The Grand Hawaiian Adventure. A trip report with Patters, Menus, Elvis, and ...

H20Skibum you have great color and clarity in your photos. Is it the photographer, the camera or the photo enhancing that is making these pictures look so great? Is it a combo of the mentioned or is it a great camera? I am impressed with the sharpness and would like to know what type of camera the brand make and model is fine. Thank you very much for the info

I looked at the Patter you posted... but could not see where could you sign up for yuk lessons? Is it something you have to do on Day one?

H20Skibum you have great color and clarity in your photos. Is it the photographer, the camera or the photo enhancing that is making these pictures look so great? Is it a combo of the mentioned or is it a great camera? I am impressed with the sharpness and would like to know what type of camera the brand make and model is fine. Thank you very much for the info

It is definitely not the photographer. I have an old Nikon P100 which was a mega-zoom camera at the time it came out, with a 26x zoom. Some of the newer models have larger zooms now. Probably most of the photos were taken with an iPhone 6S.

I have an SD card adapter that lets me transfer photos from the SD card through the lightning adapter to my iPad Air. That way, I can see what they look like on the larger screen.

Talking about photos, my Nikon has a feature that lets you set the time zone you are shooting in. I just had to remember to set it to a new time zone each time we changed our clocks on the trip. That way, when I set the new time zones on the iPhones, the dates and times of the pictures from both would be in sync.

I may do a little cropping and realigning in the iPhone or iPad photos app, and most everything I am doing here is being done on the iPad and uploaded with the Cruise Critic app. The exception is, I am scanning the Patters, then emailing the digital files so they are on my iPad.

For some of the post processing and effects, I use an app called Stackables. It is $1.99 in the App Store, but I got it when it was free. I like the tilt shift effect I used for the photo of the Aloha tower.

So most everything I am doing here is being done on the iPad and uploaded with the Cruise Critic app. The exception, is I am scanning the Patters, then emailing the digital files so they are on my iPad.

I do have another app that I used for the menus that will get posted later. It is an app called photoscan, by google photos. It is a free app, and it works like a mini-scanner using the iPhone camera. It guides you through taking a series of photos of a document, then combines them to remove glare.

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This will be cool to read. Our first trip to Hawaii was cruise on the Solstice sailing from Honolulu, repositioning to Vancouver for the Alaska season. Next year we decided to spend a week on Oahu. We have looked at this cruise before.

Deleted post.

Embarkation day is when you typically receive a ton of paper in your cabin. Shore excursions for every port, upsell specials, and the first of the Patters will appear. Here are the beverage, and specialty dining costs that were in our cabin.

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Excellent review with wonderful photos. My wife and I have done the Hawaii cruise twice from Los Angeles. Looking forward to the rest of your review.

Hi h20skibum,

Thanks for your posts and lovely photos. We will be on the Grand for the first time in three weeks for the Alaska cruise. Two questions for you if you happen to know:

--Did any of the ship's officers say if they were staying on for the Alaska season or changing out? The CD or chef or Maitre d' in particular.

--I did not see lunch in one of the dining rooms listed in the embarkation Patter you posted. There have been several posts on the Princess board that this option is going away. Do you know if there was lunch in the MDR--should have been Da Vinci, I believe.

Glad you had a good trip and thanks again for the information!

I looked at the Patter you posted... but could not see where could you sign up for yuk lessons? Is it something you have to do on Day one?

The first lessons, as well as the hula lessons start on the first sea day. I will probably get to post that Patter tomorrow. They said there were over 60 doing the ukulele for our trip.

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This will be cool to read. Our first trip to Hawaii was cruise on the Solstice sailing from Honolulu, repositioning to Vancouver for the Alaska season. Next year we decided to spend a week on Oahu. We have looked at this cruise before.

It is always better to spend time there to give you more time to see things.

Enjoy

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Good to see the Wine Packages being advertised.

 

 

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Don't forget that you can take one bottle each aboard for consumption in your cabin. That's what we did. Our cBin steward brought wine glasses to the cabin when she saw we had some wine. We didn't even have to ask her.

