Day 04 - Wed - 11/05/2025 - At Sea to Funchal - Day 3

 On this our final sea day before reaching Funchal, we got up early enough for breakfast and to attend Sue Beard's Port Talk on Santa Cruz de la Palma & Arrecife, Lanzacote which are our last two ports of call in the Canary Islands.   Once again she did a wonderful job giving background history and highlights of things to see and do with subtle recommendations about ship sponsored shore excursions.  We ended up booking one of the excursions based upon her presentation.  I'll write about that one when we visit the island.  Also, the shore excursions staff were passing out 10% discount coupons on any shore excursions booked that day.  One could book it on the APP, but one had to go to the shore excursions desk to claim the discount.  This I did.










At 11:15am Matt interviewed four members of the food and beverage team.  It was somewhat surprising to learn that the alcohol consumption on this predominantly British guest cruise is about 1/3 higher than a typical predominantly American voyage. They also talked about the challenge of missing the two ports especially since there were 5 containers to be loaded at Vigo.  Some of those items will be shipped to our turnaround port of Southampton. And fortunately much of the container contents were technical supplies.  In the Q&A section, a passenger commented on the very slow service in the LIDO Marketplace and the possibility of being understaffed.  The person responsible for that area totally disregarded her comment and said that the area is properly staffed.  I agreed with her comments and spoke to her after the session and told her I agreed with her and that I had observed it on the 6 Princess cruises we have been on.  


After a quick lunch, we attended the Deal/NODeal game show in the Princess Theater.  I must have been tired as I don't remember any of the outcomes other than the players didn't do very well.  


I went down to Guest Services to inquire about some issues on our account.  While there I mentioned that I've found the LIDO service to be very slow.  The representative asked me if he could take a report and I agreed.  Later on after dinner a staff member, Waldo, stopped me and pulled me aside to inquire about the issues I reported.  I explained to him my observations and he seemed sympathetic,but we'll see if anything really changes.  As of this writing a couple days later, I would say that nothing much has changed. It was interesting with the Princess Medallion technology, one can be tracked down!  


At dinner, there was a cool ice sculpture of a tower. Also, I was able to get a reasonably decent picture of the sunset as the storm clouds abated somewhat.  The weather is getting warmer as we continue to head south.    

We attended Nate Simpson's second and new show at 8pm with the Beard's.  Afterwards I headed to the Piazza to listen to the ABBA tribute song set and sat with the Beards for part of it in the Crooner's Lounge.  The Mockingbird group was really good and did a good tribute to ABBA.  Afterwards I joined Angela in Princess Live for the first round of Voice of Ocean.  Round two will be tomorrow night.  There were some powerful singers in that group.

Nate Simpson after the show

It was then time to return to the room and try to get some sleep.  We're planning on doing a lot of walking tomorrow as we return to Funchal for the second time in a couple weeks. 

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