We would be treated to a fair number of sea days on our 2023 cruise aboard Ruby Princess and the trip started with two of them back-to-back. Given the long day of travelling we’d had just before we boarded the ship in San Francisco we weren’t disappointed by this.
Sea days on cruise ships for us follow a fairly standardised pattern now which involves getting up, taking reading material and camera with us, grabbing some breakfast, then making ourselves comfortable somewhere to give our cabin steward enough time to get our room cleaned. I might head off to take some photos and we might take a peek at any activities going on if they’re nearby and sound sufficiently entertaining. We’ll hit all the trivia quizzes if we can, we’ll swim if the conditions are good enough, and we’ll probably start drinking by mid-afternoon.
One thing that Princess Cruises do on sea days is hold an afternoon tea. It’s free – not the more fancy, paid-for event you can get on other ships – but the variety of savoury and sweet snacks is good and the tea itself is a marked improvement on most of the other hot beverage options on the ship. On this sea day aboard Ruby Princess we were seated at a table of eight with a group of American women.
Something we had been looking forward to on this cruise was getting to watch some American Football games on the main deck. This isn’t something we’d been able to do before as all our other cruises prior to this sailed in the wrong time zone or at the wrong time of the year to enjoy this experience. What was even better on this occasion was that my wife’s team, the Vikings, was taking on San Francisco, of whom there were a lot of fans aboard. And what was even better than that was that the Vikings won.
We decided on this first sea day to treat ourselves to a meal at the Salty Dog gastropub. There was nothing wrong with anything we ate or drank but neither of us were blown away with the food.
To the second sea day now and a source of general entertainment was provided by way of the egg drop challenge in the piazza. The goal of this, if you’re unfamiliar with the event, is to construct an apparatus that will allow an egg to survive a drop from the upper tier of the atrium space, and to get as close as possible to a target below. Some people go for cushioning systems and others try to float the egg down by way of a parachute, and you can usually count on a few disasters.
A general rule on Princess ships is that when you reach Elite status (fifteen cruises or one hundred and fifty days at sea) you must mention that you’re Elite at every opportunity. We’re Elite – see – and one of the perks – if it can really be called that – is a free wine-tasting event on one of the sea days. This took place on this second sea day on Ruby and while these things have wines that vary in quality from terrible to just about sippable, they are often fun if you can sit by people similarly criticising the wine, and that was the case here.
It was formal night on Princess – they’re not a cruise line that clamps down on you and shoves you out of venues if you don’t dress formally (cough, P&O, cough) – so that meant an obligatory Vodka Martini for me, and I did actually don the tuxedo for the night. We’d also booked the Crown Grill for dinner and they never disappoint although this meal was memorable for the clouds of smoke that came billowing into the restaurant towards the end necessitating some windows getting opened to let it all escape outside. Something burning somewhere but none of the staff seemed too concerned so we weren’t either.
In the next post in this cruise travelogue series we’ll arrive at the first port of call and a new one for us, Cabo San Lucas in Mexico, where we head off on an excursion to Todos Santos.