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Excellent review with wonderful photos. My wife and I have done the Hawaii cruise twice from Los Angeles. Looking forward to the rest of your review.

Thanks for following. I don't think there is much difference between this one and the one out of LA.

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Hi h20skibum,

 

 

 

Thanks for your posts and lovely photos. We will be on the Grand for the first time in three weeks for the Alaska cruise. Two questions for you if you happen to know:

 

--Did any of the ship's officers say if they were staying on for the Alaska season or changing out? The CD or chef or Maitre d' in particular.

 

--I did not see lunch in one of the dining rooms listed in the embarkation Patter you posted. There have been several posts on the Princess board that this option is going away. Do you know if there was lunch in the MDR--should have been Da Vinci, I believe.

 

 

 

Glad you had a good trip and thanks again for the information!

I may not be much help with this one, but maybe Gimer (Stan) can answer those questions. He was on our cruise, and has done this several times before. I know he had much more interaction with the ship's officers than I did. I know there was going to be some change-over in the staff for the Alaska departures.

We didn't look at the MDR for Embarkation Day. We just chose to get something quick at the Horizon Court.

Enjoy your cruise. Hope some of the bays are thawed so you can get in.

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One of our fellow cruise critic members (MTJSR) posted a nice video from our cruise that includes the sail away under the GG Bridge. You can check it out here:

Since we were feasting on our prime rib, we missed it, but I guess you can't be everywhere.

We took in the welcome aboard show (sorry, no pics) and returned to our cabin to find our chocolates on the bed, and a reminder to set our clocks back an hour tonight.

And with that, we are on our way to the first sea day.

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loriva, Cruise Director Arron Mac came on board Grand in February and Maitre 'd Luigi Moretti reported in November. There will probably be a change over during the Alaska Cruise Season.

Yes lunch was served in the MDR.

12pm to 1:30pm. Smaller menu then

normal but very good. The beef very tender.

I was on this cruise and the one before.

From the 1st cruise a few crew members

left and more in the next few months.

Melissa leaving after next Alaska cruise.

Many more in next few months. Don't

remember when CD Arron said he was leaving.

What's nice Princess usually hires very friendly

crews.

Monday, April 24.

In what would become a morning routine, I would make my way to the International Cafe (IC) for a couple of lattes and muffins and bring them back to the cabin to enjoy on the balcony. But since it is only in the low 50's this morning, my time on the balcony is only long enough to grab a picture from there.

I purchased a coffee card which was a good deal, since we liked the large lattes that are usually $3.50. The coffee card was $35.65 with the 15% gratuity, but the lattes would have been over $60 for the 15 you can get on the card. Here is a menu with prices for the IC.

Each time you get a premium drink, your coffee card will get punched until all 15 punches are used. We also had fresh brewed coffee from here, ice tea, and hot chocolate without getting a punch. The unused punches can be carried over to a future cruise if you don't use them all, but the fresh brewed and other drinks require a card purchased for the current cruise. They will check your card. These are the restrictions listed on the card.

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The first night out of San Fransisco, our clocks needed to be set back an hour. But, as I said, we don't have wrist watches and use our Fitbit Charge HR's clock and our iPhones. Since our iPhones are on airplane mode to avoid all those nasty cell charges, we need to manually change the time on them. You can select places from the iPhone time zone menu, so for this trip we had to find the right places that would correspond to our time at sea. We would use Anchorage, Adak, and Honolulu to set the correct time.

I know, some people say they put their phones in the safe for the trip and they don't need them. Since I am using the iPhone for photos, and for the Princess@Sea function, the phone is always with me.

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Is the Princess at Sea function similar to what they have on Carnival, where you can msg people on the ship and check activity times, etc?

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Is the Princess at Sea function similar to what they have on Carnival, where you can msg people on the ship and check activity times, etc?

 

 

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Since you asked about Princess@Sea, this may be a good time to talk about it. It is a good idea, but some of the features are not ready for prime time, and the IT people need to fix some of the glitches we encountered.

