southampton to Fort Lauderdale

We checked out of our hotel, The Clermont, and ordered an Uber to take us and our luggage to Victoria Coach Station. Even though it is only a few blocks away, it is rainy this morning and we did not want to haul our luggage in the rain. When we arrived at Victoria Coach Station, we were greeted by “luggage grabbers” who took our large bags into the terminal and directed us to check-in at Gate 1.

Our departure was scheduled for Southampton was at 11:30am, but some bad weather in the area delayed our coach by about an hour.

The Princess transfer from London to Southampton took about two hours. When we arrived at the cruise terminal, the baggage handlers took our luggage, which would be delivered to our rooms, and we entered the terminal where we were immediately invited to check in using the Green Lane check-in. We were surprised how few people were in line. Check-in only took a few minutes and involved scanning our medallions and showing our passports. We checked in around 2:30pm.

We did stop to have an embarkation photo taken before boarding.

We were invited to board the ship and we entered on Deck 5 right at The Piazza, which is quite impressive on Sun Princess.

Finding our Cabana Mini-Suite was easy using the midship elevators.

Soon after we arrived, our room steward, Michael, greeted us and asked if there was anything he could do for us.

We decided to get the muster station check-in over with, so we walked down a few decks to our muster station, which is conveniently located at Wheelhouse Bar.

The Wheelhouse Bar is a convenient location because it was the perfect location for us to have our traditional embarkation glass of Prosecco, which is how we begin every cruise (see photo at top of page).

As we were enjoying our glasses of Prosecco, I opened the Princess app to check our dinner reservations for The Catch by Rudi this evening only to discover that our reservation had been changed to Crown Grill! What? As I scrolled through the list of reservations on my phone I could see that we had three Crown Grill reservations, even though we had only made one.

After a call to the dining reservations number, I was informed that Rudi’s was closed this evening and that The Butcher’s Block by Dario would be closed for the entire cruise! Princess had replaced both of these with reservations at Crown Grill, hence the three reservations. This was not a great start to the cruise since I was really looking forward to The Butcher’s Block experience, a unique dining experience I will now not be able to share with our readers and viewers. What a bummer.

We were able to change our Rudi’s reservation to tomorrow night, which was good. Interestingly, when we tried to book other specialty dining venues through the app, the app says that no reservations are available for any venue. More on this later.

We ended up having dinner this evening at Horizon’s Dining Room on Deck 7 aft. We were seated at a table for two after standing in line for about 10 minutes to get seated.

Dinner was honestly nothing special, pretty typical MDR fare. The tomato and red bell pepper soup (below) was served hot and was good, but the flavor resembled canned tomato soup.

It was nice that Princess does offer a shrimp cocktail on the “always available” menu. However, the shrimp were a little mushy, an indication that they have been frozen and the cocktail sauce was buried at the bottom of the serving dish under a pile of lettuce.

We also noticed that the brass handrails we were seated next to were in desperate need of polishing. I checked the brass handrails all around us and they were all in need of polishing. I am not sure why cruise lines continue to use brass instead of wood.

The always available Caesar Salad was actually pretty good.

My order of beef short ribs was cooked perfectly and fall apart tender. Rickee, however, got a piece that was very dry and tough. We did not have dessert at Horizons. Like I say, this was a pretty typical MDR experience.

After dinner, we walked up to The Dome to get in line for the 8:45 Cirque show. You have to get in line very early to get a seat in The Dome. We stood in line for 45 minutes.

The show, Art Beat, was well choreographed and is basically an acrobatic presentation. The dancers/acrobats are extremely talented and the show is very entertaining, although the music is VERY loud!