Friday, November 14, 2008

Cruise Day! Yippee - Grand Princess 14 night Mediterranean cruise

We boarded Grand Princess on the 10th of November. I was dreading the boarding since our experience boarding Pacific Star in Brisbane. There we lined up for 3 hours in the hot sun dragging our luggage all the way.

On this day we had our driver from RomeCabs collect us at 1100 to go to Civitavecchia, Rome's port. It takes about one hour to get there so we thought this would be good since boarding commenced at 1200. The brochure said, board after 1300 for a faster check in.
Anyway we go there at 1230 and as we got out of the car, a port worker took our luggage straight to the ship, we did not see it again until it arrived in our mini suite later that day. We then went to check in. We lined up for no longer than 20 minutes, got our cruise cards, and were on board in 30 minutes flat. How great was that! It does not have to be complicated, maybe the Brisbane port should take some hints from these guys.

Grand Princess is truly a grand ship. Built 10 years ago it was Princess' flagship and still is. It is 109000 gross tonnes and is like a massive floating palace. You can hardly believe you are on a ship. Every space looks huge and although there are near 4000 people on board including crew, you could never tell.


Above the Grand Atrium

Below are shots of our mini suite


Next post, more on Grand Princess - public areas etc

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