After two days crossing the Caribbean Sea we sadly awoke to the fact that we’d reached Florida. Sad because it was the end of the cruise, and sad because it was Florida which is right down the bottom of the list of US states we ever wanted to actually visit, although since neither of us had before it was at least handy to say that we had, even if thankfully briefly.

Ends of cruises are never good but this one stands out as being worse than most we’ve experienced.

With an early evening flight from Miami airport we’d arranged to take an excursion first before being dropped off at the airport, and of the couple of choices available we opted for the airboat ride on the Florida Everglades, home to alligators. The first issue came immediately after getting off the ship, picking up our luggage, and heading to where we needed to meet the bus that would be taking us on our debark tour. The meeting spot was exposed and it was very hot and sunny this early in the morning. Not a problem if there’s a bus to get on but there wasn’t, and ours didn’t turn up for close to half an hour.

Upon arriving at Everglades Holiday Park we then discovered that for one of our tour group’s passengers the bus was completely unsuitable for him. He’d had assistance to get on the bus by officials at the port, but getting him off and into his wheelchair at the park required several of us fellow passengers helping to carry and support him. Undignified for him, legally shaky for everyone else involved. This was a tour advertised as suitable for wheelchairs, and that will get another mention soon.

We were there for the two experiences of riding on an airboat and seeing alligators, and we weren’t the only ones with plenty of other groups present. Our guide assured us that we were in the queued slots and when a boat became available we’d be called forward but in the meantime we had some opportunity to try to hunt down any bit of shade we could and look out for the famed wildlife of the area. Birds, there were plenty, and we spotted a turtle while another passenger had an encounter with a dragonfly that looked a little the worse for wear, but no alligators yet, and time kept ticking while other groups set off on their noisy boat rides then school children turned up and were bumped ahead of everyone into the next set of boats and people started muttering about just how long this was all taking. The plan had been for an airboat ride then a show where alligators and other animals were shown off so someone asked if we could do the show first since it was taking so long. “No, don’t worry, there will still be time afterwards,” our guide assured us all.

Finally, we got the nod that we could head down to the boarding area and we all did so. You can see the sort of airboats that are used for these cruise debark tours below; large, flat, with benches spread across. It would turn out that getting reasonable views was fine because the boat wasn’t overfilled with passengers, instead spreading them out so a couple could sit on one side of a bench and a couple could sit on another.

Well, most couples. To get into the airboat you had to step off the wooden jetty and down into the space between the benches, ducking your head to avoid the scaffolding framework around. You need to have some mobility to do this and people in wheelchairs who’ve needed to be carried off a bus don’t have enough. Not only that, but the cramped conditions and just common sense levels of safety stopped any of us from being able to help the poor guy in. For him, this wheelchair-accessible debark tour was a complete waste of time and money. A terrible situation for Princess Cruises to allow to happen.

Our boat driver introduced himself to muted replies from a group of passengers increasingly disappointed with how the tour was going and then explained that since he’d been told he needed to get us back by a certain time he’d have to change the planned hour-long airboat ride and give us the express version at less than half that duration. The groans were loud.

We started to move out slowly and during this I took some photos, including one of this building you see in the picture below. I like industrial buildings. What I hadn’t realised at the time was that on the grass in front of the building, above the cormorant with its wings spread out, there is an alligator enjoying the sunshine in very much the same way we weren’t.

That alligator would turn out to be the only alligator we saw on this tour and we hadn’t even realised it at the time. The express excursion involved a few examples of several minutes of rapid airboat-thundering across long stretches of water – which was actually very nice, particularly because the cooling breeze was very welcome – followed by several drifting periods around known alligator hang-out areas. The sort of areas that alligators could usually be found during the cooler parts of the early part of the day or a bit later but not, as it turned out, right at this particular, quite hot time we were out on the water, it being close to an hour and a half later than we’d initially expected.

The plant-life in the Everglades was fairly interesting and there were some nice reflections around groups of trees, as you can see below, but this tour had not really been advertised as “See grass up close” and all attempts by our airboat driver to get some group interactions going fell on disappointed ears.

