Cheapo Dad's Trip Report on the Majestic Princess (Maybe with few pictures added)...

[harryfat1]

With no miniature golf on the top deck, guess we’ll need to look around to find something to take pictures of.  Good thing we are in GB.  Would be pretty boring outside if this was in middle of the ocean with nothing to see:

 

 

 

 

We sailed right by this “dirty” glacier.  I didn’t catch the name.  Perhaps some Alaska expert can provide the name.

 

 

Edited September 19, 2022 by harryfat1

[harryfat1]

Saw the Grand Princess heading the other way as they were 3 hours ahead of us so they are done with GB for the most part as they head south to drop off their rangers in next couple of hours.

 

Here is a picture of the Grand Princess with the Glacier in the background.  Whoever sailed on her can email me and I can forward these picture to you as you can never take a picture of our own ship sailing through GB.  I hope someone took a picture of the Majestic in GB and we can exchange pictures:

 

 

 

 

 

 

[caribill]

19 minutes ago, harryfat1 said:

Putting green.  Another evidence of Princess cruise with little interest to attract families.  I can understand no water slides on their ships like many cruise ships out there trying to attract families as the water slide/water park can be loud and an eye sore. 

 

 

But it doesn’t take that much effort to try and create a mini gold area to keep the family busy for a bit.  With Princess, you have ZERO theming. They didn’t even TRY to make it appealing. I have seen older Carnival ships with more golfing pizzazz.

 

Artificial turf area with few holes is Princess definition of putting green/mini golf.

 

 

Princess used to have a better mini-golf setup, but has replaced those with the uninspiring putting green. The Princess mini-golf was not as good as what can be found on some other cruise lines such as RCI.

 

 

[harryfat1]

As it’s almost one o’clock, it was time for lunch.

 

Back to the buffet, sitting in the “light wood” area as it’s less crowded.  Today being GB Day, harder to find a window table as people have camped out by a window and watching the glaciers through the window.

 

 

 

However, the buffet area is not the best for photos if you try to take a picture through the glass, you get a blue tint and possible reflections.

 

 

 

 

Anyway, here are the food pics:

 

 

I like the curry on the ship.  Think I had some version of it daily for lunch.

 

 

Today being GB, got something white to drink to match the theme color:

 

 

[harryfat1]

20 minutes ago, caribill said:

 

Princess used to have a better mini-golf setup, but has replaced those with the uninspiring putting green. The Princess mini-golf was not as good as what can be found on some other cruise lines such as RCI.

 

 

 

But the older set up at least showed they TRIED to appease the family crowd to give them something to do.  The current set up showed zero effort in allocating space or effort. Can't be that expensive or hard to put few objects on the top to make it somewhat entertaining.

 

For those that have not sailed on RCI, here are some old pics from 2014:

 

 

 

 

 

Edited September 19, 2022 by harryfat1

[harryfat1]

23 hours ago, caribill said:

 

The Alaska ports are more touristy than the Norwegian ones.

 

There are no Diamond International shops on a Norway cruise.

I've always been curious on what type of financial arrangement Diamonds International has with various cruise lines for them to push Diamond International stuff at each "port talk" which is basically ads for various jewelry and clothing stores.

 

Anyway, here's DI at Ketchikan for those that has need to do jewelry shopping on the cruise (visit uncle in prison):

 

 

[4x4bob]

10 hours ago, harryfat1 said:

I've always been curious on what type of financial arrangement Diamonds International has with various cruise lines for them to push Diamond International stuff at each "port talk" which is basically ads for various jewelry and clothing stores.

 

Anyway, here's DI at Ketchikan for those that has need to do jewelry shopping on the cruise (visit uncle in prison):

 

 

Welcome back.  I am sure that the cadre of your CC followers are very happy to be back reading your posts and looking at your Photos.  I sure hope your wife responded well to her son leaving the family nest to go off to college.  When our daughter went off to college we drove her down to Southern California and helped her load her Stuff into her College Dorm room then she came back out to the car to say good-by.  As she walked back to the Dorm my wife looked like I had just sold her into Indentured   Servitude or something.   Then after paying for 5 years for the College Deans Mansion on the hill, his Royal Royce and his Yacht, I kinda wished that I had explored that Servitude idea.  You know, find a good Jeweler that could have taught her how to split diamonds or something. 

[mimmy52]

I’ve managed to catch up and I’m thoroughly enjoying your trip report which brings back memories of the one I took with a friend on the Grand Princess in 2015. Just watch what you say about 75 year old grandmothers since a lot of us are cranky old crones even though we might run fast to view a whale.

