This trip was a 10-day Alaska cruise round-trip out of San Francisco. This was our 5th Princess cruise, and 2nd time on the Grand Princess. Our most recent cruise was aboard the Carnival Splendor five months ago (a 7-day trip to Mexico out of Long Beach), and I’ll reference some comparisons later.
Our travel agent provided bus transportation from Sacramento to San Francisco; we left Sacramento at 10am and arrived at the pier at 12:10. Traffic on the Embarcadero is often heavy, and more so on a cruise departure day, so we were thankful not to be driving (or having to deal with parking). Within 8 minutes of our bus pulling up at Pier 27, we were in the security line (our luggage is automatically transferred from the bus to the ship). Four minutes later we were in the check-in line, and five minutes from that we were walking aboard the ship. It was a pretty impressive process; only 20 minutes between when our bus pulled up to when we were on the ship.
Since we made it on board before 1pm, we decided to hit the Da Vinci dining room for lunch. We don’t usually make it early enough for this. I was surprised at how empty it was in there, only a small scattering of people here and there. The staff had been directing people to the buffet immediately after boarding, and later in the cruise the Cruise Director mentioned that there were some 1700 first time cruisers on board (yikes!), so maybe not many people knew about the dining room option. One thing that surprised me in the dining room – there were a couple of little bugs (gnats maybe?) flying around the table. I can’t recall ever seeing bugs in a ship’s dining room before.
It's a basic inside cabin; on Princess they're not particularly large. But it had a great amount of storage space for the size (would be better if there were less life jackets stored in the closet; it seems every trip we go on there's two per person in there...). Being one deck above the Promenade, it made for easy access to the heart of the ship. Sound isolation is actually pretty good; we could hear music from the Theatre directly below us in the hallways, but not so much in the rooms.