Family B2B Cruise - June 24-25, 2022 - At Sea Day and Turnaround Day

I continued my streak of catching the sunrise each morning.

This Masked Booby circled the ship this morning.

On turnaround day (the day most passengers disembarked and new ones embarked) it was an early morning for me as the captain indicated we had booked a 4:45 a.m. pilot for our docking in Port Everglades.  Not many people were up this early, except for three teenage boys which seemed a bit odd - maybe they had yet to go to sleep....

Pilot boat

We were the first ship to arrive but the Allure of the Seas followed shortly after.

There wasn't much of a sunrise because of how cloudy it was but I did get to watch a cargo ship come in.  

Then, as we were heading to breakfast, I saw the Infinity finally come into port.  The Infinity was coming in to pick up its first passengers since the pandemic.  With the sailing of this ship, Celebrity's entire fleet is now back in service!

While everyone else was scurrying around with luggage on the disembarkation day, I relaxed with a Mimosa (light on the orange juice).  ;)

At 9:45 a.m., as an in transit passenger, we met in the theater and then were escorted off the ship.  We were required to go through customs and the ship had to get to a zero passenger count and then we were escorted back on.

By 11:15 a.m., we were the first ones in the pool and servers were anxious to bring us drinks. 

Can you tell which one of these is a Zero Mojito and which is a regular Mojito?  I'm surprised the ship still had mint at the rate my nephew had been ordering Zero Mojitos!

We had a great time in an empty pool and then took my nephew to lunch in the Main Dining Room.  We spent the rest of the day wandering through public spaces and then finding spaces to escape as we got the feel for what this week's passengers would be like.  It's interesting how the vibe can change from week to week with different people on board.

Both weeks, the ship sailed at close to full double occupancy.  Double occupancy for the Caribbean Princess is 3,142.  That number often goes much higher in the summer when more families sail and more rooms have 3rd and 4th passengers.  But with COVID, they are still holding back a portion of the Aloha deck for potential isolation rooms.  Week one there were 2,992 passengers.  Week two there were 2,978 passengers.  About 500 people were on both weeks (it was a bit surprising to learn only 160 people were back-to-back when we departed, given the July 4th holiday was part of that week).  We also later learned that at least for the second week more than half of the passengers were new to Princess (about 1,500).

We were able to get our same table and servers in the main dining room for dinner which was nice.  The line was still long for those with reservations.  Hopefully they will get the kinks figured out for their new Dine My Way system as it doesn't work very well right now in many dining rooms especially on ships that are mostly full.