The Adventure Begins

Thursday, October 17, 2024

The Coral Princess has spent the last three weeks in dry-dock in Singapore. Today she will return to service with around 1970 passengers and 900 crew members.

Boarding our ship, scheduled for this morning, has been delayed until late afternoon to allow food and other cargo to be loaded. Good. We will have time to move slowly today. After one final run to a drugstore, we returned to our hotel and packed our bags. While packing we tried to predict what we might want as soon as we board, in case our luggage is not delivered to our room before dinner. In addition to my electronics, I packed one nice casual outfit in my carry-on. That turned out to be the right move, as our luggage was indeed slow to arrive in our room. What a relief to know that we won’t have to worry about our luggage for quite a while after today.

We were invited to hang out in the executive lounge while we waited until boarding time. We really loved our stay at the Conrad Centennial. They took such good care of us. 

Boarding was relatively painless. The terminal was not crowded at all. Our room was ready for us and we found lots of paper there to go through: changes to tours, changes to ports, welcome letter, port schedule, list of daily specials in the buffet, invitations, and a gift from Debbie, our wonderful travel agent.

We ate dinner at Sabatini’s. It’s the Italian specialty restaurant onboard. It wasn’t very busy. We appreciated the quiet and the good service.

Dessert: A light, fresh zabaglione

We sailed away during dinner.

Goodbye, Singapore

Friday, October 18, 2024

Our first full day was a sea day. We love the sea days. They are so relaxing.

Some of the passengers participated in an online discussion group prior to the cruise through a website called “Cruise Critic.” There was a meeting for the Cruise Critic folks this morning and a number of the senior officers attended. After they introduced themselves and explained their duties, we had a Q & A. There was a lot of interest in the dry-dock. This was not a routine dry-dock and it was longer than most. We learned that the purpose of the dry-dock was to modify the ship to comply with the ADA - Americans with Disabilities Act. I was amazed at thescope of the project. They upgraded several cabins - made the entrances wider, upgraded the bathrooms for wheelchair access, added doorbells and automatic doors, etc. Changes were also made in the public areas. Wheelchair lifts were added in the theater, the gangway, and the pool. The bars were even modified for better wheelchair access.

Tonight was “Formal Night.” Nobody (or very few people) get dressed up on formal nights these days. But it is nice when people make an effort to look nice.  People were less dressed up than we normally see in the Caribbean. Since this cruise involved much longer flights than usual, people tended to bring less in the way of dressy clothing. However, Princess tried to make it nice with a champagne welcome aboard event, a nicer dinner menu, and a production show. The show was called Spectacular, and it was one we had not seen before. It was ok, but not especially spectacular.

Shabbat shalom!

Today’s fabric is bamboo woven upholstery fabric in coral, from FabricGuru.com. In recent years, technologies have been developed that allow bamboo fiber to be used for a wide range of textile applications (Thank you, Wikipedia). Bamboo fabric is soft and absorbent. It is claimed to be eco-friendly, though there is some controversy about this.