Our week on the Star Princess, April 17 - 24, 2005, was just as expected: fantastic! I'm going to try to cover everything I think I would have liked to know before I cruised on the ship, with some kind of order and random thoughts thrown in here and there. So bear with me, this could be a little long!

First a little background. My wife and I are in our early 50s, enjoy a variety of activities, good quality food with variety, also a variety of shipboard entertainment and of course visiting interesting ports and meeting new people, both on board and on shore. This was our seventh cruise, fifth with Princess (one with Royal Caribbean -- great, would go with RCI again if the price was right; one with Carnival -- not even close to the standards of Princess in virtually every category). We have now completed the tour of the Grand Class ships (Grand, Golden, Star); our other two where on the Ocean Princess, which has been renamed and is in Europe under the P+O banner. We would cruise on the Grand class ships again, but I still prefer the slightly smaller Sun class. More on that later.

We flew from Providence, Rhode Island, to Fort Lauderdale (by way of Chicago -- in both directions -- yuck!) the day before the cruise and stayed at the Fort Lauderdale Airport Ramada. I cannot recommend this place as it is old, in need of refurbishing, quite expensive for what you get and quite frankly we felt a bit unsafe there, although I can't really tell you why. Also, their free shuttle to the cruise port does not start running until about 1 p.m., which was too late for us -- we like to get on board as soon as possible and enjoy almost a full day on board, if possible. Also the free hot breakfast was barely edible, crowded and was run by Brunhilde the Restaurant Lady! 'Nuff said about that place. Suffice to say we'll find other accommodations next time. Read more