🇺🇸 Departure day finally arrived after months of hectic preparations, planning as many port excursions as possible, and getting together everything we might need for a four month cruise. Although this was billed as a "World Cruise" we saved substantially by booking what proved to be four consecutive cruise segments: LA to Perth; Perth to Rome; Rome to Fort Lauderdale, and Fort Lauderdale through the Panama Canal back to LA. Once we began the cruise, however, we found that it was split into five segments, with the first ending in Sydney and the second ending in Cape Town. Of the 2200 passengers, only about 900 were doing the World Cruise, with half of those starting in Fort Lauderdale, and half in Los Angeles. Some adopt a theme on their World Cruise, and ours became "Bicycling 'Round The World."

The cruise's Facebook page was a good source of information, and Rich became one of its administrators. He was able to advertise many of his planned bike rides on it and attracted a pool of about 20 passengers who signed up for various biking excursions, as well as some non biking ones. It was nice to get to know some of the people very early on in the cruise. Many other passengers used the page to attract interest in shipboard activities and shore excursions. The Princess excursions, although guaranteed to return to the ship in time, were typically at least twice as expensive and crowded with busloads of people compared to the smaller independent groups.

Our friends Al and Barb expertly and calmly drove us up from Oceanside and dropped us off at the cruise terminal in San Pedro, along with our six suitcases and several other bags. Once aboard we were hungry and went straight to the delicious Horizon buffet, then began getting acquainted with our new Island Princess home and our very aft balcony cabin, Aloha 725 on the 12th floor. Our cabin steward, Sanju from Goa, India, turned out to be the best ever, efficient, intelligent and congenial. Thankfully he stayed on almost to the end of our journey. The Island's buffet is on Lido deck 14, one floor up (there's no 13), and all the way forward past the two pools. The main dining rooms are also located forward, on decks 5 and 6. That proved to be a good thing as we were forced to walk off many of the calories that we consumed. The smoothest walk across the entire ship was on Decks 6 or 7, containing all restaurants, clubs and shops, and no cabins. Deck 7 has a nice covered wooden walkway around much of it, that creates a great scenic walking track that Rich would come to utilize occasionally, listening to various nautical themed playlists on his ipod as he walked 3.2 laps per mile next to the sea. The pickleball/basketball court is on deck 15, a bit funky with nets at the baseline, but very playable.