February 22, 2009 Caribbean Princess—Southern Caribbean General thoughts (in no specific order)

Day 1 There is no public transportation between the SJU airport and the port area. The taxi ride is metered at $19 plus $1 for each bag. The official taxi stand is right outside of baggage claim. The ride takes about 18 minutes from the airport to the dock. Once there, you will wait in line outside until they open the terminal door at 12pm. In the terminal you will wait again, in rows of chairs, until it's your turn to check in with the agents. Since we arrived at the docks by 11am, we were one of the first to be processed and got onto the actual ship around 12:20pm. We ate lunch in the buffet restaurant and dinner at the Coral Dining Room. The Coral and the Island Dining Rooms are the AnyTime meal restaurants. The Palm needs reservations and set meal times. We registered our 8 year old for the kid's club. This cruise, there were only a total of 40 kids on the whole ship. So far, he loves the kid's club. He did the kid's club once before on the Norwegian Spirit. I thought they NCL ship had a much better kid's program and even a kid's only pool. But overall, the NCL ship sucked and the food was worse. I digress. Day 2 Today is a day at sea. Wife got sick. Day 3 Aruba—We park in Oranjestad, which is the capital of Aruba. Once you exit the ship, you pass all the tourist trap shops and go out onto the main street. There, you can catch public bus line L10 ($1.30o/w or $2.30r/t) that will take you to all the beaches. We opted to go to a tourist popular beach called Palm Beach. We took the bus all the way to the Marriott, which is way at the top end of Palm Beach (thinking that surely the beach in front of the Marriott would be awesome....only to find that it was soooo crowded with the hotel people.) so, we left and got the bus back and got off at a beach between the Costa Linda Beach resort and the Tamarijn Beach resort. Just get off where you can see all the people enjoying the beach and that's the right spot. It was a much better beach area and far less crowded than in front of the Marriott. The beach was nice but we've seen much better (Tahiti, Bermuda, Cancun, etc...)

Day 4 Bonaire—Disembark at 8am. We are from California, so that's 4am body clock. There's no way we could get up. We actually regret not taking the water taxi to Klein Bonaire, as it looked beautiful from the ship Read more