This is how I would describe our little jaunt down the West Coast from Vancouver to Los Angeles. We couldn't believe it when we saw that a cruise ship was scheduled to depart Vancouver in the middle of December so we just had to try it. Apparently so did a lot of other folks as it was pretty much full. A lot of passengers were continuing on to Hawaii from Los Angeles but there were certainly many who were just doing the three day cruise.

The Ruby was fresh out of two weeks in Victoria where she received quite a few changes. Lots of new carpets throughout, some new or reupholstered furniture, very likely a mechanical tune up and lots of polishing and cleaning according to the crew members we spoke to. The biggest visible change was the conversion of Sabatini's Restaurant into the new Curtis Stone "Share" restaurant. The Wheelhouse Bar was also morphed into the new Salty Dog Pub but this was a much less noticeable change.

No major complaints about the cruise except maybe the fact that there were lots of young children on board which in itself is not the issue, more of the fact that none of these children seemed to have bedtimes and so were running around the ship late into the night. In fact, on more than one occasion they were allowed by their parents to run around during the evening entertainment including climbing on stage in the Explorers Lounge during the show of the comedian and also running across the floor of the Piazza during the juggler/acrobatic show. None of this is the fault of Princess and the entertainers handled it really well, but complete lack of judgement and control by the parents, not to mention extremely rude and lack of consideration to the performers and to the other passengers trying to enjoy the shows. Read more