If in this report you see any typos, misspellings, factual errors or other types of errors, please let me know.
Please include the web address (URL) of the report in which you found the error. Thank you! Send your email to:
Click on each photo on this page for a larger and clearer image or click on the first photo for a slide show.
Puerto Madryn is your gateway to one of South America's largest breeding grouns for birds and mammals - Tombo National Reserve.
Note: Temperatures fluctuate widely in Patagonia. Dress in warm layers, wear sturdy walking shoes or hiking boats and bring a waterproof jacket, hat and bottled water.
Roads outside Puerto Madryn are bumpy and dusty. Transportation are equipped for these conditoins but do not offer customery tour amenities. (Ed. Note: Our tour bus was a modern bus with air conditioning, comfortable seats, seat belts, cup holders, an onboard restroom and even curtains at every seat! Maybe some tour buses don't have customery tour amenities, but ours sure did! They even provided us with 2 bottles of water and a box lunch.)
Thousands of Magellanic penguins return to the shores of the Puenta Tombo Nature Reserve every year. From September through the end of March, they spend their time courting, mating and hatching a brood of chicks. By April, both mature and young penguins are ready to migrate to warmer climates. Quite unfazed by human company, the penguins allow you to get in close for an unparalleled nature viewing experience. Complete your moderate full-day tour with a scenic, 2.5-hour drive back across the Patagonian steppe to your ship.
It was about a 2 hours and 30 minutes over 100 miles bus ride to, and then another 2 hours and 30 minutes over 100 miles bus ride back to the ship, plus around a mile walk to see the penguin roosts, but it turned out to be well worth it!
Based on passenger post-cruise email surveys, an award is given to the crew of the Princess ship that gets the highest passenger satisfaction ratings and the Sapphire Princess has won that award 2 quarters in a row! To celebrate, the Sapphire Princess put on a big party with speeches a huge array of treats as seen below.
My wife and I love live jazz, especially horns and most especially the saxophone. The Sapphire House Band is fantastic and I hope they have a lot more performances that include all 3 horns. I have another website, JazzDens.com where I have documented many of my jazz as well as other live music experiences. It even includes a directory of jazz venues that I have discovered throughout the world.
A couple of our past cruises we have purchased the Princess Premier as it didn't used to be that much more than the Princess Plus. It allowed us to order wine and spirits up to $20 per glass at no extra charge. However, Princess has raised the difference between Princess Plus to Princess Premier so much that it is just no longer worth it for us, especially for long cruises.
We added up the cost of things which we would have purchased anyway such as pre-paid gratuities and 1 WiFi device per person and at least one or two wines or spirits each day. We found the cost for the Princess Plus upgrade, was just a little more than paying for the pre-paid gratuities, WiFi and drinks individually. Also when booking more than a year in advance, the cost of the Princess Plus upgrade was discounted. So the Princess Plus is worth it for us. They have raised the price of Princess Plus since our last sailing and added in some new benefits. However, the additional benefits are totally useless to us and wish they had kept the old lower price. They added in 2 Premium Desserts Per Day Per Person. Considering that both of us rarely ever order and eat even a single desert, even in the Main Dining Rooms or buffet, this was useless for us. They also include Unlimited Juice Bar, but neither of us ever drink any juices. And then they also threw in 2 Fitness Classes each per cruise. Considering we have never taken a fitness class on a cruise (maybe we should), this is also a new added benefit of no use to us. So overall, all the new "benefits" they've added to the Princess Plus upgrade don't justify the increased cost of the upgrade for us. We still purchased it, but are now getting less benefits for more money.
As a side note, whenever we cruise when the Drinks Package is not bundled in with other benefits, we never buy the Drinks Package. I've added up the cost of every drink we have ever purchased on each cruise and it never comes anywhere near the cost of the Drinks Package. We have always ended up saving hundreds of dollars by just buying our drinks separately and not purchasing a drinks package.
The Princess Plus now costs $60 per day per person. That is bad enough, but now the Princess Premier upgrade costs $80 per day per person! We hardly use any of the additional benefits that come with the Princess Premier upgrade so it is definitely not worth the extra $20 per day per person for us. We have no need for 4 WiFi devices each. I already mentioned in a previous post how we manage to keep all our WiFi devices connected even with just the 1 device per person included in the Princess Plus upgrade. We rarely buy photos, eat desserts or drink juice. So those Princess Premier upgrade benefits are useless to us. As far as getting more expensive drinks, or the number of times we go to specialty or casual dining, it is cheaper for us to just pay when we go than pay an extra $40 per day for the two of us. That also goes for just buying our drinks, or paying the diffence between the $15 drink price limit on the Princess Plus upgrade vs. the $20 drink price limit on the Princess Premier upgrade. So we didn't purchase the Princess Premier upgrade for this cruise and I can't see us every purchasing it again on any cruise unless they lower the price significantly or increase the benefits that attract us significantly.
But let's get back to the wine issue and how the Princess upgrade packages tie into this. Just as a side note, on our very first cruise which was right after cruising resumed after the Covid lockdowns ended, I found all of the wines, even the most premium wines, were terrible. I suspect during the many months that cruising was suspended that Princess did not store their wines in properly cooled facilities. Usually wines move relatively fast when the ships are serving thousands of people every day. But if they are stored in warehouses without climate control, or even just left on the cruise ships where air conditioning wasn't at normal levels in order to save on costs while the ships weren't operating, then wines can certainly get ruined. Fortunately that was just a temporary problem. I don't know if Princess just got rid of those bottles of wines or managed to sell through them to people who couldn't tell the difference.
