In October 2025 we took a spur of the moment cruise from Vancouver down to San Diego and back. Since a lot of Canadians are not visiting the US these days it was a good deal. It was the first time we’ve cruised out of Vancouver, and it was amazing to pack in the morning, grab an Uber, and be on the ship in 30 minutes.
We sailed on this ship, The Coral Princess, twice before, to Alaska with Pamela in 2003, and through the Panama Canal with Dani in 2005. The ship has been kept up very well, and the service was very good. We’ve grown accustomed to the high quality food on Oceania, and Princess is certainly no match for that, but we purchased the premier package that let us dine in the specialty restaurants as much as we wanted, so it was fine.
Normally we don’t bother much with cruise ship photos, but since they were included in the package we had some fun with them.
We didn’t get off the ship in Seattle since we can go there any time, but we did enjoy a few hours in San Francisco, and visited our favorite spot for Irish coffee, The Buena Vista Cafe.
San Francisco’s tourist area is pretty much the same, but it has been several decades since we were there and I was impressed by how much redevelopment has occurred in the Embarcadero.
Sailing under the Golden Gate is always beautiful.
In San Diego we did our only excursion, which was to one of the few wine regions in the US we hadn’t been to, Temecula. The tour guide was a retired engineer with interesting history stories, but the tour turned out to be disappointing.
The “catered” lunch at Peltzer Winery turned out to be gas station pre-packaged sandwiches.
Wilson Creek Winery is a beautiful facility with a nice tour, but their wines are definitely made for non-wine enthusiasts—just sugar bombs. The weirdest one was a sparking wine flavored with almond syrup.
In Los Angeles our mission was to get Covid and flu shots, since our insurance doesn’t work in Vancouver! We took the opportunity stock up on Lawry’s Lemon Pepper at Ralphs and have some real Mexican food at a small place called Maria’s Mexican Restaurant. The cheese enchiladas was right up there with El Cholo! A lot of the Canadians on this cruise didn’t realize that San Pedro is nowhere near anything they think of as LA, and that it would take all day to get there and back in LA traffic.
Most of the rest of the cruise was sea days, with just a brief stop in Victoria before returning to Vancouver, where it was again nice to be minutes from home. We’ll definitely do some more cruising out of Vancouver in the future.