 

But mostly, I want to thank you thank you thank you for separating your photos so I don’t have to squint my old eyes and try to figure out where one ends and the other begins. Also like that you don’t have a picture dump at the end because when that happens I often forget what I’m supposed to be seeing.

 

Looking forward to more.

[harryfat1]

8 hours ago, 4x4bob said:

Welcome back.  I am sure that the cadre of your CC followers are very happy to be back reading your posts and looking at your Photos.  I sure hope your wife responded well to her son leaving the family nest to go off to college.  When our daughter went off to college we drove her down to Southern California and helped her load her Stuff into her College Dorm room then she came back out to the car to say good-by.  As she walked back to the Dorm my wife looked like I had just sold her into Indentured   Servitude or something.   Then after paying for 5 years for the College Deans Mansion on the hill, his Royal Royce and his Yacht, I kinda wished that I had explored that Servitude idea.  You know, find a good Jeweler that could have taught her how to split diamonds or something. 

Thanks the note. Good to be home.

 

Move in day is always exciting/interesting in seeing all the parents dropping off their kids at college and all the stuff they bring to school.

 

This being his sophomore year makes it easier to get adjusted to not having him home daily. Like many young adult males, he plays online games with his college buddies so even when he is home for the summer so it’s not as if he was 7 years old sitting next to us wanting us to play with him.

 

Yeah, if you add up the tuitions all the college students pay annually worldwide, that must exceed the GDP of many smaller nations.  The money we throw at higher education is mind boggling.

 

If you daughter had picked up the skill of diamond cutting, maybe you can open your own chain of jewelry stores – Bob’s (4 X 4) Jeweler’s – at various cruise ports…

 

[4x4bob]

1 minute ago, harryfat1 said:

Thanks the note. Good to be home.

 

Move in day is always exciting/interesting in seeing all the parents dropping off their kids at college and all the stuff they bring to school.

 

This being his sophomore year makes it easier to get adjusted to not having him home daily. Like many young adult males, he plays online games with his college buddies so even when he is home for the summer so it’s not as if he was 7 years old sitting next to us wanting us to play with him.

 

Yeah, if you add up the tuitions all the college students pay annually worldwide, that must exceed the GDP of many smaller nations.  The money we throw at higher education is mind boggling.

 

If you daughter had picked up the skill of diamond cutting, maybe you can open your own chain of jewelry stores – Bob’s (4 X 4) Jeweler’s – at various cruise ports…

 

Yes, good idea.  Right next to Diamond International stores which draws in lots of customers.

Bob

[harryfat1]

8 hours ago, mimmy52 said:

I’ve managed to catch up and I’m thoroughly enjoying your trip report which brings back memories of the one I took with a friend on the Grand Princess in 2015. Just watch what you say about 75 year old grandmothers since a lot of us are cranky old crones even though we might run fast to view a whale.

 

But mostly, I want to thank you thank you thank you for separating your photos so I don’t have to squint my old eyes and try to figure out where one ends and the other begins. Also like that you don’t have a picture dump at the end because when that happens I often forget what I’m supposed to be seeing.

 

Looking forward to more.

 

Thanks for reading along and glad the little break allow people to catch up. Hope the rest of the trip report is satisfactory.

 

I was too slow to video tape the people movements whenever there was an announcement of wild live sightings.  Partly because I was trying to find the animals myself but never could. Only now in writing the trip report, I wished I had some recordings.

 

Here’s the difference between professional trip writer and just a plain old vacationing family guy: Professionals would be prioritizing the documentation of the cruise process/events for the story like a reporter.  Plain old vacationing guy is just trying to take a picture for his own collection.

 

Oh, yeah, separating the photos.  Here’s more about “sausage making process” than most people care to know – the CC software wants to automatically group all the pictures next to each other at the cursor without a line break.

 

So if you just finished typing whatever you want to say and then upload the photo files and click “submit”, the software will just stack all the photos at the end with no separations. I always need to hit “Enter” many times to create extra space at each picture to break them apart.

 

Especially since I typically drop in multiple photos in every post to explain the background, it’s hard to scroll up and down since I’m extremely long winded. I like to give the reader a heads up on what they’re about to see as I know sometimes when I see a picture without context, I  don’t know what I’m looking at.  If the description comes prior to the picture, then I can focus on what the writer is trying to convey.

 

Under the adage I mentioned earlier – treat others as the way you want to be treated. I try to present the info I would like to read if I was researching for a cruise myself.

 

As much as this current software upload isn’t perfect, it’s miles ahead of the old ways years ago when trying upload pictures was a major chore. Back then, CC wouldn’t host the pictures so I had to upload them onto a 3^rd party photo site like Flickr and then I get a long URL link that I must manually “trim” the end parts before I can drop the link into the post.  

