This cruise was the first half of a back to back Caribbean -- the Eastern Caribbean part with planned stops at San Juan, St. Maartin, St. Thomas, and Princess Cay. Getting to FLL is so easy compared to many other ports and the airport/port are so much more user friendly than some. We caught a non-stop, 2 hour flight on Southwest (yea! bags fly free!), took a short taxi ride to the peer and arrived a little too early to check in. They let us (Platinum and Elite) in the terminal and we waited about 30 minutes to begin the check in. Check in was quick and painless and we were on the ship in time for lunch at Alfredo's Pizzeria.

Our first scheduled stop at San Juan was cancelled due to wind/high seas plus problems with one of the engines that slowed us down. Instead, we proceeded on the St. Maartin. We were compensated $50 per passenger for the loss of port. I think that was very fair. We've missed ports several times in the past with no compensation - both on Princess and other lines. The rest of the stops were made as planned and we left Princess Cay Friday afternoon and headed back to FLL. We took a shore excursion in St. Maartin. It was pretty good as they go. We circled the entire island and saw both Dutch and French sides. Back in FLL, we decided to take a shore excursion to pass the time between disembarkation and re-embarkation. We took the Land/sea tour that featured homes of the rich and famous within the FLL canals. It was very interested but the hassle of the bus and dropping the non back to back passengers off at the airport wasn't worth it. We wouldn't do it again. Some other back to back passengers told us they were off and back on the ship in about 30 minutes. We'll try that way next time.

This was our "revisit" of the Grand. We took the Grand on her Transatlantic/British Isles crossing in May, when she was just out of dry dock. If you want more info on that cruise, check out my review for that cruise. The first thing we did was run up to the OneFive -- the lounge that replaced the much-publized and now gone Skywalkers. It wasn't finished -- in fact, they hadn't even started on it -- on our TA cruise in May. The OneFive is very nice, very state of the art disco type lounge. The DJ - Michelle - was very nice and user friendly. We didn't spend a lot of time there. We do SOCIAL ballroom and were very lucky with live music elsewhere on the ship. Read more