At 6-30am on Friday 30th March 2012 we were collected by limousine at our home for the Adelaide Airport to travel to Sydney to embark on the Sun Princess for a 14 night cruise to New Zealand. This was our second cruise to NZ with Princess having done the Xmas Cruise in 2010. We arrived at Sydney Airport at about 11am and rounded up the other "fliers" and went to our buses for the short trip to Barangaroo Cruise Terminal. The buses were parked quite some distance from the terminal and it was quite a walk lugging our luggage to the bus. Once on board it was a short 1/2 hour trip to the ship where we saw what appeared to be chaos at the tent. The ship was completely booked out for the cruise and to see 2000+ people milling about was a bit off putting but to our surprise we were on board by 12 midday with a very orderly and organised embarkation procedure. We dropped our hand luggage off at our stateroom, an "inside" on Aloha deck 11 and then went to Horizon Court for a light lunch. We met our cabin steward, Somnieck from Thailand and what a delightful young man he turned out to be. He was meticulous in how our room was cleaned and prepared and being an untidy bloke myself it took me some time over the next couple of days to find my papers and pamphlets etc which he always tidied up after me. He also arranged for a jug of iced water to be in our fridge each day, a much appreciated gesture. We hardly saw him in the room as he knew our meal times and when we were not around to tidy the room each morning and turn it down for the night with the choccy on the pillow with the Princess Patter.

THE ROOM

We had a corner room which seemed larger than the rooms off the corridors. We had it made up into twin beds and this gave us a large area to move around between the beds. The bathroom was of more than adequate size and me being a big bloke could fit easily in the shower. The shower curtain did not suck into the shower and stuck to the walls so as no water splashed on the floor, something we found not to be the case on our two previous Princess cruises. Read more