We prefer port days because a cruise for us is about the destinations and seeing new things but we’ve learned to appreciate and enjoy sea days more as we’ve become seasoned cruisers. Salty and peppery. For my wife it’s a chance to get some serious reading in; for me it’s a chance to take a hundred more photos of the ship; for the pair of us it’s a chance to get a little rest in on the back of port exploration or ahead of some typically more strenuous than we should be attempting activity in the next port. And don’t forget the additional drinking time.
If you’ve read the previous few posts in this Mediterranean cruise travelogue series then you’ll know that on the day before my wife had aggravated an old injury during our wander around the Rock of Gibraltar so she especially wanted to do as little as possible this day. Looking at the daily programme of events – on Princess Cruises ships this is called the Princess Patter – this looked like being an easy desire to achieve with only a few activities sparking the mildest of interest in either of us. We had some plans for the evening but it looked like the morning and afternoon was going to be one long stretch of relaxation as Emerald Princess cruised up the Mediterranean towards the French coast.
Breakfast done, we drifted back to our room to pick up our morning equipment. For my wife, her Kindle, while I grabbed my camera and snapped a few shots from the balcony. It was going to be another warm September day.
Morning At Sea
We weren’t in a trivia-participating frame of mind (not that we ever do well in the mornings anyway) and it had probably just started by this point so I left my wife in Crooners then drifted down to the bottom of the piazza to start grabbing some more pictures of this ship. Some people think you can have too many photos of the same places on the same sort of ships but I don’t really talk to people very much so they don’t factor into my decision-making. Let’s go for a walk around Emerald Princess together.
What’s become a regular haunt of ours on Princess ships was situated here, that being the Vines wine bar. The next time we’ll be on a Princess ship will be in 2020 when we board the brand new Enchanted Princess and it’s a slight disappointment to discover that there appears to be no place for this venue on that vessel. We shall wait to see if the service and somehow always superb banter we seem to find in Vines translates to one of that ship’s other bars.
Bypassing the shops on the next floor up in the piazza brought me to the entertainments deck for want of a better word. It’s actually the Promenade Deck, deck 7, which in addition to housing a full wraparound promenade on the outside houses numerous bars, lounges, and eating locations. At the top of the piazza staircases is Crooners where I carefully avoided getting any photos of my wife in any pictures taken here. We have rules.
It’s an interesting to me that these Grand-class ships operated by Princess have subtle design differences in the various sub-classes and the Crown-class to which Emerald belongs includes one at this very spot with Crooners being located on the port side of the ship as opposed to the starboard side with which we’d become more familiar on cruises aboard Star, Diamond, and Sapphire over the eighteen months ahead of this cruise. To be fair we shouldn’t have been that surprised as we’d cruised on Crown twice before but we’ve got to that age where things that happened over two years ago might as well be ancient documents to be unearthed and shocked at for the amount they factor into recollections.
Heading aft from the piazza afforded some views of the new information screens that have been appearing on Princess ships over the last few years as the technology platforms aboard have been upgraded in preparation for the Ocean Medallion system as well as a wall of plaques that vessels receive the first time they visit a port. I find these plaques quite interesting to look at as they give you an impression of the city or country in question if you’ve never visited before; is this a place that has put some thought and effort into welcoming a new ship to its shores or did someone in the harbourmaster’s office run down to the nearest trophy engravers the day before? I’ve always wondered how those places stay open.
Explorers Lounge was set up for the art auction and ever since The Incident we no longer have any dealings with Park West, the people who run that particular activity, so no photos there. Club Fusion was hosting the trivia that we’d skipped out on so I wandered quickly through it too.
Rather than head back through the same area to the section forward of the piazza I decided to take in some sea air, it being one of the things you can get all the time on a cruise that is somewhat lacking if holidaying in a bungalow on the outskirts of Birmingham.
Nothing much was happening in the Wheelhouse Bar when I stepped back inside the ship, although this was hardly surprising given the time of day. This is a place that we’ve generally enjoyed on cruises but for this week in the Mediterranean aboard Emerald Princess our only time spent here was the evening before when we tried the Salty Dog Gastropub, the seating for which takes up the section closest to the corridor.
