We are still trying to recover from the six hour time change and the 23 hour long day we had last Friday flying home. Stephanie has pretty well recovered from her mild cold, but now I seem to be coming down with something. It is no wonder, after having been subjected to drastic changes in weather, lack of sleep, and exposure to lots of people in confined spaces as we traveled home.
We continue to refine the blog, having added some trip videos that can be accessed from the right sidebar menu. We have completed all of the write-ups for the last two days, and added photos, as well as adding photos to all of the Photo Albums. We have added new slider images from this trip to the main page, replacing the older ones we loaded up from our previous trips.
I have begun to try and proof read the posts, but that is a tedious effort. However, I will try and review one or two a day until we are complete.
Here are some interesting facts from the cruise, provided in a Log Of The Cruise by Princess on the last night.
The total distance we traveled from Ft. Lauderdale to Hamburg was 4,678 nautical miles, or 5,380 Statute miles.
The table below shows each segment, the distance traveled, and the average speed of the ship.
| Sailing | Distance Traveled(Nautical Miles) | Distance Traveled (Statute Miles) | Average Speed (Knots) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Port Everglades to Ponta Delgada | 2,858 | 3,287 | 18.9 |
| Ponta Delgada to Le Havre | 1,347 | 1,549 | 16.5 |
| Le Havre to Zeebrugge | 174 | 200 | 18.2 |
| Zeebrugge to Rotterdam | 85 | 98 | 16.7 |
| Rotterdam to Hamburg | 214 | 246 | 10.1 |
We had one day at sea, April 11, 2017, that was the windiest, with Force 7 winds on the Beaufort Scale, which is in the range of 28-33 knots, classified as “Near Gale” and waves in the range of 5-6 meters, or 16.5-19.5 feet. We also had six sea days with Force 6 winds, which at in the range of 22-27 knots. Overall, it was a fairly smooth crossing, those winds are fairly light compared to some we have seen on previous crossings. It never felt rough, but there were a couple of days where we had large sea swells from the side, and the ship rolled a little back and forth.
I have tried in the past to determine how much fuel is burned by a ship on a Transatlantic crossing, but even with using the internet, there is a lot of controversy in the calculation, and nothing conclusive. I am sure it is quite a bit, but the consensus is that per passenger, including the crew, it is not bad on a per person basis.
We save all of our credit card receipts, and have gone through all of them to reconcile against the charges we see online at the credit card website, just to make sure that there were no unusual charges. It looks like the average exchange rate was about $1.065 to 1.00 Euro, not too bad. We only had one charge that caused us a little trouble to figure out, it was the two tolls for crossing the Pointe Normandie Bridge, which showed up as a single charge instead of two separate charges.
We came home with about Euro 150.00, which is about average, we always like to have some in our possession for the next trip, it keeps us from having to go to an ATM right away. With the current exchange rate, it is worth keeping them ourselves instead of paying a bank here in the US to get them for us, which we have never done.
We may try and calculate the total cost of the trip, but we usually don’t bother, it does not really mean anything, we did what we wanted, we did not do anything extravagant, and got a good deal on the cruise and airfare anyway.
This will probably be the last April Transatlantic cruise we do for a while. We really struggled with the time change again, and overall, this trip’s weather was much cooler than last April’s Transatlantic, but both were on the cool side. It is just a tough time of the year in Europe, it can be sunny and warm, but more than likely, will be cool and rainy. The ports we visited were great, and we got to see new things and really enjoyed Berlin.
However, in comparison, we really enjoyed the warmer weather on the October Transatlantic last year, it was warm in Europe, and even warmer on the sea days crossing the Atlantic, and we gained the six hours of time change on the ship instead of losing six hours going westward.
However, we won’t ever count out another April Crossing, good deals may be had, and we may get to see even more locations, possibly staying on for a Baltic Cruise, which we should have done last year in April, many fellow passengers stayed on for another week and went to St. Petersburg, Russia.
One thing we do know is we will never do another cruise to Europe that has port days at our near to Easter. This was probably our biggest disappointment, not the weather. It was just too crowded in Honfleur, Bruges, and Amsterdam. Berlin was not too bad, it is big enough to handle the crowds, but we both got tired of fighting our way around in the smaller destination cities. Had it been sunny, maybe it would have taken off the edge a little, but cloudy, rainy, cold, and crowded was a little too much.
We both decided that the trip to the cliffs in Etretat, France was our favorite stop. It was great and would have been awesome with sunny skies. We will definitely put that on the list to do again if we go to Le Havre again.