My first pictures from the trip are now posted. I’ve put up the pictures from Barcelona, Spain. Click on the "pictures!" link on the right to see the pictures index.

We disembarked from the Grand Princess on Saturday, October 29, 2005 in Venice, Italy. We had come to the end of another very enjoyable cruise. Princess Cruise Lines is new to us as our four previous ocean cruises have been on Holland America. I’ve found a pretty good review of the Grand Princess which describes the ship well.

The next several posts will be about different ports of call during the cruise. Before that, however, here are some general thoughts about the cruise and the itinerary.

• This was a fairly long ocean cruise — twelve days. Two days were sea days, that is, the ship sailed all through the day towards the next port of call. The other nine days were spent in different ports of call. We did a huge amount of walking on the trip and by the end of the cruise we were right ready to spend some downtime. We visited four ports (Marseille, Livorno, and Civitavechia, and Naples), followed by a sea day, three more ports (Mykonos, Istanbul, Kusadasi) followed by a sea day, followed by Venice. That meant four days in a row with lots of walking, a day of rest, and then three days in a row with lots of walking.
• The cruise was far different than any of the Alaskan or Caribbean cruises we’ve taken in the past. It wasn’t as intensive as the river cruise we took with Viking River Cruises last October. It was very educational and very interesting.
• On sea days the ship offered computer classes on a variety of subjects. The link goes to the Computers@Sea website and the job description for the computer instructor. Nina and I both took six classes on board on Adobe Photoshop Elements. The instructor was excellent and both of us learned a lot about the program. I don’t know if similar programs are offered on other cruise lines, but this was a real bonus.
• October was a good time to make this cruise. I’d think that anytime from mid-September through mid-October would be good. The temperatures were very mild, upper 60’s and low 70’s. The humidity was high (above 90% every day), so this was plenty warm. I can’t imagine climbing up to the Acropolis in 100+° temperatures with 90+% humidity, not to mention all the crowds! We were there during the off season and were quite impressed even then with the number of tourists….
• The direction we took is the better trip as each stop was better in some way than the previous stop. I think starting in Venice and ending in Barcelona would have resulted in some disappointments towards the end of the trip. So, when you go, start in the western Mediterranean and go eastward.
• This was the largest cruise ship we’ve been on, and the cruise was booked full, meaning we had about 2,600 fellow passengers. Most of the time the sheer number of people on the boat was not noticeable — until time to go up or down the elevators. The worst was during embarkation or disembarkation in the various ports of call. The elevator system on the Grand Princess leaves a lot to be desired. Perhaps the most annoying attribute of the elevators was that the elevator call button light outside the elevator turned off when the doors started to close on an elevator. If anyone pushed the elevator call button before the elevator actually started to move, the doors would open. Sometimes we’d be on a crowded elevator with lots of people waiting to get on an elevator and the doors would open and close five or six times before we could actually get underway. Very annoying.
• There were lots of other elevator features that became annoying before the cruise was over. There just simply weren’t enough elevators for all the people on the ship. I don’t think I want to cruise on a ship with this many people again.
• Internet access on the ship was abysmal. In some ways it was good that the blog website was down during the trip as the poor access on the ship would have made posting to the website very painful. Princess needs to make some significant upgrades to this capability. The wireless access was so painful as to be unuseable most of the time. There were no tables or desks in the area where the wireless signal was available, only easy chairs where manipulating the computer while seated was very difficult. For that reason alone I would not do another Princess cruise!
• There were a number of things on the ship that we did like. There were four pools on the ship with two reserved for adults only. Two hot tubs were also adults only (and were PLENTY hot). The movies under the stars with the huge LCD screen was fun — the nights were a bit too cold; this could be great summertime activity. The shopping on board was good, particularly for sundry items. The casino was tucked away and out of sight unless you really wanted to go there. There were four venues for shows each evening which meant we could find some interesting entertainment when we wanted to. The embarkation process was smooth and very fast — Holland America could definitely learn from this process!!
• We probably should have done more research on the Internet about the tours we signed up for. The Athens tour we selected included almost three hours of sitting on the bus going to and from the Temple of Poseidon on the southern tip of the island. We could have taken a different tour that would have spent a little more time in the center of Athens. The tour descriptions sound wonderful, but often aren’t exactly what they’re hyped to be in the cruise brochures.

We had a great time. We were with some good friends and we really enjoyed their company. At the beginning of the cruise Nina remarked that the next twelve days will probably just fly by. And so they did. No sooner had the cruise started than it was over. Stay tuned for detailed information about our adventures at each port of call.