Background: This was our second cruise with Princess and first time on the Sun Princess. We are a married couple in our late 20's and this was our first time taking a cruise abroad. We booked through AAA.

Pre-Cruise: We flew out of Pittsburgh, PA on the evening of 11/19 and had a connection in LAX en route to Sydney. It was quite a long flight, but luckily our bags arrived on time. We generally like to arrive in port a day early and book our own flights to save money, however due to work scheduled we were forced to arrive on the morning of the cruise and therefore booked the more expensive flights through Princess to get the next port protection in case we were delayed. I highly recommend signing up for frequent flier miles if you plan to fly from the U.S, as we new have nearly enough combined for a round trip ticket in the U.S. with our combined miles.

Embarkation: We arrived in Sydney around 7:00 am and were through customs and immigration fairly quickly. Thanks to other Aussie cruise members on the boards, we knew prior to arrival that we were going to be delayed a few hours due to the ship hitting rough weather in the Tasman on the way back from NZ. Luckily for us, while clearing customs, we ran into another couple coming from the U.S. and informed them the ship was delayed. I say lucky for us because, after clearing customs, we set out to find the Princess rep to transfer to the pier. We expected a large sign or piles of luggage would give the location away, but after walking around the airport for 15 minutes we still could not find anyone and the information booths didn't seem to know what we were talking about. Fortunately, we spotted the couple from the immigration line who found the cruise representative caring a small folder that had a Princess cruises sign, and we joined up with them. She informed us that we would be taken to the Park Royal hotel where they would have snacks for us until we could transfer to the pier after the previous passengers disembarked. Upon arrival at the hotel, it looked like most of the other passengers there were willing to just hang out and wait for the pier transfer. We really wanted to explore the city, especially since we only had about 6 hours before we had to board. We asked the staff if they had a map of the city and told them we would find our own way the rest of the way to the pier after we finished exploring. Our bags had already been taken to the pier, which left us free to explore. We set off on foot to walk the approx 1 mile to the Opera house and Darling Harbor. We spend some time exploring Circular Quay, the Opera house, and walked onto the Harbor Bridge. We then headed to the pier to get in line to board at approx 3:00 pm. It seemed a bit disorganized and was very crowded, but we eventually made it through all of the lines and headed on to the ship. The people from the hotel who waited for the transfer arrived to the port after we did. Once on the ship, we had a late lunch in the Horizon court, did the obligatory muster drill (it always amazes me how difficult it seems to be fore people to follow directions, which always makes the drill take longer than it would otherwise need to) then went up on deck for the sailaway and got very good pictures/video of our ship cruising under the harbor bridge and past the Opera house while listening to Derringer, the onboard Canadian band. After the sailaway, we went to dinner in the dining room, which was open seating, and sat with a British couple. Dinner consisted of Rockfish, Prime rib, and a few other choices that were very good. We went back to our room to find all of our luggage delivered, and went to bed around 10:00 pm. Read more