Saturday, June 9: To Sea
We had a relaxing morning as Jeannie did some souvenir shopping and I visited the Terme Diocleziano, a HUGE ancient Roman Bath complex. Jeannie really enjoyed being able to bargain with the street vendors, and got some great deals.
Then we took our transport to the docks, and began the arduous process of boarding our ship the Crown Princess …. Which turned out to be not so arduous after all. In fact, of the 5 times we’ve cruised, this was by far the fastest on boarding we’ve ever experienced. Normal on boarding for a cruise usually takes 1-3 hours of standing in one line or another. Today we went from curb to stateroom in 20 minutes. Amazing.
So we had time to grab some lunch, complete the scavenger hunt (a thinly disguised trick to make you walk all over the ship and familiarize yourself with the deck plans), get unpacked, and attended the Muster briefing before going to dinner.
As expected, the dinner was excellent, with 2 minor annoyances. Of course, on cruise ships, everyone knows that they charge you outlandish prices for everything, even bottled water. At dinner, the waitress was really pushing the bottled water, either ‘still’ or ‘sparkling’, and never mentioned the FREE ‘tap’ water unless you specifically asked for it.
The second thing was more egregious. Our Travel Agent had kindly given us a voucher for a bottle of wine, which the waitress accepted, and she delivered our wine to the table. Later on, however, when I checked my stateroom account with the nifty onboard app they have now, I discovered that they had charged me the full price for the bottle! I’ll have to get that fixed tomorrow.
After dinner, Jeannie and I hit a couple of the clubs and did some dancing. Good times.
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