Just returned form the 10/31/04 Panama Canal sailing of the Coral Princess. There were 3 of us that went—myself age 29 and my parents mid 60s. As a general rule, the majority of passengers on this sailing were much older than myself. However, I expected this due to the length of the cruise and the itinerary. Children were not very prevalent on this sailing—I think I saw a total of 6 the entire cruise. Also of note was that in each port we were the only cruise ship in port that day.

Pre-cruise stay: we always fly down a day early before a cruise and this time we chose to stay at the Marina Marriott in Ft. Lauderdale. It was during the Ft. Lauderdale International Boat Show, so was quite filled up. The hotel is right across the street from the pier and when we arrived we could see the Caribbean Princess getting ready to leave. Another thing we enjoyed about this hotel and it's proximity to the pier was getting up early on the morning of embarkation (5am) and watching all the ships return to Ft. Lauderdale. It was fun to watch the Coral Princess return to port and made us even more excited to start our cruise. The hotel offers a courtesy shuttle to the pier so we made arrangements to take that. Just sign up with the bell captain's stand. I should note that the first person we asked at the stand told us that they did not offer shuttle service, but we asked someone else again and they told us that they did have a shuttle; so it may pay to ask more than one person if they tell you they don't offer one. We took the 11:40am shuttle time and were the only guests on it and arrived at the pier by 11:50am.

Embarkation: After arriving at 11:50am, the porters took our bags and we got in the line outside the terminal. Once we made it inside the terminal and everybody sorted into the various lines for check in according to deck etc, that part went fairly quickly and smoothly. After check in, the line through security went very slowly, and there was a bottleneck of people waiting to get their embarkation photo taken etc. I think the whole process took us an hour; this was the slowest embarkation I've experienced on Princess. Read more