With that I headed up to the top deck to take photos of the sea, the swimming pools, the Movies Under The Stars screen, and the wake. I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves here because there are only so many times you can say “And then I came upon another pool” or “And this is what the Princess Cruises Sea Witch logo looks like” without it starting to resemble the sort of comments I often find in code I’m looking over in my real-world job, and nobody wants that sort of reminder during a post about exploring a cruise ship.
I will just point out ahead of this photographic cascade that another one of those design tweaks in this ship’s subclass was evident on the top too and it was something that took my wife and I a couple of days to work out. We knew that something was different between this ship and those we’d more recently been on and we eventually twigged that the movie screen was over the aftmost of the two large pools whereas it was over the foremost of the pools on the other ships. I know you probably couldn’t care less but I’m going to leave that little snippet of knowledge remain for posterity. My site, my rules.
Anyway, pretty photos of Emerald Princess.
An area that had had a bit of modernising was around one of the pools and was the last location I photographed on the top deck of the cruise ship before heading back inside. The pizza joint, bar, and burger joint were rebranded as Slice, The Mix, and the Salty Dog Grill, and with that rebranding came some striking and bold black and white designs plus some colourful hearts on one wall. It was a much nicer, less dated look and I’d love to see some more of this styling make its way into other places around Princess ships in the future.
Our favourite artistic flair was the wall area that looked like it needed colouring in. Maybe we’ll take some colouring pencils with us next time. Maybe we’ll get kicked off for vandalising the ship and banned from the fleet. Maybe we won’t do that, after all.
My intention at this point was to rejoin my wife in Crooners and plan what we’d next do but I got distracted at the top of the piazza due to the 60 Second Frenzy taking place. This involved people volunteering to take on challenges against the clock. It wasn’t particularly frenzied looking down on passengers attempting to drop pencils into a bottle. It wasn’t even mildly interesting now that I think about it. But activities don’t need to be mildly interesting on a cruise. They can be utterly mindnumbingly awful. And there’s a sort of charm to that. You kind of have to be there, really.
Before heading back to the room to decide on the afternoon’s activities we had a quick browse through the outlet sale taking place in one of the dining rooms. The only thing to grab my attention were socks with pineapples on them. I didn’t purchase them – pink isn’t really my colour – but I had to take a photograph because the pineapple symbol has an ever-so-naughty connotation on cruise ships and it amused me to see them. If you know what that connotation is then you understand and if you don’t then feel free to ask.
Afternoon At Sea
And so the afternoon came around. I couldn’t persuade my wife to join me for a swim so I enjoyed some quality thrashing about like a spawning salmon time in the Sanctuary pool alone. After that we both decided to grab some lunch in the World Market Place following an aborted attempt to have the Deep Dish Focaccia without chili flakes from the Slice pizzeria. Apaprently, if you’re not a fan of chili then screw you. Thanks, Princess. We picked up a beer and a cider then headed back to our room to watch Captain Marvel on the TV. The free and recently-released movie offerings on Princess ships is something that we have come to really appreciate on these sorts of sea days.
The Mediterranean Sea was as flat as a pancake by the time the movie finished.
We decided at the last moment to head to Club Fusion for the afternoon trivia. We still weren’t really in the right mood for trivia for some reason even though we knew that not taking part would mean that we’d definitely lose our run of having won at least once on every Princess cruise we’d been on. It was something of a shock, therefore, to not only win it but to win it with a perfect score. So untrustworthy were our faces that the staff member running the quiz had to check with the team who’d marked our work to ensure we really had got everything right. I suppose it’s important to show due diligence when the prize is as Earth-shatteringly valuable as rubber coasters of the Emerald Princess. To celebrate our win and to try to get over having had our honour called into question we took our winning prize to Vines for a glass of wine and to be praised by the staff there when they saw we’d been victorious. They didn’t question if we’d cheated.