 

I believe back then the limit was 6(?) pictures/emojis per post such that if I had 2 emojis in the post, I can only add 4 pictures in that post as the software counts emojis as a “photo”.  Any additional photos will have to be in a new post. Only the die-hard folks that really want to share their cruise photos were willing to endure all the extra work.

 

Like I said, more about the “sausage making process” than most people care to know…

 

[harryfat1]

As the park ranger wrote on their schedule, the best side is the outside so we went back to our cabin to enjoy the outside. Afterall, that’s why you paid for a balcony cabin, right?

 

You can save money with obstructed balcony as the glacier is far enough away in the horizon, if you don’t like the life boat background, just aim your camera to “shoot over it”.  Personally, I don’t mind the life boat in some of the pictures as the orange color adds a bit of contrast to the white glaciers.

 

 

 

Before I forget, they sent someone over to try and fix the issue with the door not opening up even though the medallion device recognizes my son is approaching the door.  The ship sent over a technician to see what was the problem and she played around with it for awhile and had to go back to get more parts to replace whatever was needed but she told us that she has updated the panel but the door lock mechanism is not linking to the panel and there’s another specialist to fix that problem.

 

She said another person will come later on to replace whatever needs to be fixed.  Whatever.  Since we have connecting cabins, they can just use our cabin to access theirs and they can still turn the knob to leave their cabin so it’s not a big deal.

 

I forgot to add in Vivaldi's Four Seasons when we were at the Hubbard Glaciers (at least I don't think I did - you tend to forget more things as you get older) so here it is as there's ice floating in the water that fits with the piece:

 

 

 

[harryfat1]

So here it is, the crown jewel of the GB that all ships came to see – Margerie Glacier.  As with Hubbard, don’t expect me to tell you the details.  That’s what Wiki is for.

 

I hope you like see ice as that’s all you will see tonight.

 

The captain rotated the ship 360 degrees so every location on the ship had ample chance to take as many glacier photos as possible.

 

The Margarie Glacier isn't nearly as large as the Hubbard Glacier but there wasn't too much ice in front of it so we were able to get in much closer than the Hubbard Glacier the previous day.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited September 20, 2022 by harryfat1

[harryfat1]

More Glacier pictures (when you don't have any great photos - you just overwhelm them with lots of average ones)🤪

 

 

 

 

Maybe I'm getting hungry, but some of these looks like lemon meringue pie

 

 

 

 

 

[harryfat1]

Yeah, Yeah, I know, I know.  Too many Glaciers Pictures.  Hey, I have at least 50 more to upload if I wanted to...

 

Here's a change of pace on not just glaciers:

 

If you never had a balcony cabin and wonder how high is the railing, you can more or less see over it sitting in a chair

 

 

My wife taking a picture of me taking a picture of the balcony railing.  Yeah, it wasn't that cold by the afternoon with the sun and no wind.  So just had a hoodie and t-shirt. 

 

 

Bare feet too

 

 

So now you are thinking you are sorry that you wanted to leave the glacier views from above as that was more entertaining than looking at my feet?  😜

 

View of the glacier from INSIDE the cabin looking outside if it was a cold windy day and you don't want to go outside but you can still see the glaciers without being outside

 

Edited September 20, 2022 by harryfat1

[harryfat1]

My older son ordered the family favorite mocktail – Strawberry on fire.  I never had it but boys liked it as well as my wife.  As we were just 3 decks from the IC, it was a hop and a skip to go down and grab some snacks later in the afternoon as we admired the glacier from afar and some of us had some afternoon tea

 

 

 

 

Quick atrium shot on our way down to IC to get something to eat - it's been at least couple of hour since we last ate...

 

 

 

 

[harryfat1]

After 4 PM, we headed south on our way out of GB. 

 

We sailed right by this glacier that I though looked interesting and no ice in front of it.  We could have gone up pretty close and did 360 for people to see but we just sailed passed it.

 

Anyway, here are few more glacier pictures for the day:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[harryfat1]

At around 5 PM, I wanted to try the noodle bar so my younger son and I headed out to deck 16 to grab 2 bowls of noodle. I got the special of the day – Tom Yum soup and he got the wonton noodles. 

 

 

 

 

 

Add whatever condiments you wanted

 

 

 

I had forgotten that my older son went to the other side of deck 16 and got a chocolate& vanilla swirl ice cream until he remined me the other day as he didn’t want hot noodles. 

