[PICTURED: Chiara, Toni, and Aaron approach Gaudi's penultimate work, La Pedrera.]

Check out time from the cruise ship is not noon, like at a hotel, because a new set of cruisers starts boarding at 1pm, and they have to clean everything up. So, anyone who wants to carry their luggage off is invited to exit the ship at 6am. Everyone else gets assigned a waiting area – the Princess Theater or one of the big Lounges – and a departure time.  Every five minutes one of the groups is called from one of the waiting areas, so within a few hours all 3,000 passengers have disembarked.

We had breakfast in the Horizon Buffet and then waited in the Explorer’s Lounge for our turn to disembark at 8:35am.

By “we,” I mean Chiara, Sam, Gianna, and me. Aaron and Toni were first off the ship at 6am. They rented a car, drove to the top of Monserrat, enjoyed the views, and then headed north to cross the Spanish border into the tiny country of Andorra. Some microstates – like Liechtenstein, Monaco, and Vatican City are more well known than Andorra. Aaron and Toni were so tired when they returned that I still don’t know much about what they saw in Andorra.

Despite the generally mediocre and occasionally poor quality of the ship's entertainment, and despite the uneven and occasionally ridiculed quality of the food, and despite the incessantly annoying and occasionally despicable marketing, I was broken-hearted to leave the Crown Princess.

Even if the FOOD at the Horizon Buffet is nothing special, the ability to visit the buffet any time you want between 6am and 11pm, as many times as you want, and secure a table next to a giant ocean-view window that would put to shame the best views from fanciest restaurants in most cities, and then get Disney-levels of service, with servers practically competing to refill your drinks, and no bill for any of it, is REALLY special.

I never swam in the pools, I never tried the hot tub, I never went to the spa or the gym. I didn’t do any sunbathing. I spent zero time in any of the lounges drinking, socializing, or listening to the entertainers. I didn’t go out on the dance floor or take any dance lessons. I didn’t play any sports, or participate in any games or trivia contests. I never even tried any burgers or snacks at the Salty Dog Café (which I rue, actually, although I am assured by my companions that the food at the Salty Dog was nothing special).  I used the complimentary room service just once, to order two glasses of water.

It was enough for me to move easily from port to port, conveniently disembark for excursions to amazing places, enjoy every kind of food or snack any time, watch the ocean any time, and sleep in an extremely comfortable bed, breathing the fresh sea air, in a room that was instantly refreshed by Larry any time we left the cabin, with chocolates on the pillow every night.

Under these circumstances, I cannot find it in me to criticize the quality of the lobster, or to bother with the one time Larry did NOT get to our room while we were gone, or to complain that the flavor-set at the gelato bar in the International Café was too small and too static, or that the décor in the specialty restaurants was kitsch or plastic, because I just don’t care about those things.

So, with the exception of the Entertainment, Princess is a good cruise line for me, and cruising is a great vacation for me.

For everyone else it was more a mixed bag, and the ship offered them more annoyances, and more constraints, and more difficulties, than I experienced. In other words, even though we lived through identical circumstances, we experienced those circumstances differently.

For example, on our Mediterranean cruise in the summer, there was practically no ship motion discernable, except when we ran into white caps en route to Montenegro, and I still barely noticed it.  But another person might have to take Dramamine in the same circumstances.

Similarly, the amount of time we spent in port was plenty for me because there are limits to the number of hills I can climb and the number of sites I can see in a day. But someone else might prefer to stop for 2-3 days in each port, which is standard on longer cruises, but not on a week-long cruise like ours.

I was mostly unaware of the 3,000 other people on the boat; as long there was a window seat left for me, I didn’t much notice who was at the next table. But others could not shake the feeling that they were surrounded by Trump voters, which made the whole boat seem icky.

So we have finally come to the heart of the mystery of the wild variations in the cruise reviews.  It is not JUST that some of these people are ungrateful shits, although some are. Instead, there turns out to be extreme variability in people’s preferences and expectations, and some aspects of the cruise experience speak to them, and some aspects enrage them.

Princess aims to deliver a kind of middle-of-the-road experience that pleases all the people some of the time, but few of the people all of the time, and in that they succeed wildly.

Disembarkation

Disembarkation was a breeze. When they finally called our group – Light Blue 1, named for the color and numeral on our assigned luggage tags – we walked down the ramp, off the ship, past the luggage waiting for everyone else (because we carried our own off), and into a waiting cab without stopping.

The cab took us to our hotel in Barcelona – the Alexandra Curio Collection Barcelona by Hilton – which devoured half of my massive accumulation of hotel points in exchange for three rooms times two nights, but still wouldn’t check us in at 9:30am.

So Sam, Gianna, Chiara and I had some ice cream – partly to drown my sorrow at being back on shore, and partly because the Crown Princess had taught us that we could eat anything any time without consequence, and we had not unlearned that yet.

Then we bought subway tickets and found our way to Barcelona’s Archeology Museum, which is Sam’s favorite kind of place, and the rest of us like it, too.

The Archeology Museum of Barcelona is a great little museum, with three substantial exhibits, a great audio tour, and more objects of art and history than we could fully absorb. The pre-history and central American exhibits were outstanding, and the Sex in Ancient Rome debauchery exhibit was probably great, but it reminded me too much of my ride on the Princess Theater just fourteen hours earlier, and I had had my fill.

When we returned to our hotel they checked us in, we loved our rooms, we rested and relaxed, experienced the strangeness of a hotel room that lacked motion, vibration, or a waterfront balcony, and then went for dinner. The Google told Gianna where to eat dinner – a very nearby restaurant called “Toto” – and the Google was absolutely right.

At 11pm, Toni and Aaron, having in the prior sixteen hours from their rented Renault seen more of Catalonia than the rest of us ever will, returned to the hotel exhausted and fell asleep.