Vexorg

I have now put up a second Blog post describing our visit to Phillipsburg in St. Maarten, and showing off some of the, um, interesting merchandise on offer there. I'm expecting to do a second Blog post from St. Maarten shortly describing our shore excursion (the America's Cup Regatta) for the afternoon.

Ya Wanna' Buy a Watch? A Visit to St. Maarten - The Sledgehammer Version 2.0

And the next part... Kind of short, since there wasn't a whole lot going on.

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Sea Day, 3/29

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OK, I may have lied a bit earlier when I said I didn't have any trouble sleeping during the trip, although in this case, it wasn't the bed's fault. It was the sunburn from the previous day which woke me up a couple of times during the night. So I might have been a bit less than bright and cheerful when I woke up that morning, but since it was a sea day there wasn't much on the agenda anyway. I ended up spending most of the day inside to stay out of the sun for a while. After meeting a few people up on the Horizon Court for breakfast, several of us ended up in the Piazza for a game of Scrabble, which happened to coincide with the fruit carving demo that was happening at the same time.

Finishing up the Scrabble game (I think I won, but I'm not sure) ended up making me late for the Cruise Critic gathering that happened up at Adagio. around this time. I got there not long before the gathering was getting ready to end, but was still in time to meet several people, including Commodore Romano, several other bridge officers and Maitre'D Generoso (I believe from what I heard that the cruise director showed up too, but I missed her.) After the gathering broke up, it took me a bit of time to catch up to the others, but I think I found them just about in time for the afternoon Bingo session in Club Fusion.

Conveniently ignoring all the various stuff I had heard over the years about chance and the Law of Independent Trials, I somehow ended up buying in and playing, although, predictably, I lost. My aunt, on the other hand, managed to win the last round for the $400 prize for the last round (the big jackpot was for 51 numbers, I think she won in 54,) thus fulfilling both the "win at Bingo" and the "Win more than $50 in the casino" requirements on our big list (Technically it wasn't the casino, but I think we counted it anyway.) This was the first formal night, and I have a couple of bad photos of me, my brother and my cousin in our suits just before dinner, Dinner was pretty good (I believe I had the beef filet) and after that, I think we mostly hung out in Club Fusion again, and I blew another $10 on the slots.

One thing that I found to be a bit of a pet peeve during my trip was that most of the pools all seemed to close rather early in the evening, so going for a swim after dinner was rather difficult to do. I believe the aft pool was kept open until Midnight and the Neptune's Reef pool was kept open until 11 or so, but the other pools all seem to have been closed by 9. Ultimately, I would have liked to spend more time in the pools than I did, but that's ultimately a relatively minor issue. I aloso suspect most people probably wouldn't care much about this, but since I tend to be a bit of a night owl (especially running on three hours of jet lag) it would have been nice to be able to go swimming later.

Anyway, St. Maarten is coming up next, and with it I'll probably have another Blog post on the way covering most of that.

Still plenty to go here... Here's the next part.

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Princess Cays, 3/28

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Before going to bed last night, I set an alarm on my (otherwise pretty much useless) phone to go off at 8:30am this morning. It turns out to have been slightly unnecessary, as I was instead awakened by the lovely sounds of the anchor chain going down as the ship moored in its holding position at Princess Cays (as I would find out later in the week, the room I was in is almost directly below the forward mooring deck.) Since I don't think anyone would be able to sleep through that, I figured it was probably a good time to start getting ready for the day. Ultimately, I ended up having some breakfast from the International Cafe (I actually didn't get to try a lot of the stuff here, mostly because I'm not really a big dessert person) and by the I was ready to leave the ship it was 9:30, and most of the rest of the group was already off. Fortunately, my relative tardiness meant that I was able to quickly catch a tender across.

Upon arrival on shore, I made it my first goal to find the graves, the process of which I have already outlined in the Blog post linked above. As I was heading south on the beach I actually ran into my parents and brother, who had gone down the beach looking for it but didn't have adequate footwear to handle the sharp rocks, so they were headed back up the beach. All told, I think the trip down the beach to the graves and back took about an hour, after which I went looking to find the group. I met my brother shortly after this, who said that my Dad was up on the Northern part of the beach near the Sanctuary cabanas surf fishing, and gave me some money to give to him to tip the guides for this. I found my Dad and took a few pictures, and also got the location of the rest of the group, down near the food area. When all was said and done, it ended up being a fair bit of walking.

