Southampton, UK

Good news, all!  Despite not blogging about it yesterday, we did manage to make it from London to our cruise ship, with basically no problems at all.  We had such faith in ourselves leading in to that journey, that we opted to sleep in and get a nice breakfast at one of the cafes near our hotel, and our faith (mostly in the state of public transportation) was totally justified.  From London Paddington, we took a 25-minute ride to Reading, then switched trains to get on a 40-something minute train to Southampton.  From there, it was a quick 6 GBP cab ride, and we were at the cruise terminal.

Now, as you may have guessed, from my description of our travel philosophy, I didn’t opt to print out luggage tags ahead of time (for some reason, I thought that Princess would email those to us, and when they didn’t, I assumed that it wouldn’t be a big deal).  I also neglected to print out any of our cruise confirmations or ticketing information (in retrospect, that would probably have been an okay thing to have done).  So, as you might imagine, I had a last-minute worry or two during our brief cab ride to the terminal.

But, my key takeaway was that I shouldn’t have even spent those 6 minutes worrying about it, because Princess has the embarkation process down pat, especially if you’ve already hooked your credit card to your account (which, I had done, because it’s the next screen after they take your passport information when you book the cruise).  We met a nice gentleman who wrote out luggage tags for us, went upstairs to wait in line for a few minutes, checked in next to a woman from Durham NC, and went through security, all in approximately 15 minutes.  Despite us showing up around an hour earlier than our assigned check-in time, our cabin was ready to go, and we had an hour and a half to kill before our muster safety drill.  So, check plus to Princess for embarkation :)

Our muster station was in the casino, and weirdly not very packed.  This ship doesn’t feel totally full, which is nice (I have yet to really get a feel for how many people are on board, but so far, there seems to be plenty of space.  On a second weird note, the muster drill was set to music, and that was… um… new and interesting (and also kind of awful).  Now we know.

Post-muster, we read/napped/walked around/read/drank a martini for a few hours.  Troy did discover that we have earned cruise “status” – we’re in the gold captain’s circle, which signifies that we have taken at least one (1) cruise with Princess before.  It entitles us to gold stateroom keys and a gold pin.  I believe that ends the associated “perks.”

Dinner in the dining room was pleasant – we sat with a father/daughter/son-in-law trio, and two other couples cruising together.  Everyone else was from the UK, and everyone had cruised before.  The food was good overall – I had enriched broth soup with tortellini, a cheese and leek tart, and crème brule, while Troy had a salad, prime rib, and a sundae.  Safe to say, we’ll be doing the dining room a fair bit.  Evening activities included checking out a few of the live bands/entertainers, one of which we enjoyed pretty well (the other was doing loud ABBA hits, and I guess it wasn’t quite what we were feeling last night).

Sunday is our first of two days at sea!  Just think of all the trivia :)