Star Princess April 3-13, 2012 Coastal cruise to Mexico from San Francisco

This was our 5th cruise to Mexico, but the last one was in 2004. We really were not interested in seeing any of the cities in Mexico. We just wanted to take a cruise since we had not been on one for over a year. We had one planned for March of this year in the Caribbean, but it was cancelled because of propulsion problems on the Caribbean Princess. We received 25 % of our cruise cost for the cancelled cruise and applied it to this one which was also discounted. It was almost cheaper than staying home.

We live south of San Francisco, so we took a taxi to San Francisco Airport and caught the Princess bus to the pier from there. We received an Emergency Notification from Princess a couple of weeks before the cruise stating that boarding would take place according to deck and cabin location and we should not arrive at the pier until 2:00 PM. We left home at 10:15 and arrived at the airport at around 10:40. We saw a Princess bus loading and asked the lady in charge if we should go inside the terminal and wait for a later bus. She said we should get on the bus that was about to leave. We did and left about 5 minutes later. When we got to San Francisco, there was a traffic jam that had traffic backed up for at least a mile from the pier. The bus driver had mentioned that he might have to drive around for a while before we could get off the bus and when we finally got to the pier, we were told to take another drive and come back in another twenty minutes or so. We did and this time we were allowed to get off the bus. We went directly to the check in counter and were on the ship in less than 10 minutes. The driver took care of offloading our baggage. Our cabin was ready and we were able to get settled there and go to lunch by noon. Our baggage was late arriving and we finally got it around 4 PM. Read more