You can’t guarantee wildlife sightings, of course, but it was impossible not to think that better organisation, a bus on time, and no wasted time and effort helping someone when this should all have been catered for by the tour group, and we might have got on the ride earlier, had the full time allotted to us, and increased our chances of seeing alligators in the wild. We’d have had longer out in the Florida Everglades on the water and not standing around in the searing sunshine at the very least. Most of us, anyway.

At least we had the show to watch now. Only we didn’t because the current show was in progress and full and we didn’t have time to wait around for the next one. At this point there were some angry comments from some passengers demanding their money back (that wasn’t going to happen) and saying they’d be complaining to Princess about it (and I hope they did because we certainly did afterwards, albeit to no effect). Princess Cruises are usually quite good at responding to issues like this but on this occasion they completely dropped the ball.

Our guide took us around the back of the show and we briefly glimpsed an alligator, some rabbits, and some tortoises, but that was it.

To hammer the final nail into this coffin containing an absolute shambles of a cruise debark tour we came within a whisker of not being dropped off at our airport terminal because our hapless guide decided to stop using the microphone to announce where the bus was. It was only when I spotted what looked like the Virgin Atlantic logo near where we were briefly stopped that I had to shout down the bus to find out why we were where we were and realised that we needed to get off.

The airport and flight home were, thankfully, unremarkable, although we were treated to a lovely sunset from our seat window as we bid a very fond farewell to Florida.

And that concludes the travelogues for this cruise.

The DJ aboard the ship was appalling and we hope he never works for a cruise line again, and this debark tour was remarkable just in how bad it was, but those are really the only low points to mention. Managers and bar staff on the ship were otherwise superb and we’d meet many of them again a year later on another cruise, and it was lovely to tick off another of the Grand-class ships operated by Princess. Highlights of experiences off the ship were, of course, transiting the Panama Canal, having a great time on our excursion in Cabo San Lucas, flying in a day early for the first time, and getting to visit Colombia for the first time too.

The evening in Fisherman’s Wharf had been warm and dry and… absolutely nothing like the morning that greeted us. The hotel lobby was busy with people who were clearly looking to board the ship too given the luggage tags on their bags, but they were also all sitting around and waiting for taxis. It was a ten minute walk to the port so we didn’t want to waste money on calling a cab, but we also weren’t keen on getting soaked and the rain was persistent, if not too heavy. Decisions, decisions.

We ended up hanging around for perhaps half an hour, hoping for a break in the rain, and one eventually came so we risked it and started walking. Faster than we’d have liked, but not too fast as we had cases and this was America, where cars are king and pedestrians are an afterthought.

We were getting a little damp but it wasn’t too bad until suddenly it started to tip it down again. At this point we were walking along the waterfront but still a few minutes from the pier we needed. Fortunately, there was an overhang we could scoot under so we did and it was nice to at least take a breather from our quick pace. It wouldn’t do to twist an ankle right at the start of a cruise, after all. We saw that we weren’t the only idiots wheeling luggage around in the San Francisco rain so that made us feel slightly better.

The rain eased off again and we started walking. We’d been able to see the ship for a while – cruise ships are not small things – and now we could make out the pier entrance as there were coaches unloading passengers and taking cases down to be brought aboard.

As we got close to where cases needed to be handed over to the pier workers we saw one of those workers wheel a cart loaded with passengers’ cases from a bus towards the dock area. As it bumped over a bit of paving the top case came loose and dropped into a shallow puddle. I shouted and waved, another guy shouted. The worker stopped, looked back at the case, then turned around and carried on walking with his cart, leaving the bag there in the water. That was utterly shocking to us and it didn’t put us in a good frame of mind with the workers there.

Fortunately, when a worker came to take our bags and held out his hand for a tip only for me to say “Sorry, we aren’t carrying any cash” we got a look of disgust that evened things up a bit. I mean, it’s actually true; we weren’t carrying cash to tip someone just for doing their job because we live in a civilised part of the world that pays its employees properly so it’s simply not something we think of doing.

There was a bit of a queue inside the building which gave us a little bit of time to dry to dry out but we were soon aboard and, because the ship had come straight from dry dock, the rooms were all ready for us already. We unpacked our hand luggage, freshened up a little, then did the first important thing: stepped onto the balcony to post a photo of the view and boast to those back home and on social media. Okay, the view was a bit grey but we were on a cruise ship, and a Grand-class cruise ship at that (the best class), and on the C deck (the one with the double-sized, half-covered balconies), so we were very, very happy.

