Set the alarm clock for 5:30am and woke up earlier - possibly just a bit excited!
Taxi arrived on time, no hassles with the bus trip to Sydney although 3 1/2 hours is a long time to sit in one uncomfortable seat. Got a train to Circular Quay and dropped our suitcases off a little after 11:30am.
As "Platinum" cruisers with Princess, in theory we can board any time we like after boarding starts. However, they did set a time for each deck to board, and we decided to stick to that. So we went back to a restaurant we ate at before our last cruise, and had another delicious lunch there - along with a lot of people waiting to board the ship, many of whom didn't know that you could drop your suitcases off long before boarding time. Suitcases everywhere!
We also wandered around towards the Rocks to get a picture of the back of the ship - because this time we have an aft balcony cabin, so we'll be looking back at where we've been. These are really popular cabins and I can already see why - the balcony is huge compared to most and the view is really cool. If you click on this photo you should be able to see a red arrow pointing at our cabin.
The Platinum thing did give us really quick access to the ship though once we finally tried to board. There were five separate queues - to get into the building, to get up to the check in area, to actually check in, to go through Customs and to go through security. We got to bypass the first four queues - it took us about 20 minutes in total and by the look of the queues the normal time would have been more than an hour.
We found our cabin and then went for a walk around the ship, just trying to get our bearings again. Lost cause really, even though we have been on this ship before we still took some time to find everything. No real plans for this evening though; it's quite surprising that I'm even up for typing this because usually the Travacalm would have knocked me out by now.
Anyway, I'll post more about the ship over the next couple of days; sea days so we don't propose to do too much. If you don't see anything from me it's probably because the forecast I saw was correct - they were suggesting that around the time we get to New Zealand we'll be sailing through 10 metre waves!! Let's hope the forecast is mistaken (not just because of the potential for me to be drugged out with Travacalm) - waves that big would probably stop us from going into the Fiords and even though we've seen them before I'd be disappointed if we missed them.
