Some Interesting Facts:

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<strong style="font-size: 1.4rem;">Did you ever wonder about how much stuff gets "processed" in one day on a cruise ship?

Well, we had a chance to do a "behind the scenes" tour of the Star Princess on our trip and we learned some very interesting things.... The Star Princess is not Princess's largest ship; nor the smallest, but she is pretty big. At almost 1,000 feet long and 109,000 registered gross tons, she holds a crew of 1,100 and another 3,100 passengers. She burns about 39,000 gallons of bunker fuel every day (About 4800 tons for our entire trip -- and her tanks hold 750,000 U.S. gallons -- Internet reads that bunker fuel is about $600 per ton, so a fuel bill of about $2.9 Million for the trip), makes her own fresh water (but stores 750,000 U.S. gallons), compacts, incinerates and vaporizes all of her own garbage (except all paper products which are re-cycled in port), and can travel about 530 miles every day at her average speed. The ship is very green, and everything from water waste to her exhaust is monitored and controlled 24 X 7 by an environmental ethics officer. She pretty much runs on autopilot at sea, and is driven by an integrated navigational system that includes three GPS systems, five different radars, and a huge array of electtonic gear, radios and computers, LRAD sytems (for anti-piracy as there ar no weapons on-board) and other hi-tech gear. The ship is "steered" by a joystick just like the ones you see with video games! She has four 16-cylinder engines that turn out 63,360kw of electric power, which she uses for everything from propulsion to running the ovens in the bakeries. Which by the way, is part of an operation that churns out the following stuff for her population of 4,200 that consumes it all on a daily basis, and this is what her crew processes (select items -- we have more if you want to know!) every day:

5,000 eggs, 6,000 pasteries, 300 pies and cakes, 100 gallons of home made ice cream, 1,700 fish, 1,400 pounds of poultry, 1,700 pounds of beef, 1,400 pounds of pork, 1,600 pounds of salad, 2,700 pounds of potatoes, 400 pounds of butter and shrimp, 550 gallons of soup made fresh every day, 2,500 pounds of veggies, 470 gallons of coffee and 6,000 poiunds of fruit! The crew washes 70,000 dishes every day and 21,500 glasses, plus all of the cooking pots, pans, utensils, and other stuff used to prepare food. This was a 30-day cruise, so you do the math!

One entire portion of deck three holds a laundry full of huge washers and dryers that churn out bedding for 1,300 passenger rooms and another 1,100 crew spaces. This bedding, bathroom towels, galley and bakery linens and towels, and beach towels for the pool decks are all processed and folded by huge machines that cover a vast expanse of the laundry area on deck three.

In the front of the ship there are two anchors which weigh 28,000 pounds each, and another 27 anchor shackles, which weigh 28,000 pounds for each shackle. They sit on a winch that can haul them off the sea bottom at one shackle each minute.

We learned an ocean-goong cruise ship is much more than a floating hotel.... it is a huige processing machine as well.

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