January 4 –Fort Lauderdale

nice place to blog

Weather – 25º, sunny

Steps – 13,074 (4,000 was from the Silent Disco!!)

Humidity – 60%

I was happy when I woke up early this

getting there!

morning. I got a muffin and cappuccinos from the hotel’s café for our balcony watching the boats go by. The hotel (as it seems all hotels these days do) charges a ‘resort’ fee even if the hotel isn’t at all a resort. This one is resort-ish, but sheesh…just roll it into the nightly rate. These fees usually cover Wi-Fi, the gym, parking, the pool/towels, and other amenities. Often, they come with a portion given back as credit to use at the hotel. This hotel’s fee was $30, with 20 of that back as credit…that’s what we used for

and closer

coffees.

 

Our morning task was to attach our Princess luggage tags to our large suitcases. Regent sends adhesive luggage tags (like airline ones) prior to the cruise, Princess ones require printing out at home and then stapling. We weren’t about to bring a stapler and assumed we’d borrow from the hotel. That’s what worked. Plus, Chris fashioned our

door just opens!

Westjet tags to pierce through the Princess tags for some extra insurance. Regular Princess cruisers have some kind of plastic pouches from Amazon – depending one this cruise, maybe we’ll become regular Princess cruisers and will get buy the pouches, or…Chris will just continue to MacGyver ours.

 

Yesterday’s port recon gave us confidence about walking to the port. It was super easy! From the time we left our room to being onboard the ship was about 30 min – NICE!

 

first look

We are in the “Sanctuary Collection” section of the boat. This is what Princess calls their ship-within-a-ship-section. Ship-within-a-ship is what mainstream cruise lines call their Regent-like spaces. One perk of this was being able to bypass the main line to get onto the ship – I can live with that.

bed room

 

The first main difference I notice between Regent and Princess is that Princess is more ‘party’. The workers are very upbeat and energetic – Regent staff is great, but not as ‘spirited’.

Oh yeah, and Princess has ‘the medallion’. Basically, a device that is the size and shape of an Apple air tag that serves as your room card, but significantly more. As we approach our room it recognizes us and the door automatically unlocks! As we approach a bar, the bar tender sees us on a screen etc…pretty slick!

 

bathroom

Once on the ship, we found our muster point and then a drink. There is no welcome champagne here…unless you have a drinks package (like we have) you pay as you go for drinks. We found a spot to sit and Chris got us welcome margaritas.

 

This ship is BIG. There are 4,300ish people onboard so that many people need space. There are a lot more floors than Regent too…not sure how much stair climbing we’ll do. Our room is on 17, our Sanctuary restaurant is on 8…that alone is a lot of floors!

on 1 of our TVs

 

We had lunch at the Sanctuary Collection restaurant and then it was time to get to the room. Lunch was good…much simpler than Regent…in a good way. I had a salmon cobb salad and veg spring rolls – it was great. I’d be happy to have that all week!

 

Our room is BIG. We have a sitting area, a bedroom, a separate bath and shower AND a toilet in a water closet. It will be nice to spread out. The balcony is pretty big too.

 

sailaway blimp

After unpacking we headed to the pool deck for the sail-away party…this was just slightly different from Regent. LOUD music and packed – a very upbeat vibe. Princess plays The Love Boat theme on departure…fun.

 

Next on the itinerary was a nap.

We had our pre-dinner cocktail at ‘Crooners’ – ship’s jazz bar. We sat at the bar – there is no lack of drink service, but at the bar you are pretty much guaranteed not to be missed. The band was good.

I had a very thin piece

Dinner was at the same place we had lunch and the servers were the same too. There is no requirement to stay with the same servers, but it would be hard, I

imagine, to sit elsewhere. Dennis and his partner are both fun, so we are fine with the same section. We have specialty restaurant reservations for 5 of the 7 nights, so we won’t be with Dennis a lot anyway.

get used to it Dennis

We went to see some acrobats at the after-dinner show. Another perk of Sanctuary Club are reserved seats for shows – not all apparently, as there were none reserved. We found seats nonetheless…not great ones, but fine.

acrobat

The highlight of the evening was SILENT DISCO!! I’m not sure why I like it so

much, but wherever it is offered…we DO IT. 45 minutes of dancing increased our steps by 4,000 – not bad. We stayed for a bit of the band’s show and checked out the Arena where there was a DJ and a handful of people dancing, we didn’t stay. On the way back we stopped to watch a bit of the end of

shhhhh! Silent Disco

the football game, shown on the big screen.