With you phone or tablet in airplane mode and wifi turned on, you access Princess@Sea (PS) through the ship's free internet. From there, you can set up a user name and password. PS will have a listing of all the events for the day, and you are able to add the ones you want to attend to a calendar. It does have a messenger function to let you send messages to others onboard, but this is an area that needs work. There is no tone or vibrating ring to let you know you have received a message, so unless you are looking at the PS screen on you phone and see the message, you will miss it.

If you have paid for an internet package, PS has a link to let you log in and log out of the paid internet. There is also a link to let you check your onboard account.

You can have it list just the movies that are playing ( I think by their listing we can figure out what is playing at 6:30 here)

You can also check excursions that are open, and ones that you have booked, and even ones like this that we booked that they never charged to our account or delivered tickets, so we couldn't go on it.

You can also check some of the menus for a couple of places, but I found that the prices listed in the PS menus were not up to date with the printed menus.

Maybe it will be good if they can fix these few things, but we found it convenient to carry the schedule around on the phone instead of carrying the Patters around.

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The problem with changing the time on the Fitbit trackers is that you need to sync them with an internet connection. The Bluetooth function will update your Fitbit app with the floors, steps, miles and calories, but all the other functions need the Internet. Sleep statistics will be lost if not updated on the internet on a daily basis.

We purchased an internet package of 200 minutes with a bonus 20 minutes for $99. We planned to use it for email and texts to keep in touch back home, and we let the tracker information sync in the background.

The internet on this cruise can only be described as horrible. The last two cruises we did on RCI and Celebrity, we had their VOOM and XCelerate internet that was fast enough to stream videos and make Facetime calls. With this cruise, the internet was so spotty, it did not download a single email between San Fransisco and Lahaina in the hundred minutes we had it on for those days. It wasn't until we connected to cell service on Maui that over 800 emails came flooding in.

So unless you have some free minutes, don't waste money on an internet package. There were several areas of the ship that did not have service, so you would have to move around to find a strong signal. There were times it would not even send a text message.

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Ready to start our first sea day, here are the Patters for the day.

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Thank you so much for posting the patter. I see that if times stay the sameish.. i will be able to do the activities I am interested in with no conflict. Silly question... for the eukelali (spelling sucks) do they provide the instruments or do you need to bring one with you from home?

Thank you so much for posting the patter. I see that if times stay the sameish.. i will be able to do the activities I am interested in with no conflict. Silly question... for the eukelali (spelling sucks) do they provide the instruments or do you need to bring one with you from home?

They do have a number available for use, but I am not sure how many. I did see some who brought their own also.

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On this first sea day, after our lattes and muffins, we made our way to the fitness center.

Our morning routine is to go to the gym, and it is no different on a cruise. We usually do four miles at the gym, and get the rest of our miles moving around the ship.

The seas were very rough last night after leaving San Francisco, and they continued this first sea day. One channel on the tv shows the ships position, the height of the waves, distance traveled, and temperature. Much of this information is included in the Captain's log of the cruise that they distribute at the end of the cruise, but instead of listing wave height, they list wind force. His log shows we went from Force 5 to Force 6.

I know, what the heck is that. Although the log does not indicate what the Forces are, it is the Beaufort Scale that relates wind speed to observed conditions at sea. Force 5 winds relate to waves that are 6 to 9 feet, and Force 6 winds relate to waves that are 9 to 13 feet. These Forces are evidently the numbers you need to make it feel like you have been riding a rocking horse all night long. This is one time you don't want the force to be with you.

While showering after our workout, DW decided to meet up with that unwelcome visitor named Sea Sickness. The effects of the rocking horse had finally got to her, so as a good husband, off I go to the ship's store to get some Dramamine for her. Admiring her lovely shade of green, I say "I'm hungry. You up for a nice big breakfast?" To which she replied "Mumpf", or something similar. It was difficult to tell, with her hand covering her mouth.

So off I go without her for a hearty breakfast at the Horizon Court. This is where we would eat every morning, and we never did try any of the dining rooms for breakfast. It was just quick and easy to get it here. Most days would be the same with a made to order omelette, sausages, fruit, pancakes, and whatever else looked good.

Once breakfast was done, it was time to check in with DW to see if she was up to making it to the Meet and Greet that was scheduled this morning.

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