Star Princess Review
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I went on this Cruise with a group of 31 people, lots of young Nieces and Nephews among them. We disembarked from San Francisco and we all live in the South Bay so we all pitched in for a bus to pick us up and drop us off for embarkation and again when we returned. We just walked off with our carry ons and the bus went onward to drop our luggage off at the luggage terminal for us. All of that went smoothly. We arrived on time and our bus was on time to pick us up when we got back as well.
The process for getting on the ship was slightly annoying, employees kept yelling at me to get my passport in my hand, yet it was in a sling pouch in a nice tight open pouch pocket with the top sticking out right where they could see it and I just can grab it and slip it out, no zipping or opening of anything to get to it was necessary and they could see this was the case but seemed to not care about logic, one of them even told me to pull over out of line and get it in my hand before moving on and I just kept walking, in retrospect that was probably a bad idea and I'm probably lucky I got away with it, as frustrating as it was just say "yes sir" and keep walking if you have one of those nifty passport pouch slings. It was frustrating because I was already carrying my backpack, rolling my carry on with one hand, and carrying a bag for my blind mother in the other as it was...
Eventually I had to fill out some sort of medical pamphlet along the lines of "Have you had a fever recently?" .. "Have you been around sick people" .. etc etc. After that I finally got to a long desk area where you wait for the next available employee to hold a number up (Think checking out at fry's electronics) and they get you your cruise card when you show them your boarding pass, the lady I got at this point was warm, welcoming, and friendly. It was a breath of fresh air from the chaotic 10 minutes before this point. After that they now wanted you to have your cruise card in hand, np, that's exactly where mine was until I got to my room. We got onto the ship and waited on elevators, this was a mistake, unless your physically unable just take the stairs. The elevators were already full from floors below, and the one we finally got onto stopped at every single floor before it got to ours...
Cabin Review
One of my brothers on the cruise with me stayed in a mini balcony suite on Dolphin deck 1 floor down, if I had to do it all over again I would pay the xtra $$ for it, I felt for me and my roommate our C deck room was slightly small and claustrophobic, however it did have plenty of space for 2... We didn't use up all the closet space nor all the desk/drawer space but we're also both male, lol. Our balcony was bigger than my brothers D deck balcony but we certainly didn't need/use the extra balcony space. Our room was located in a good spot away from public rooms that can be noisy, however you can still hear very loud periodic bangs throughout the night and also people walking and kids running very loudly in the halls. I never really heard talking except out in the hall sometimes when people walked by, but never from an adjacent rooms. One of the noisiest events at night was the very first time a fog horn went off at 4 something in the morning, you could hear a lot of commotion from people waking up, all sorts of bangs and footsteps, the horn does kind of sound like the one in "War of the Worlds" that goes off right before the giant robots start vaporizing everybody. LOL.