We are now at sea, enjoying our first full day of seven days crossing the Atlantic. Weather today is beautiful and warm, and we are feeling very virtuous with our restraint on food choices and our (well, make that Tom’s) determination to stay on track with the exercise program. He is out right now doing his four miles on deck. I am sitting out on the ‘back porch’ watching the ocean.
To continue with yesterday’s saga—The ship had been in drydock last week, and only left the shipyard yesterday morning, arriving in Fort Lauderdale around 7:30. Then came the government inspections; the ship having had some minor changes made meant the entire ship had to undergo a health department inspection. People had been notified by email that boarding would be delayed by a couple of hours, and we were asked not to arrive until 2:00, when they would start boarding. When we arrived at 1:30, there were 1500 people ahead of us in the terminal, which was packed full.
So they put all the newly arriving on-time people into a different terminal across the parking lot, and we all got to wait two hours while they emptied the first terminal before bringing the second terminal occupants back over to the first terminal and actually checking in. This made a lot of people grumpy, particularly since they had not yet eaten and thought they would have been aboard and fed three or four hours earlier. And even the delayed boarding plan ended up being further delayed, with people still coming onboard while they were running the muster drill, and that ran late, so first seating dining was started late, which made everyone else run late.
From what we have seen and from what the staff has told us, most of the changes were related to the implementaion plan for the Ocean Medallion, the new electronic wristband system that Princess (will- eventually-be) using on all its ships. The plan and the implementation are...umm...not matching. All ships were originally supposed to have this up and running in 2018. This trip on the Crown was planned to be using it. But so far, the first ship is still in the testing phase, with only a couple hundred rooms operational, and the ship-wide implementation is now something like six months in the making.
That did not stop them from rewiring much of this ship, however. We have new touch pads outside the doors, there are digital (eventually interactive) screens where the old ship maps used to be in the elevator lobbies, we even have three, count’em three!, little near field infrared gadgets in each stateroom. One in the bathroom (really? 😳!), one in the bedroom and one out on the balcony. I am beginning to understand why some people fear this new technology and want to keep the old-fashioned key cards.
We also got huge new TV’s in each room, 42” or so. It appears these will also someday also be interactive, but as of now it is still the same old system with a bigger display. There is new carpet in the hallways, but they still have a little design detail to distinguish the port and starboard sides. We’ve also seen new atrium decor, carpet and lighting.
The crew from the captain on down has bent over backwards apologizing for the ship being not-quite-ready or up to usual standards, but in reality, what’s missing is minor, correctable stuff; pools not filled until today, hot water was just warm, new carpet fuzz and contruction dust and bits and blobs here and there...all madly being tidied up by regular staff as well as a slew of contractors working on the Ocean Medallion program.
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