First off, I recognize that there is nothing that can be done about the weather, and perhaps the current, post-Concordia world, there is no room for cowboy captains, even out of Houston. All we know is there were a heck of a lot of big ships sailing through the “un-navigable” channel. Of course, I am no seaman, so I will have to defer to the captain’s wisdom.
Embarkation was pretty much as expected, though again, due to the holiday, the lines were all very long. One thing of interest to me were the number of people packing flats of water and soda, etc, onto the ship with them as carry on. To me, this is a sad sign of the state of cruising with Princess. I really think people should be able to have a good vacation without having to worry about packing all their fluids onto the ship with them.
As many reviewers have stated, the sailing was delayed a day due to the weather. Not much to be said there, except the communication was pretty poor. I was up every couple of hours all night looking to see if we had sailed at all. I think it might have been possible to tell everyone what the plan was or even say it was possible we’d be there all night.
Standard mini-suite. We chose it for the covered balcony which I think is the only way to go. We had no issues at all with noise from the nightclub below.