Grand Princess Review

3.5 / 5.0
1,603 reviews

First time family cruise

Review for the Western Caribbean Cruise on Grand Princess
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shofer
First Time Cruiser • Age 70s

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Sail Date: Feb 2008
Cabin: Balcony

We were booked on the Grand Princess to leave 2/2/08 from Ft. Lauderdale for a one week Western Caribbean cruise traveling with our adult children and their spouse or significant other. The plan was to leave Chicago on Friday, 2/1/08 and stay overnight one night pre-cruise to allow for any weather delays. This proved to be prophetic as it started snowing on Thursday and continued for 24 hours, dumping about a foot of snow in Chicago, causing cancellations of 600 flights on Thursday at O'Hare and continuing on Friday. Lucky for us, we were flying United which has its hub in Chicago and we not only had an aircraft at our gate but our flight was on time. The "kids" were taking public transportation from the city while we arranged a taxi. They actually beat us to the gate by quite some time while we barely had time to check our luggage before the 25 minute cut off time. The anxiety over the weather overshadowed everything else on our minds with us getting up several times during the night to check the snowfall and/or the Weather Channel.

As we finally winged our way to Ft. Lauderdale with great relief, something my son had said about his passport stamps triggered something in my mind. I turned to my husband and asked if he had brought the passports as they had been sitting on his dresser. The horrified look that he gave me confirmed my fears. We weren't going to land for another 2 hours and had no way to contact anyone for that time. We frantically discussed this with the kids trying to come up with some solution.

The girl sitting next to me overheard our conversation and suggested that we have someone go to the house and FEDEX them to us. The problem was that anyone who had a key to the house was sitting on the plane with us. She suggested that we could get a friend to have a locksmith meet them at our house to open the door, retrieve the passports and then send them to us at the hotel where we were staying the night. This sounded like a good idea to me but DH felt that there was too many parts to this plan that could go wrong and his plan was to fly immediately back to Chicago and come back the next day.

Cabin Review

Balcony

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