Day 08 - Santa Cruz de Tenerife
Ship: Princess Cruises’ Sun Princess
Itinerary: 16-Night Transatlantic - Southampton to Fort Lauderdale
Rehearsal
Today, Sun Princess is docked in Santa Cruz de Tenerife. As I am enjoying my morning coffee at Coffee Currents on Deck 7 midship, my blogging is interrupted with a rehearsal by the ship’s cast of singers and dancers in The Piazza.
We disembark Sun Princess on Deck 4 this morning through The Landing, which is the ship’s tender boarding area and disembarkation area.
Santa Cruz de Tenerife is a port city on the island of Tenerife, in Spain’s Canary Islands. Well-preserved buildings in its old town include the colonial Church of the Immaculate Conception. The 1700s Palacio de Carta has baroque and neoclassical features. In the Old Civil Hospital, the Museum of Nature and Man has interactive displays on the islands. The city has numerous squares, including the central Plaza de España.
Santa Cruz has placed signs everywhere to direct cruise travelers to the City Center, so it is impossible to get lost here.
While walking up one of the main pedestrian streets lined with shops and cafes, we stumbled onto a little sidewalk bistro that was offering one of our favorite tapas.
Local Bistro
We ordered two small glasses of local beer and an order of the Pimientos de Padrones. These are small peppers that are quickly fried in olive until blistered then served with sea salt. We remembered the first time we had these in Barcelona as part of a Segway tour and we have been fans ever since. Sometimes I can find these peppers at Whole Foods and I make these at home as a snack.
Padron Peppers
We paid our bill at the restaurant and started walking down the street again and discussing how inexpensive the Padrones and beer had been. Our total bill was only 9€. We thought “there has to be a mistake”, you cannot get two beers and a tapas for 9 Euro! We walked back to the restaurant, found our waitress and asked her to confirm that we paid the correct amount. She said YES, that we had paid the correct amount. What a deal!
Once back onboard Sun Princess, I head down to Princess Live for Trivia with Niamh (pronounced Neev) while Rickee gets ready for our dinner tonight at Sabatini’s. The trivia was very difficult, at least for me playing by myself.
Tonight, we had reservations at Sabatini’s and, honestly, we were a little apprehensive because we have had mixed experiences at Sabatini’s in the past. We had a very good meal at Sabatini’s on Island Princess years ago, and a very average experience more recently on Discovery Princess.
When we arrived at 6:10, the restaurant was only about half full and we were seated at a beautiful table for four. The extra plates were cleared and our waiter came to take our order.
Rickee ordered a Cello Drop ($14) from the list of Italian Cocktails. This was sort of like a Lemon Drop Martini, but on ice. It was her favorite drink of the cruise so far and it was covered by our Premier Package!
Cello Drop
Dinner at Sabatini’s includes a soup or salad course, an Antipasti course, a pasta course and a main course, and then, of course, dessert. I asked if I could order two antipasti instead of a salad and antipasti, which our waiter confirmed was fine.
I will go through our meal course-by-course in an upcoming video, but everything we had was excellent. It was the best meal of the cruise so far. Rickee loved that the Beef Carpaccio antipasti (below) was a manageable portion.
Beef Carpaccio
My lamb chop main course (below) was as good as any lamb I have ever had on a cruise, or anywhere for that matter. And yes, I did pick up the bones to gnaw off the last few bites of lamb!
Lamb Chops
There is no production show tonight, but tomorrow we plan to catch an encore matinee of the show performed night before last. So far, since the theater is so small and fills up an hour before the production shows, Princess has graciously presented an encore performance on the next sea day, which will be tomorrow as we begin crossing the Atlantic ocean.