When I found the others, I retreived the snorkel gear I had brought off the ship (I packed my own, which was nice to have, but at the same time the fins took a fair bit of room in my luggage) and did a bit of snorkeling off the beach. The scenery was as nice as I remember it being, but before too long the waves started getting a bit rough and made it tough to keep water out of the snorkel. I returned to shore to grab some food (I seem to recall that the lines were fairly long) and spent a bit of time relaxing until the others headed out to the water to swim for a bit. In the meantime, my Dad, my brother and cousin had gone out on one of the Hobie Cats, which my brother reported to be a lot of fun, even if he did throw up due to motion sickness along the way. In fact, for the first couple of days on the ship he had some motion issues, but eventually they went away. For my part, I didn't have any problem with this on the trip at all. I was expecting it to happen (it did on the first couple of cruises I was on, but only for the first day or two) but it never did. Anyway, while they were off sailing I spent some time on the docks getting a couple of photos. Eventually it was starting to get close to time to be getting back to the ship, but not before I took a trip outside the compound to the local sellers and picked up a few trinkets. I did have to wait in line for the tender back to the ship for a bit, but it didn't take too long.

Upon return to the ship I went to go spend a bit of time in the Lotus Spa pool before it was time to get ready for dinner, but it was around now that it was becoming apparent that in spite of the sunscreen I had applied several times during the day, I had managed to work up a pretty good sunburn. Dinner was, once again, quite good (I think most of us ended up having the beef tenderloin) and after dinner, several of us went to the Explorer's Lounge to see Carlos Oscar, one of two comedians on the ship. Not only was his show very good, but he was also clean at the same time (something sorely lacking in many comedians these days.) After this, we ended up in Club Fusion for the trivia and the Karaoke with the band. Hacving already committed karaoke once on this cruise, I figured that a second round wouldn't hurt, and went up on stage once again to sing No Sugar Tonight (originally by the Guess Who) with the band.

The rest of the evening was spent wandering above decks for a bit (after spending a Winter alternating between being cooped up inside and walking to and from work in all sorts of lovely wind and rain, it was great being able to spend some time outdoors in shorts and sandals for a chance) and eating second dinner before calling it a night fairly late. It turned out I didn't sleep particularly well on this evening, mostly due to the sunburn. Fortunately, the next day was a sea day and a bit of time to recuperate.

I'll be continuing with the review here in the next day or two, but in the meantime, here's a post I made on my Blog this evening detailing a visit to the graves on Princess Cays:

Wandering off the Beaten Path at Princess Cays - The Sledgehammer Version 2.0

And continuing on...

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Embarkation Day, 3/27

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I think most people (at least in my room) were up by 7 or so on this morning, dealing with whatever last-minute details they needed to sort out before boarding the ship. My aunt had to make an early trip out to MIA this morning to pick up several more people who were arriving on a nonstop redeye from Seattle. We all got together and had breakfast in the hotel lobby (again, pretty much the same thing you'll find in just about any other Marriott,) and then after breakfast a few people took a trip to a nearby Target to pick up one or two more items before boarding. After that, we returned to the hotel to work out the dilemma of getting everyone and their stuff into the vans. Somehow it all fit, and we managed to leave for Port Everglades around 10am.

Upon arrival at the port, all of the luggage and most of the people were unloaded, but after unloading everything the vans still needed to be returned, and since I figured there was going to be some time before boarding started anyway, I just went with my parents to go return the van at the airport. We filled the van at the Texaco near the port (I should note that later in the trip after disembarkation I had to fill a different van at this location before returning it, and the gas purchase so far from home triggered a fraud warning on my debit card, which I had to call and clear up with the bank. Based on stuff I read here, it sounds like this is not too uncommon, I just forgot to warn the bank I was traveling before I left.) Anyway, after this we returned to the airport, returned the two vans, and took a taxi back to Port Everglades, as apparently Avis no longer offers a shuttle to the port. Since I was with my parents I was able to go into the Platinum check in area, and we also found my brother and brought him over to this area since we needed to make a change to his shipboard account before boarding. By the time we got back to the port and through security, it took about another 15-20 minutes in the waiting area before boarding began. It was shortly before Noon when we boarded the ship.