It was nice to see Alcatraz from our balcony. We’d seen it the night before, but obviously it had been a little darker. That is the nature of night. Were we to do another cruise out of San Francisco in the future we might consider a day or two earlier to include some tourist activities including a visit to the island.

The first important thing had been to post photos from the cabin. The second important thing, after a quick side quest to complete our muster, was to go and get a drink and post another photo. As it was a bit muggy and we were still a little soggy and the ship’s interior was busy with people boarding we decided for a change to go and grab a drink from around the quiet pool area. A 24K Gold Margarita for me – it’s become one of my go-to drinks to start any Princess Cruises cruise – but my wife’s choice of a Dirty Banana would have to wait as they hadn’t loaded the bananas at this point. She suffered with a Prosecco.

Ruby Princess had just come out of dry dock and we were interested in seeing if there was anything obviously new about her, with the understanding that we hadn’t actually been on her before so this would all be a bit of guesswork. Or it would have been if we hadn’t started having a nice chat with the bar steward who told us all the things that had changed: lowered bar areas for wheelchair users was one, big revamp of the casino, new carpets and furnishings around much of the ship, and some other elements. There’s a little more detail on the post-cruise write-up of immediate thoughts I wrote at the conclusion of the cruise (see: Ruby Princess Dry Dock Changes) but we wanted to check out Skywalkers as we knew we’d be spending a lot of time there. The carpet was clearly new, an obvious big change, and markedly different from any other Skywalkers we’d been in.

Heading down we then popped into Adagio, expecting that to have been freshened up too. No would be the answer there. It was quite jarring how old it all looked in contrast with a lot of the rest of the ship. Then again, we would find out it was a very little-used venue. When we’d cruised on Crown Princess and had an aft balcony for our Baltic cruise in 2017 this had been a great spot in a convenient location to get a drink away from the main drag, especially before hitting the nightclub, but it felt very neglected on this cruise and that’s likely why no money was spent on revamping it.

Next door to Adagio was Sabatini’s Italian restaurant, looking very bright and clean. We would be visiting here on the cruise. We always do.

Time for the sail away and the balcony was the place to be for it. We also had our cases waiting for us by now so we could unpack properly and, of course, with the drinks packages that Princess offer and the ability to order drinks directly to our room that’s precisely what we did.

Are you a cruise line that doesn’t provide any way to order drink directly to a room for no additional charge? Sort that out, won’t you?

We were looking forward to passing a little closer to Alcatraz and we were looking forward to cruising under the Golden Gate Bridge – it’s always nice to cruise under a bridge on a cruise – but the most joy we actually had on the sail out was being accompanied by pelicans flying in formation just off our balcony. Whether they had learned that ships provide a handy updraught to make flying easier or whether they just thought that our ship was one giant pelican, who can say? It was, regardless, utterly fascinating to see us at the head of a line of birds sailing out of San Francisco Bay. An avian honour guard.

The evening aboard Ruby Princess was spent eating and drinking. Don’t believe me? Is this your first time here? Well then…

Naturally, we had to hit Skywalkers once it started up.

First nights are always a bit quiet – not that Skywalkers ever gets that busy anyway – so it was easy to see a few people come in and sit down but not get noticed by the bar staff. In fact, because they weren’t noticed they then left after about ten minutes.

I decided to post on Instagram with a little “Hey, Princess, maybe tell your staff to be a bit more alert in the nightclub!” type of rant. If these were first-time cruisers with Princess then it wasn’t setting a good impression. I was being helpful. Sort of.

Now, the thing about posting messages on Instagram in a dark club, at the end of a long day, with a fair bit of drinking, on your phone, and with an app with a terrible single-line input box is that typos are possible. I published the post, read it back, saw a typo immediately, got annoyed with myself, also realised it was perhaps a bit unfair and maybe a smidge too ranty as this was the first night, so deleted it. That post was visible to the public for less than ten seconds, but I had tagged Princess’s media team in it. This is important. And the reasons I’m mentioning all this is that this event will be making a reappearance in a later post in this cruise travelogue series.

In the next post from this Ruby Princess cruise series I’ll cover a couple of sea days as we head south towards Mexico with some speciality dining and sea activities to describe amongst some photos from around the cruise ship too.