Long time no blog. I wonder why. Not much has happened, has there? Let’s just say it was a very loooonnnnggg 18 months. We had a back to back (B2B) cruise booked for April, 2020. In fact, we were going to be traveling with two other couples during one of the legs. Canceled.
Per Princess, they were expecting the pause to last until mid May, so we booked Alaska. Canceled. Let’s try Europe for the summer. Canceled. Another B2B for October. Canceled. The only good thing was that Princess offered 150% Future Cruise Credits (FCC) if we kept the money with them. Since we had the cruises budgeted out, we went for the FCC’s.
So not only was the industry shutdown, ships were anchoring off the coast in Long Beach. On one day, we counted 7 ships, mostly Princess. Talk about adding salt into the wound. So close, yet so far. We took weekly drives across town to see ships docked in San Pedro. Sad, but kept the dreams alive that someday, they’d be back.
Finally, with the pause ending in sight, we booked Ruby Princess for Sept. 18th and Majestic Princess for October 30th. Another cancelation… Ruby was being transferred to its new home in San Francisco.
Since I already had time off booked for the week of Sept. 18th, we looked for an alternate on Princess but none we could do in that time frame. We had exactly 14 days before becoming Elite on Princess and 14 days booked, so we really wanted to find a way to make this work. We have a 15 Day Hawaiian cruise booked for April, 2022 and wanted to board as Elite (free laundry) instead of having to wait until our next cruise.
Well, drop back and punt. The Carnival Panorama was sailing out of Long Beach on Sept 18th and going on the same itinerary, so we booked it.
The Veranda Life 