As this was my brother's first time on one of these ships I gave him a quick explanation of where things were as we went down to our room on Plaza deck and dropped off the things we carried aboard. After doing this, I made a stop at the Purser's desk to get on the list for the Ultimate Ship Tour (there were already four people on the list when I got there) and headed up to the Lido deck to meet my parents over by the Pizzeria, where the first order of business was, oddly enough, eating Anchovy pizza. To explain this (and a number of other items you'll see on the trip report) one of the things that our group had set up for the cruise was a so-called "Amazing Race," which wasn't so much a race as it was a big "To Do" list for the cruise with roughly 100 items on it to be done by groups of 2-3 people either on the ship or on shore, with point values assigned to each one. A few examples of the items on the list:

• Be part of a crew on a sailboat (10 points per person, more details on this one later)
  
• Write your name and the date in the sand on a Caribbean beach. Don't forget to take a picture (10 points per team)
  
• Go to the Princess Juliana Airport on St Maarten and enjoy the jet blast. Be sure to take pictures. (20 points per person. Some people actually got some really cool pictures/video of an Air France jet landing, but I wasn't with them. Perhaps next time...)
  
• Proudly sport your "I won at Bingo" sticker (15 points per winner)
  
• Make it through the whole cruise without getting sunburned (10 points per person, not sure anyone managed this one.)
  
• A picture of 3 complete strangers doing see no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil (10 points per team)
  
• Find an obviously fake "designer" handbag or an obviously fake "Rolex" watch (5 points per team, more on this one later too.)
  
• Participate in the Newlywed game and give "the" answer (1,000 points per team. I'm not going to elaborate on this one since this is a family board, but unsurprisingly, there were no takers.)
  

Ultimately, I don't think anyone really bothered keeping track of who "won" the game, but several of the groups got quite a few of these. If there's interest I might even post the whole list. Anyway, with the anchovy pizza out of the way (I let my brother take care of that one), we ended up meeting up with the others at the Horizon Court, Naturally, this was where they were selling the drink cards, and it was here that I found out about the price reduction on the UKP sticker from $9 a day to $7 a day, which I had not previously seen reported on CC. I hadn't planned on getting one, but with the price reduction it was a lot more reasonable than it was before, so I went ahead and got it. In the end, I think I probably would have still spent less by purchasing drinks ala carte (I don't drink alcohol, and nobody else in the group I was with does either) but the convenience was nice.

After lunch, I spent the next couple of hours wandering around the ship (having been on the Star Princess a couple of times before I knew the basic layout of things already, but I just wanted to make sure I knew what was where) until the time for the muster drill arrived. If I recall from my first couple of cruises, on the Star Princess the Plaza deck's muster station was in the main theater, but oddly enough, on the Ruby the Plaza deck seems to have its muster station in the Casino (not that I'd accuse anyone of gambling with our safety or anything, but...) Following the muster drill, we all assembled on the Sun deck to find a spot on the rails for sailaway, which seems to have been a little bit late since both the Nieuw Amsterdam and the Allure of the Seas ended up going out before us. By the time we made it out of the harbor and headed out to sea, it was just about time for dinner. The larger of my two suitcases arrived before dinner so I had clothes to change into; the other one didn't arrive until later in the evening. It was around this time that I met my room steward Benjamin, who even before I met him knew that I was Mr. Lutz, and once I introduced myself, I was called by name each time I saw him. At some point during the day my brother accidentally lost his cruise card and had some trouble getting into the room until he got a replacement.

I don't recall too many of the details of dinner, but I believe I had the prime rib. My brother had the Barramundi Piccata, and says that it just may be one of the best things he's ever eaten. After dinner we all went our separate way. I understand a few people caught the show in the main theater and thought it was kind of so-so (I actually only made it to the theater once on the cruise, for part of the last night's show,) and I promptly blew $20 on a slot in the casino before going out to wander. Eventually I caught up with people at Club Fusion where karaoke was taking place. I signed up to do a song for a quick 10 points on the list (interestingly, I found that some people had trouble convincing themselves to do that one, where I have no problem with it.) After hanging out a bit longer and heading up to the Horizon Court around 10:30 for what would soon become our nightly second dinner (kind of silly to be honest, especially since most of us were still trying to sort out the first one at that point,) we headed for bed, getting ready for tomorrow's day at Princess Cays. I don't think the beds are quite as rock-hard as some of the accounts I've read here seem to suggest, but I've definitely slept on softer beds. Still, I never had any significant issues sleeping on the bed during the trip.

Here's the next part. There should be another installment covering embarkation day a little bit later tonight.

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Fort Lauderdale, 3/26:

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After my parents arrived at FLL, we went and picked up the 12-passenger van we rented (with as many people as we had in our group, an additional minivan was also rented by my aunt to make sure we would have room to get everyone and their luggage to the pier) and headed for what would be our hotel for the evening, the Residence Inn in Plantation. Not much to report on the hotel, if you've seen one Marriott you've pretty much seen them all these days We were able to check in when we got there though, so we were able to drop off all the luggage. Given my typical luck with traveling, any hotel that doesn't have something glaringly wrong with the room can be considered a victory of sorts.

