Prinsendam Review
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Background This was our sixth cruise and our third with Holland America. It was our first experience with one of the longer "Grand Voyages." We are both 60, but in good physical shape and consider ourselves open-minded and willing to try just about anything once. At 68 days, this cruise was three times as long as anything we'd done before. Within the "cruising community," that makes us relative "neophytes" but we are more eclectic in our travels and don't concentrate solely on cruising. But even though we consider ourselves "well-traveled," we were awed by the travel experience of most of our fellow passengers on Prinsendam. Many had logged 20 or 30 cruises and a surprising number had done HAL's Grand World Cruise more than once. (Clearly they have a bigger travel budget than we do!) We were pleasantly surprised to find that, rather than making them more critical and more likely to find fault with things, the vast majority of our fellow passengers had learned that everything can't be perfect all the time and sometimes you just need to exercise a bit of patience and understanding. We were pleasantly surprised at how few smokers there were. I'd estimate there were fewer than 10 total, out of a group of about 700!
Getting There & Back One of the big advantages of the "Grand Voyages" is the round-trip format. No long international flights! We had a routine flight from SEA to FLL and back. The check-in procedure was quick and painless. The was some kind of "communication problem" between HAL, our travel agent, and us which kept us from being able to ship bags in advance. This may have been a blessing in disguise as we met quite a few people whose bags didn't catch up with them until we got to Lima! On the way home, we did use the service and it worked perfectly.
Yes, they collected our passports, which made us a bit nervous until we figured out the reason. We hadn't realized that the Customs people actually came aboard and stamped every single passport. And we were halfway through the cruise before we found out that, once the officials were finished with them, we could "check out" our passports and take them ashore with us. In some countries, money exchanges required the passport (not a copy) in order change even minimal amounts of money.