At the beginning of this month I embarked on my first cruise as an adult. My previous cruise I was 10 years old, so I don’t really count it. As such I consider myself a total cruise novice. My significant other has been on cruises a few times and when we decided we wanted to take a “relaxing” vacation this spring, the idea of a cruise came up. We did some research together; I did a lot of reading, and we decided. Our cruise of choice was the Grand Princess, departing from San Francisco February 28th to March 10th, touring the Mexican Riviera. The decision points were:
- It was about the right length we wanted to take off
- It left from San Francisco (which makes it extremely convenient)
- We read good things about Princess.
In case you haven’t extrapolated from the “Day 0” in today’s title, this is going to be a multi-part blog series. I spent at least a small amount of time each day writing about the day’s experiences and there will be one post for each day. One of the things I noticed in my reading of cruise reviews is that the people writing reviews tend to have a lot of cruises under their belt, so they compare and contrast. Often those comparisons are harsh on ships features because “XYZ does it so much better” which sounds bad, but often times the truth has been far from it. Also those reviews and tips don’t often write for the new cruiser (because it’s been so long for them, they forget what that means).
So what am I writing about? It’s going to be a mix of my personal experiences, points specifically mentioned by other cruise reviewers, and those things that I see as success/fail (for next time I cruise, or so you don’t make the same mistake I did). While I share the litany of details for each day, I do so in the hope that you will be able to use this as a general guide. Any particular successes/failures are extremely myopic, a single data point in a sea of 2500 other passengers. Also at the end of the day-by-day entries, I have a few additional tangential posts such as a final thoughts, cost breakdown and gear review.
So now you know who I am, why I’m here, and my cruising background… let’s get started.