We met up with some of the people in our group who had already arrived before us at the hotel pool, and after spending a bit of time catching up we went and found a Smokeybones restaurant for lunch (a BBQ place that my parents happen to like which isn't around anywhere in the Western United States. After lunch (too much food, somethng that would become a bit of an ongoing theme for the rest of the week) I had expected that we would return to the hotel, but instead we headed straight down to Fort Lauderdale for a planned trip on the Water Taxi. Unfortunately, this meant that I got caught without any camera which was in a bag I left in the hotel room, and my cell phone was also there charging) so I have no pictures of this.

We got on the Water Taxi at the stop underneath the bridge, where we could see several ships in port, including the Crown Princess, the Oasis of the Seas and a Celebrity ship I couldn't immediately identify. We ended up staying on the water taxi for what was basically an entire loop of its stops, first going to the downtown loop, then along the beach (if we had known that the beach route was going to take as long as it did we might have gotten off at an earlier stop. In particular, the ride between stops 1 and 2 can be really long without a whole lot to see.) As a result, I expected that we would get back too late to watch sailaway, but it would turn out that we arrived just in time for Crown Princess to shove off (The Oasis had already departed.)

After spending a little while watching it leave from the Water Taxi parking lot, we made a trip to the Walgreens near the port for a few items we needed to get prior to boarding, then returned back to the hotel room where the previous 36 hours of no sleep finally caught up to me and I spent several hours zonked out on the couch in the room while my parents went to go pick up my brother and cousin from the airport. Apparently they went and got some dinner along the way too, but I was too tired to care about missing dinner, and was still fairly full from lunch. By the time everyone got back, it was just about bedtime anyway. I ended up sleeping on the hide-a-bed in the room, but apparently I was tired enough for this not to be much of an issue.

Note: I am going to be posting this review in several parts over the next few days as I write it. I will also be writing a version of this for my Blog, and will post a link to it once that is ready (there is nothing commercial on my Blog, so I would assume it's OK to post.) This is the first part of the trip, covering some background and the trip to Fort Lauderdale. There will be plenty more to come later.

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Background:

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Given the fact that I have spent the vast majority of the last decade working in contract positions that generally offer little to no paid time off for any reason, most of the vacations I have taken over the past few years have been rather short ones, usually when I can manage to sneak away for a long 3 or 4 day weekend, or when I have a few days between contracts. It was during one of these between contract periods that I took my last cruise, a 7-day Eastern Caribbean itinerary on the Star Princess back in April of 2005, with stops in San Juan, St. Thomas (although the St. Thomas stop was at Havensight rather than Crown Bay,) Tortola and Princess Cays. This meant that a couple of the port calls on this trip would be ones I've been to before, but St. Maarten and Grand Turk would be new ones.

In addition to many of my previous trips being short ones, I also find that most of the time I end up planning my vacations on short notice. It's not unusual for me to plan trips less than a month before my planned departure, which doesn't leave lots of room for planning, but it does usually work out. This cruise has been an exception, as I've had it booked since early December, giving me nearly four months of planning time. Not that there was much planning to be done anyway, as I would be taking this cruise with a group of 14, and as a result would mostly be going with the flow on this trip. This included my parents (frequent cruisers on their 12th and 13th Princess cruises,) my younger brother (first-time cruiser), and a number of other members of my extended family. For my part, this was my third cruise, with the previous two both being on the Star Princess. I don't see my younger brother all that often as he lives in Utah, so it was particularly nice getting to spend some time with him, especially since it looks like there's a good chance he is going to be getting married soon. Most of the time when I go on vacation I end up traveling solo (being single will do that to you) so it was a bit odd traveling with a large group. I haven't ever tried doing a cruise solo, mostly because it costs almost as much to go solo on a cruise as it does to travel with someone. There are exceptions to this, but they seem to be rare.

I booked this cruise on an EE (unobstructed oceanview) guarantee, and although I got a cabin assignment less than two weeks before sailing, there was no upgrade, and I was assigned a cabin in the category I booked. I was in cabin P203, the second cabin from the front on the starboard side of the ship. I had been booked into this category (P222, on the opposite side) on the Star Princess in 2005 so I had some idea of what to expect. For the most part it's a fairly quiet location with relatively low motion, but any operations on the forward mooring deck or any operation of the bow thrusters will generate some noise. In particular, dropping anchor at Princess Cays was especially noisy. The only times this became an issue were on arrival at Princess Cays as noted, and on arrival at Fort Lauderdale on disembarkation day (in which case I probably needed to be getting up anyway, grumblegrumble.)