Evening At Sea
It was time for our Captain’s Circle event. This is something held for those returning passengers on Princess Cruises voyages and can span a couple of days and times depending on just how many people aboard aren’t first-timers. We knew it would never be able to compare to the Captain’s Circle evening we’d had on a Star Princess sea day earlier in the year because there’s no captain quite like Captain Tuvo. Still, Captain Steven Lewis did a fine job and was better than expected with some entertaining jokes.
Of course, you don’t attend these things for:
- the jokes or
- to hear about upcoming ship builds in the fleet or
- the information about how many passengers are aboard or
- to applaud the passengers who’ve spent the most number of days on a Princess ship or
- to think dark thoughts about the passengers who’ve spent the most number of days on a Princess ship or
- to mumble what bastards the passengers who’ve spent the most number of days on a Princess ship are
although all those things will happen. You attend because there’s a chance you might win champagne (it hasn’t happened yet) and because you will get a free drink. Free drinks are good. Even better, when you’ve become friendly with bar staff elsewhere on the ship (and Skywalkers is a great place to do this because it’s a sorely underused place so it’s easy to become memorable quite quickly) you might just get singled out for special treatment and get more drinks than other people. It happened again on this cruise.
Dinu: Hello Mr Mark, hello Miss Marie. Can I get you a drink?
Me: Hey, Dinu, nice to see you! How are you doing!? We’ve already got these ones, thanks.
Dinu: That’s okay. I’ll get some more anyway. What would you like?
Me: I’ve no idea.
Dinu: How about a gin and tonic?
Me: That sounds good. That’s great. Yeah, two of those please.
Tip: the staff will be nice to you but be nice to the staff and they will be nicer to you.
And so to the evening’s dinner plans. You already know what we ended up doing because I’ve thoughtfully included it in the title of the post but that’s not what we wanted to do.
Emerald Princess has two speciality dining venues at the rear of the World Market Place buffet, these being Planks BBQ and Steamers Seafood. We’d anticipated being able to attend both locations during our cruise even though it wasn’t possible to book online ahead of time. We’d assumed quite wrongly that these would be places you could walk up to and see if there was availability as a result but what you’re supposed to do – just like the Salty Dog Gastropub that we also made this mistake on the day before – is book while you’re on the cruise by phoning the number in the Princess Patter. The other thing you’re supposed to do is realise that Planks and Steamers open on alternate nights.
We chanced our arm and wandered up to Planks to find it was closed. We strolled across the landing to Steamers and asked if it was possible to get a table for two. “Well, you’re supposed to book,” answered the woman there there, “but you’re in luck because two people who reserved a table haven’t turned up.”
The cynics in us wondered if that was true but what did it matter? We were seated with a fabulous view of the evening sky to the rear of the ship.
The menu in Steamers isn’t very large so we ended up ordering the same starter and main. Our starter was the Clam & Smoked Ham Chowder while the main was the Princess Broiled Platter, consisting of broiled (that’s grilled to you and me) scallops & shrimp and crab-stuffed flounder with a side of crispy seasoned fries and tangy Old Bay dipping sauce.
Dessert was Key Lime Pie in a Jar while we took advantage of the selection of cocktails available to try the Mermaid’s Wish and a Limoncello Collins.
What’s our verdict on the Steamers Seafood experience? The food was above average but not massively so, so in that respect it’s borderline as to whether we’d consider the cover charge worth it. You can’t fault the portion size if you want value for money, though, but for us it was just slightly too much and we ended up close to bursting at the seams. We’ve found this a common problem on Princess ships – quite possibly because American culture demands huge portion sizes for some bizarre reason – with the exception of Diamond Princess where they target the Japanese culture as well and the portions are far more sensible as a result. Naturally, we don’t have to eat everything but it seems rude not to. And that’s why we put on so much weight on cruises. That and the excessive drinking and the lack of a decent amount of physical exercise.
So full were we that our end-of-evening stint in Skywalkers was a short one and I can’t remember if we got up and danced but it seems unlikely.
This was the last sea day of the cruise with four days in ports and excursions to finish it off coming up. In the next Mediterranean cruise travelogue on Emerald Princess we’ll arrive in the French port of Marseille ahead of a full day’s tour well away from the port.