Well what a day!!
As one would have picked up from the rushed posts earlier it was a great day. We arrived early for our flight at Brisbane Airport (thanks heaps Dianne), had no issues with the Princess booking, luggage arrangements etc. I had half expected some issues as we did not have a booking number for the flight, and our luggage allocation had only been changed recently.
We were on the 9am flight, we bumped into folk who were on both the 8 am and the 10am...all 3 flights were chockas with fellow cruise passengers.
Princess had an efficient system to meet and transfer everyone from Sydney airport to the ship, with our preferential boarding status we were sitting in the buffet on deck 12 by 12.30pm.
We have already bumped into a few Cruise Critic colleagues, some of whom we knew from our lunch a few weeks ago in Brisbane, and some who just recognised me from the photo online.
Both Donna and I had the same emotions once we got on board.. It just felt like home, as we had cruised on the Sun Princess, and it's identical twin sister, Dawn Princess quite a few times, we just had this sense of belonging.
The sailaway out of Sydney was just amazing, we had done a sail into Sydney before, but not a sailaway, very special, the bridge, and the Opera House still get you. After the obligatory downing of the free house champers, and a couple of ales, we went downstairs and had a sit down, and contemplated what lays ahead. I have to confess it still does not quite seem real, 104 nights, 14 weeks, 3 and a half months..does not matter which way you look at it, it is still hard to comprehend that we are doing a lap of the world.
We are on late dinner sitting of a table of 10,although only 6 rocked up on first night. We like the large group for dinner, increases the odds so to speak. All at dinner tonight are doing the full round world cruise, so we know who we are with.
Big day tomorrow, we get to meet all the fellow members of Cruise Critic, over 100 folk so that should be pretty good.
Enough for day 1....ciao
You have a good cruise as we are sure you will. We did it on the Dawn in 2010 and are still reliving it. We will follow you all the way. I hope you can afford the internet charges unless you are already on Elite. Good luck.
ReplyDeleteThanks Steve and Donna for sharing your trip. I am sure there are many of us following along, you should have a page count on here.
ReplyDeleteI would glady contribute towards your Internet Bill...LOL
you are truely making my day with your posts.
Cheers
Robyn