Edited September 21, 2022 by harryfat1

[harryfat1]

After that, went back down to IC on deck 5 to get couple more bottles of water

 

 

 

Forgot to mention that since the ship was destined for China, they had Yao Ming as the PR guy for the ship at the start.  The ship still has display case talking about his winery in the bay area

 

 

Mega sized wine bottle at the atrium

 

[harryfat1]

By 6 PM, it got foggy real fast.  You can see from this picture that you can barely see out.  The captain was firing up the fog horn every few minutes as required.

 

 

More TV menu as I find them easier to read than picture of hard copy menu but lots more pages as a result of TV display limitations.  I was trying to pull up the menu on the Medallion phone app but it was useless as it kept saying "loading" and nothing was happening.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

By 7 PM, the fog had cleared as the park rangers were ready to depart the ship.  I was hoping to go down to deck to take pictures of them leaving the ship onto their boats but it was dinner time and given our issue with not getting our table last night, I didn't want the MDR staff to give up our table because I was few minutes late

 

Edited September 21, 2022 by harryfat1

[harryfat1]

Night #3 dinner at MDR. 

 

Let’s play “where will we sit tonight”.  Walked up to podium holding my breath, requested table 352 and Noel.  Bingo, they lead us to the table and no one was sitting at the table.  Funny after only sitting there for one night, you have this attachment for “our table”…

 

Food pictures – here’s a contrast in photo style:  my wife prefers to take her pictures showing more of the background whereas my food pictures are the “in your face” close up shots (similar to my sense of humor).  So you can easily tell who took which picture and who ate what:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[harryfat1]

Dessert:

 

 

 

 

We saw a YouTube video of someone ordering an after dinner drink and it looked more like a dessert on its own so we just had to try it as it was inclusive of the drink package as we wanted to try new drinks we wouldn’t have otherwise tried.

 

So this is Mexicano.  Coffee with Kahlua and whipped cream.

 

[harryfat1]

After dinner, finally made it to a show at Princess theater.  Three guys from Europe singing various songs.

 

They were OK.  Not bad but nothing to write home about.

 

 

 

 

 

I guess since I showed the background of Phantom, I need to drop in the main theme:

 

To be different, let’s try the non vocal version:

 

 

 

[harryfat1]

After the show, same nightly routine.  Go to IC for water before going back to the cabin for the night. The boys cabin still not functional. The screen recognizes their Medallion app to say “door is unlocked” but the knob doesn’t turn green with a glow.  Guess whomever was supposed to fix the door knob never came tonight.  Good thing we have connecting cabins or else we’d have to go down to guest services.

 

Tomorrow would be our first day in port.  After being on sea the past 2 plus days, I’m glad to be back on land as I’m just not a sea person.

 

Our first port is Icy Strait Point (ISP).  It wasn’t supposed to be ISP as we were originally scheduled to be going to Skagway but I assume most people are aware of the rockslide issue at Skagway earlier this summer and the closure of the Railroad Forward dock and that forced many Princess sailings to relocate to ISP or Sitka or Haines.

 

As you can see from Google maps that these ports up in middle part of Alaska are pretty close to each other.  You have Hoonah (which is ISP) and up north a bit you have Haines and Skagway and to the East you have Juneau so not like the ship has to go far during this part of the voyage. 

 

 

Which was why Princess allocated 14+ hours for us to be in ISP (originally Skagway) because the next town isn’t that far away and we can afford to be in town for a much longer time. One of the advantages of sailing one way instead of round trip from Seattle is you have more time in port (although I will discuss how/why we lost 3 hours in port later on – got to have teaser to keep people coming back, right?)

 

Anyway, as we got back to the cabin and looking outside, the Majestic Princess is already docked at 10:40 PM for tomorrow’s port as it took around 3 hours to travel from GB to ISP.

 

The air outside was very smoky because ISP has a wood burning fire pit in the port area and the wind blew a lot of that smell into the ship area.  After couple of pictures, time to hurry back to the cabin and close the door to keep the nasty smoke out. 

 

 

More neon lights from the sky walk above

 

 

Since I can’t go outside the balcony to take more pictures, time to go outside the cabin door and take one from there at 11 PM. Not a single person to be seen. Besides being only 60% full, not an active crowd compared to other sailings in Caribbean/Mexico we have been on previously.

 

FYI that starboard carpets are red and Port side carpets are blue.  So, if you when your elevator drops you off at your deck and you are uncertain to turn left or right, look for color of the carpet that corresponds to your port or starboard color carpet.

 

 

This concludes the day 3 trip report - as always, thanks to everyone for reading along and providing the "like" support at all the posts.  Much appreciated.

 

[LouChamp]

Thank you for your posts and especially the food pictures! Love princess and wish you smooth sailing.