We’ve just come back from a weekend break – a three-night cruise aboard P&O Ventura to Belgium – and there will be a very short initial review at the end of this post while everything’s still fresh in the memory, but firstly there will be the usual round-up of recent travel posts added to the site, and those all come from the Ambassador Ambience cruise to Norway that we took last year.
Cruise write-ups tend to start with embarkation day and this is no exception, although the embarkation port was a brand new one for us, going well with the brand new cruise line too. In Ambassador Ambience Cruise: Boarding Day At Tilbury there are details of Tilbury as a cruise port plus photos from a quick look around the ship before we settled in to make use of the drinks package. We’ve said this on numerous occasions since this cruise, but Ambassador Ambience is one of the most beautifully-decorated ships out there once you look past her age and unusual shape.
It’s fairly common on cruises to follow up embarkation day with one spent at sea and that’s what we got on Ambience, the details of which you can read about in Sea Day And Formal Night On Ambassador Ambience.
Our first port of call on the cruise should have been Haugesund but wind conditions caused a last-minute change to a second day in a row on the ship, although rather than spend it at sea we were treated to scenic cruising along Hardangerfjord and this was a spectacular upgrade in our experience as we’ve visited Haugesund before and it’s a port that’s largely in the one-and-done camp for us.
Back in 2013 we’d taken our first cruise to Norway and on that cruise the first port had been Bergen, which we’d not visited since until last year on Ambience. The first of two posts from the city covers a walk around the harbour in search of an aquarium and a craft ale bar. We found both on a bright, sunny day that was quite a contrast to when we’d last been there twelve years earlier.
We had an overnight stay in Bergen with an early morning departure followed by a day at sea next.
The next port that Ambience docked at was Ålesund and we began our day here with a walk up the reasonably small hill of Storhaugen which still managed to provide great views over the city and out to the surrounding mountainous landscapes.
The final cruise-related post published on the site to this point then provides an account of our visit to the Jugendstil Centre which showcases some of the architecture and decorative pieces produced in this offshoot of Art Nouveau. If you like the sound of an intricately-decorated, early twentieth century teapot then this post features a photo of one.
One other post has made an appearance on the site since the last of these blog or newsletter updates, and that’s one simply showing some photos of water-based activities around Chichester Canal taken in 2011, when I used to work nearby. Occasional visitors to this site or subscribers to the newsletter may know that I like to break up the stream of travel content with posts from across the years every now and then. Keep everyone on their toes.
Onto the brief review of our short P&O Ventura cruise now, and it will be considerably shorter than normal. Even the full write-up, when I get around to it, will be fairly concise (for me), and that’s mostly going to concentrate on the port stop we had with little taken around the ship, partly because it was a family-friendly cruise with lots of kids around and I tend to keep my camera away for these.
We booked this cruise fairly late, only becoming aware that it was a possibility that wouldn’t eat up any annual leave when we heard that a friend and her daughter were going, and it was a three-night cruise to Belgium, docking in Zeebrugge as Belgian cruises do, and doing this on the last day so that the first full one aboard would be a sea day. We’d not been happy about that aspect of it, to be honest, because this made the day we were actually in Belgium a Monday, and it turns out that the things we like to do – museums, for instance – are closed on Mondays.
So, no drinks package, no overwhelming urge to visit Bruges or Ghent or even Blankenberge again, but this led us to looking into just what else we could do, and so we hopped on the tram in the opposite direction to most people, ending up spending several hours in the seaside town of Knokke-Heist. However you’re pronouncing that name, you’re probably wrong if you’re not from the area. Knokke (for short) was nice, but lacking in enough of great appeal for a return visit. Lovely beach, though, a lake you could almost see over the reeds, loads of art galleries (closed, because it was a Monday) and public artworks, and a fabulous bar near the tram station where we had a couple of red beers before heading back.
As for Ventura herself, she was in great condition, the captain’s announcements were often amusing, and the ship had really good staff aboard. P&O’s staff have been a bit cold and aloof in the past but that certainly wasn’t the case on this cruise. The staffing levels were good enough to make getting drinks a quick and easy affair too, and I wonder how much of that was down to this being a short cruise with a lot of first-timers and no drinks package availability, and the inevitable increase in drinking (and profit) to be expected. Cynical me wonders that, anyway. We’re hoping it stays the same when we’re on Ventura at the very end of October, but we shall see.
One thing we’re hoping changes on that cruise in October/November is a kitchen full of new chefs. With the exception of the buffet breakfast items the food was either dry, the wrong temperature, tasteless, or all three, and some main dining room dishes were so unbalanced in ingredients that they bore little resemblance to the menu descriptions. A meal with “avocado puree” for example, had so little of it that I would guess no more than two avocados had been pureed to serve the entire ship. Speciality dining on the first night in the Beach House barely reached average levels, but at least there was a promotion on with a free bottle of wine to soothe that particular irritation.
We’d booked an inside cabin for the first time since our very first cruise eighteen years earlier and it was okay. It still wouldn’t be our preference, but the room was spacious and in a quiet location of the ship, deck 14, forward. Carpets were definitely new, but still no USB sockets anywhere despite this year’s refit for the ship.
As mentioned, with a lot of families aboard for this end-of-the-summer short cruise I barely took any photos of the ship or had a look around to see what else had been obviously upgraded, but, as I’ve also said, we will be back on Ventura in a couple of months and it’ll be a longer cruise with a different demographic and more opportunity to hit all the venues properly. For us, for this cruise, it was just an excuse to get away for a few days and it was nice to experience a new part of Belgium to explore in the process. Plus we learned how to use the trams, which we’d not done before, and that may come in handy as we’re revisiting Belgium early next year so options to explore further still now open up.
The people we spoke to aboard were very friendly, and we got to meet Mark and Elliot, a couple of other reasonably well-known cruise bloggers, too, spending several hours on both of the first two nights chatting. The only other thing of note was that we did spectacularly well in the trivia contests, winning three of the four we took part in. What I do like about P&O is that their trivia prizes are actually good and worth winning (Princess, I’m looking at you here) and we ended up coming back with a P&O-branded highball glass, two power banks, a champagne bottle stopper, a pen and keyring set, and a card game. We actually won two of those card games and gave one away to the team who’d marked our papers for that second win.
So, the ship and cruise were better than we’d anticipated in all respects other than food. We’d have liked for the itinerary to have had us in Belgium on the Sunday with the sea day after so that more places of interest to us would have been open in port, but it wasn’t to be. Overall, though, a good time was had.
There’s one other thing to announce in this update, and that’s that we have booked another cruise – who’d have guessed? – and that will be on a ship we’ve cruised on three times already, but not since 2022.
In 2028 we’ll be getting back on Sky Princess. We found a good deal for one of Sky’s actual decent-sized balconies (this class of ship doesn’t have many) on an itinerary that will see us hit Spain, France, and Italy – including a couple of new ports for us – on a two-week cruise. Quite a few sea days at the start and end with the port activity all in the middle, so a chance to fully relax ahead of and after all the exploring ashore.
A fair way off yet, but it’s always nice to have something – or many somethings in our case – to look forward to.
That will do for this update. The next one will likely feature just updates of more published posts from our Ambassador Ambience cruise because we daren’t book anything else.