Tired of cruising the Caribbean and skittish about Europe we decided to fly (not a favorite thing of ours to do) to LA and take a 15 day cruise round trip LA - Hawaii. We have never been to Hawaii so this was a great choice. We chose Princess for several reasons. One, we are elite so we get some nice perks with them. Two, we got a very large amount of shipboard credit because Princess is very generous with that also. And, we find Princess to be pretty consistent. We usually know what we are going to get with them and they didn't disappoint.

Embarkation was a breeze and being elite made it even easier. We had a standard balcony cabin up on Baja deck and it was located in an extremely convenient area, close to the elevators. Cabins are a bit smaller on Princess than some of the other lines we cruise on, but we were only going to be in it to sleep and perhaps grab a quick nap on sea day sit was not big deal. There is always plenty of storage space on their ships. Our cabin steward was most pleasant and helpful and always responded to our requests.

We ate in the main dining room early seating 13 of the15 nights and the food was consistently good and plentiful. Our waiter and his assistant were fabulous and helped make our dining experience quite lovely. We ate in the Crown Grill one night to help celebrate a 50th wedding anniversary of a lovely Australian couple I had become friends with on our cruise critic roll call. The food was very good and worth the $25 cover charge. We ate breakfast mainly in the Horizon Court buffet and the food was plentiful and generally good. Nthe wait staff were very kind. The set up on the Ruby is the old buffet style where you are jammed into a small space and that was the only negative. We ate there occasionally for lunch but frequented the pizza place (pizza there is really good) and e hamburger, hot dog grill - again very good. We ate in the dining room for breakfast and lunch a couple of times and it was excellent. That was about the only place I could get my fried eggs cooked likeI like them. I attended the tea twice and it was terrific. I also got a few things from the International Cafe and the food there was also quite nice. Read more