As you can see from the above photos, the only wines available to those with the Princess Plus upgrade within the $15 per glass limit without incurring an extra fee are generic house wines. You can order a type of wine like Pinot Grigio, Riesling, Sauvignon Blanc, Chardonnay, Rose, Pinot Noir, Shiraz, Merlot, Cabernet Sauuvignon, Malbec and Red Blend, but you don't know the brand, vintage or quality of the wine. My wife and I have tried all of the house red wines. There is at least one exception to this. There are some wines under $15 per glass that you can get in the Vines Wine Bar and some of them are pretty good. But the other generic house wines available in most bars on the ship at under $15 per glass are acceptable, but nothing to write home about.
The wines available to Princess Premium upgrade purchasers without extra charge include: Grgich Hills Merlot, Silverado Cabernet Sauvignon, Duckhorn Paraduxx, Belle Glos Pinot Noir and Seghesio Old Vines Zinfandel, all of which my wife and I are familiar with and are excellent! On our prior Princess Round Australia cruise when we did have Princess Premium, these were the wines that we frequently ordered.
My wife and I have decided to start ordering wines from the Princess Premier upgrade selection, even though we have to pay a little extra for them. Fortunately, Princess went with a new policy a few years ago where you can order drinks more expensive than the $15 per drink Princess Plus limit and just pay the difference rather than paying the entire cost of the glass. Tonight we had the Silverado Cabernet Sauvignon from California, which we have had before and were familiar with, and it was excellent! I suspect the quality of the name brand wines on the ship is going to be quite a bit better than the generic house brands. We went to a wine tasting on a prior Princess cruise and one of the benefits was that they gave us certificates for a free wine tasting each at the Silverado Vineyards & Winery. Normally the wine tastings at the Silverado Winery are $70 per person. We happened to be passing near their winery one day and so stopped in. The wines at their winery were excellent and we saved the $70 tasting fee each using those Princess certificates.
My wife and I aren't wine experts, but we probably have a little more knowledge and appreciation of finer wines than the average person. We actually own a vineyard and winery in Missouri called the Silver Rails Vineyards & Winery. It is a long story how we got into that, but we only own the vineyard and winery and don't manage it ourselves. We have a friend who is far more knowledgeable about wine than ourselves that does that. We already owned the land and building that was slated for a totally different purpose, but when that purpose fell through, we had this crazy idea a decade ago to turn it into a vineyard and winery. Well, it is ten years later and we are more into enjoying our retirement and traveling than being bothered with the headaches that go with owning a vineyard and winery. Thus we are selling the business. If you are interested in owning a vineyard and winery, then please do check out SilverRailsWinery.com and SilverRailsProperties.com/winery.
Ever since I started on this trip I've been waking up around 4 AM, usually wide awak and often right on the dot. This is regardless of how early or how late I went to bed the night before. I assume it has something to do with jet lag, but the time of 4 AM does not make a lot of sense to me as that is 11 PM for my home time (Pacific Time) in Vancouver, Washington. It is not like I'm waking up at the usual time I would wake up back home.
Since I'm usually wide awake when I get up at 4 AM, that is when I usually complete the logging of my travels from the previous day. One great advantage of working at 4 AM is that the internet speed is usually extremely good. I guess there are few on the ship awake at 4 AM using their mobile phones or computers that I have to share the ship internet bandwidth. Once I finish my work, I'll have no trouble going back to sleep. On Sea Days my wife and I will usually sleep quite late, often until 11 AM or even much later. We tend to be night owls even at home going out to late night live music and then sleeping in the next morning. Our favorte dive bar back home doesn't start their live music until 9 PM and doesn't end until 1:30 AM.
Anyway, while working on my travelogue this morning and uploading some web pages as well as a video to YouTube, my notebook computer suddenly reported a Google Chrome exception error and then the entire computer powered down. It took about 10 minutes before I could get the computer to power up again. That is something very rare to happen on this computer. It has maybe happened only 2 or 3 times before over the 3 year life of this notebook computer. I do normally keep my notebook computer turned on 24/7, even at home, so possibly something overheated in it. I may try turning it off when not using it in the future to try to avoid a repeat of this problem. It does have a solid state storage drive so I doubt it would be related to a disk crash, but could easily be related to the overheating of some chips.
I did bring along another notebook computer similar in power and features to this one. I figured I'd be dead in the water if anything happened to this computer in the middle of this long cruise. However, I had not updated the content of that computer to match this one since the time we departed on this trip. It would be quite a hassle to download all the changes off the backup to the cloud I make every day to this backup computer. I also brought along an external USB Disk Drive that was updated just before I started this trip. So the first thing I did once my main notebook computer recovered was to back up all the new files to that external USB Disk Drive. If my main computer fails again and refuses to recover, I at least now have an external USB Disk Drive with all the latest changes. It will be fast and easy to apply those changes to my backup notebook computer. I'm definitely glad I thought of bringing along an extra notebook computer and a backup on a USB Disk Drive despite the extra weight in my backpack. The backup of all the new files to the USB External Disk Drive just finished at around 5:30 AM. That took about 30 minutes.
Click on each photo on this page for a larger and clearer image or click on the first photo for a slide show.
If in this report you see any typos, misspellings, factual errors or other types of errors, please let me know.
Please include the web address (URL) of the report in which you found the error. Thank you! Send your email to:
