Day 01 - Sat - 09/27/2025 - Southampton Embarkation
As has been our custom the last few days, we did not set an alarm but allowed the light filtering into our loft bedroom to wake us up. We gathered our possessions, enjoyed a small breakfast of the leftover chicken and toast and a couple donuts and some English tea. Around 10:30 AM I used the Uber app to summon a car & driver to transfer us to the ocean terminal. The driver that arrived claimed that we were booked to go to a different location, which I disagreed with, and he got a little bit huffy and canceled the ride saying that he couldn't go to the Ocean Terminal. I went back to the app and rescheduled a different driver who was certainly able to go to the Ocean Terminal and I confirmed that before he arrived to pick us up. We're only a few miles from the Ocean Terminal but traffic is pretty significant and it took about a half an hour to reach the drop off point. There were four cruise ships in Port today.
At the terminal we found where we were to leave our luggage and proceeded on into the check-in area. Because we are Platinum status with Princess we got to skip the long lines and enjoy a priority boarding process. With our passport scanned, we obtained our Princess medallions, which is used to open our safe door and do many other things on the ship. We were directed to a special lane for priority boarding to go through security. That line was a bit backed up, but we smoothly cleared security and made our way onto the ship by around 11:20 AM. The whole check-in process took less than 15 minutes.
We used our medallion to scan onto the ship and then found our room and deposited our carry-on luggage. The room was not "officially" ready, so we didn't spend much time there except to watch the mandatory safety video and headed on to explore the ship a bit and then find some lunch up in the Lido buffet area. We did do a walk around deck seven which is a very nice 2.5 lap /mile walk around the ship. It's also pretty cool that our stateroom is on deck eight so it's easy to get down to seven and do a walk.
After a light Lido buffet lunch, we went back to the room and our room was ready and our luggage was there so we were able to unpack and get situated for our cruise. We have an obstructed window view cabin, which is turning out to be the nicest cabin of this type that we've ever had on a cruise. The window is quite large and is located above a lifeboat. The bed is perpendicular to the window and there is a nice size closet and a very small bathroom with a very, very small shower. But it's more than adequate for our needs and we are thrilled to have a window for this 30 day cruise.
I took a short nap to try and recapture some of the sleep I missed, and it was time for the ship to leave. I watched the untying of the ship and then our departure before joining Angela in the Piazza to listen to some jazz music, which was very good. We met a couple from Texas who's on the full voyage to Florida with us. Afterwards, we went back to to the Lido for a simple dinner before going to the showroom for the evening 7:30 performance tonight's entertainment was a Frank Sinatra tribute singer, Erik Bryan, and he had a very good voice. His show was called 'Let me be Frank' and was accompanied by the house orchestra.
After the show, I watched a game show called Left/Right which essentially has people decide between two choices what year that a song was introduced and eventually one person in each round wins the contest and a small prize was given. In the final round the prize was more significant, a bottle of champagne. While I was doing this, Angela took in karaoke that she really likes and I made my way back to the stateroom to get ready for bed.
The University of Washington Huskies were playing Ohio State in a football game and I was able to watch much of it on my phone on the Fubo app. It's pretty amazing to think that one can watch these games halfway around the world live using one's phone. We also did a Wi-Fi phone call with a cruising friend who lives in Port Townsend. It was good to catch up with her and she was amazed to find that we were on a ship on the other side of the world The call clarity was excellent.
I'm still pretty tired and it was good to have a very comfortable Princess bed to hopefully fix that.
We have two sea days ahead of us before reaching our first stop in Norway, so it'll be good to relax and hopefully catch up on sleep and be ready to enjoy Norway and particularly the northern lights.
We arrived in Croatia last week. Our routine for avoiding jet lag is rather strange, but has been effective for us quite a few times. A couple of weeks before we travel we start changing our bed time and awake time one hour earlier every 3 days. On the day we left Seattle we woke up at 1am. When we arrived in Croatia we were only 3 hours time difference to our bodies which is quite manageable. Love your blog so far. I think in 2026 we are heading to the British Isles for some land and sea cruising.
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