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Travel and Arrival, 3/25-26:

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As I noted above, being in a group does tend to make for a different vacation experience than I'd normally plan on, and in this case, there was a fair bit of logistics involved in getting everyone to where they needed to be. Between the 14 of us on this trip, I think we had six different sets of flights from several different airports to both FLL and MIA, with connections all over the place, with completely different sets of flights on the return trip. Most of us would be arriving in Fort Lauderdale a day early, and flying out the Monday after disembarkation. For my part, I was flying a Friday night redeye on Virgin America from Seattle to Fort Lauderdale with a connection though San Francisco.

The morning before the flight I ran into a snag with the airline when I tried to check my bag in. Somehow, my flight had been booked as two separate trips rather than as a connecting flight, and as a result the web check-in tried to charge me twice to check a bag. A call to a Virgin America customer service rep got me nowhere, as I was informed that not only was there nothing that could be done about this, but that in order to get my bag to Fort Lauderdale I would have to go claim it at SFO, check it in again, and go back through security to get back to the gate. This was obviously ridiculous, so I did what any aggrieved nerd would do in this situation: Complained on Twitter.

This actually prompted a rather quick response and resolution of the issue by a VA rep on Twitter, although I quickly learned that trying to write a legible complaint letter in 140 characters or less is a lot trickier than it sounds (and quite frankly, it sounds pretty tricky in the first place.) In the end, the whole thing ended up being irrelvant anyway, as it turned out my parents had their own set of airline issues, although as a result of this they were able to check two bags each for free, so they ended up taking my checked bag with them, and I was able to get the checked bag fee for my flight credited for future use. Since I would be meeting them at FLL anyway, this worked out well.

For the most part, once the bag-related drama was resolved, the flights were mostly uneventful. I grabbed an airport shuttle from a hotel near my apartment (which ended up being an Escalade, something that sounds a lot more luxurious than it actually was) and made it to the airport with plenty of time. There was roughly an hour delay on the SEA-SFO flight, but this wasn't a big deal as I was going to end up with a 3-hour layover at SFO anyway, so I would have plenty of time to catch my connection (and given the fact that the International terminal at SFO seems to be the second most boring airport terminal I've been at in a while, that's probably a good thing, although the return trip was going to have a 4 1/2 hour layover here as well.) Unfortunately, the carbon offset vending machine in the terminal seemed not to be working properly, so I was never able to figure out exactly how guilty I was supposed to be for taking this trip, so I had to spend the time browsing the surprisingly comprehensive display of Barack Obama merchandise being offered in the gift shop. Not sure exactly what that has to do with San Francisco, but I guess someone there is buying the stuff.

This was the first time I have flown on Virgin America, and I do have to say that their planes seem to be a lot nicer than the creaky old MD-80s I seem to end up on for most of the flights I take. The whole Red seatback entertainment system seems like it's already showing its age only a couple of years after it was introduced, but it's still better than starting at the blank back of an empty seat and thumbing through the SkyMall catalog for the bazillionth time. Even so, all the fancy gadgetry and WiFi in the world doesn't really do much of anything to make a six-hour coast to coast flight any shorter. In the past, I've found it pretty much impossible to sleep on an airplane, and this trip was no exception, which made sure I would be nice and loopy for the upcoming day in Fort Lauderdale.

I made it into Fort Lauderdale as scheduled around 8:05am, which would leave me a couple of hours to kill before my parents would arrive on a different flight in a different terminal at 10. I made a halfhearted effort to find a corner somewhere and try to rest for a bit, but FLL was pretty much a madhouse at the time with passengers for at least four ships arriving and departing all at once. After chilling out in the terminal for a while, I headed over to the other terminal where my parents would be arriving, and met them shortly afterward.

Just a quick note to report that I was able to find the graves on my Princess Cays stop a few days ago. Still on the ship, so I will report more when I get back.

I have a relatively small animation art collection, and On the last cruise I was on I bought a relatively inexpensive Disney sericel from the art auction on the ship. It's actually on the wall right next to me here, and has been joined by several other pieces (in particular, I've been picking up a number of character sketches on visits to the Disney parks, they're reasonably inexpensive and hand-drawn.) All things considered I probably could have gotten it cheaper on land, but I don't pretend that it's got much in the way of collector value, but it still looks nice.