Time to Go Cruising!!

After months of anticipation, Saturday, boarding day, dawned bright and sunny, and Serenity was gone from the Passenger Terminal!!! But that was expected.....

Over the last five or six years, Sydney has become a very busy cruise port as the lines all send new and bigger ships to the South Pacific. That is all well and good, except Sydney has exactly two cruise terminals, and one of those is on the "wrong" side of the Harbour Bridge at White Bay! Crystal had both ships in Sydney this weekend as a turnaround point for both ships' World Cruises. Symphony fits under the bridge and so was a White Bay. In THEORY Serenity will fit under the bridge at the lowest tide, but it has never actually been attempted in practice for one very good reason. What happens if it gets under but, because of tides or timing issues, it can't get back out??? Serenity was able to use the Overseas Passenger Terminal of Friday as scheduled, but Carnival Spirit, a much BIGGER ship was coming is Saturday, so Serenity was "banished" to the Athol Buoy, an anchorage across from the Opera House, and she moved there at 5:00 AM Saturday morning.

A "turnaround day" is always a challenge for a ship as one group of passengers (and all their luggage!) gets off, then a second (and all THEIR luggage!) gets on. Now add in having to do all of this using smaller boats to shuttle everyone and everything between ship and shore! Two things did make this a bit easier. First, this is a World Cruise, so about half the passengers were staying on the ship. Second, they were able to offload all the luggage for disembarking passengers Friday evening at the same time as they reprovisioned the ship.

Usually embarkation is a case of getting a taxi to the peir, then "hurry up and wait" until you finally complete the boarding formalities. This time we took a taxi, a bus, and finally a small Captain Cook Harbour Ferry, and it all went surprisingly well, considering the process did not get finalized, including changing the embarkation location for the Captain Cook boats, until five days before we left for Sydney!

We left the hotel at 11:45 and were in our suite on the ship a little after 2:00. Our bags didn't arrive until 3:15, but even that was something of a surprise as we had only hoped they would arrive before dinner! So there we were, all unpacked and moved in for 39 days, and all before 4:30 in the afternoon!

For most of our previous cruises on Crystal we have booked standard Balcony rooms, which are about 275 Sq Ft. We had also moved up to the Penthouse rooms for a couple of longer cruises, giving us about 400 Sq Ft. This being the longest cruise we have ever attempted, we decided to go for a Penthouse Suite, which clocks in at 540 Sq Ft and includes a separate sleeping area. We had never even been in one of these before, and we must say we are impressed!

Bedroom area with drapes to close it off.

The sitting area with a small dining table, couch, chair and bar area.

View from the balcony door. Very roomy.

Our balcony. We have had larger, but we've also had
much smaller.. This is a very comfortable size.

There are four larger Crystal Penthouse Suites that are almost 1,400 Sq Ft, with a price to match!! They usually price around $200K/person for the full World Cruise, and interestingly, are almost always the first ones to be booked. And NO, we did not even think about it!!!

As usual, boarding Serenity is a little like coming home, and we started seeing familiar faces almost as soon as we came aboard. And as always, greeted with a big smile and a "Welcome back, welcome home". We don't pretend to know how they remember names and faces, we were last on Serenity in September of 2016, but they do, and it is one of the reasons we keep coming back.

After having the first full day of the cruise at anchor in Sydney, the net two days were at sea, with the usual selection of lectures and activities. We'll get onto those in the next post.