Haugesund is very much more an industrial port than one for cargo, fishing, or tourism, and we could see lots of buildings and dockside equipment to facilitate the manufacture and maintenance of ships large and small as Britannia pushed away from the town.

An obvious item that caught our eyes in Haugesund as Britannia departed was the Penguins FPSO. Quite what the name meant, we had no idea, and just looking at the huge structure didn’t provide any further clues.

“FPSO. First Prussian Stationery Office?”

“That seems over-the-top for lever-arch binders and coloured card supplies even for the Prussians, and I’m not sure there are any Prussians any more.”

“There was a Franco-Prussian war in the nineteenth century. This might be the place where the captured troops were interred to be never heard from again.”

“The Franco-Prussian Soldier Oubliette, you mean? It’s plausible when put alongside a stationery office, but less so on its own, and since when did you become an expert – if that is the word – on nineteenth century European conflicts?”

Thanks to the internet we’ve since discovered that FPSO is a Floating Production, Storage, and Offloading unit, and Penguins is a field in the North Sea that Shell UK will extract non-renewable resources from in order to please its shareholders. Okay, all of us who aren’t sociopathic aren’t pleased by that, but from an engineering perspective it’s an impressive piece of manufacturing, and when you further consider that it was built in China and shipped to Haugesund on the back of a vessel designed to carry things like this weighing well over 30000 tons, that vessel then semi-sinking itself to slide out from under it, and remember that the F stands for “Floating” once more, it’s quite mind-boggling.

You didn’t visit this page to look at extraordinary lumps of red metal bedecked by cranes, though, so on with the views from our balcony on Britannia as our cruise ship sailed away from Norway.

Haugesund features on lots of cruise itineraries that will market themselves as “Norwegian fjords” cruises but it’s not located along or at the end of a fjord itself so the majestic sight of sheer rock faces gliding past and nearby snow-capped mountains is not one you will experience on a ship while approaching or departing Haugesund. But, once you’re just away from the port area there are lots of low-lying islands with aesthetically-pleasing rocky coasts and an abundance of trees and grass on some, and these are lovely to see. If you’ve spent the day ashore in town, as we had, then the rocky islets make a great natural contrast to being surrounded by houses and other types of buildings for the most part.

As our ship lost the sheltered protection of some of the larger islands nearer Haugesund, so those smaller land masses we now started to pass lost the short grass, bushes, and trees. The wind, especially with the ship now able to increase speed, became more biting and it wasn’t too long before we headed in from the balcony and into the warmth of our room.

On this penultimate evening aboard P&O Cruises Britannia we’d made a reservation at one of her speciality dining venues, Epicurean. We’d had overall good experiences at this particular venue on other ships in the P&O fleet (no, not you Iona) and with this being our first cruise on Britannia it made sense to compare.

The restaurant itself was very nice and there were no complaints from us about the service or location or menu, but my notes from the day simply state “good, but not great” and that’s been a growing feeling with successive Epicurean visits on different ships. There was a sense that the food was good enough to warrant the speciality tag, but not as clearly so as it had been when we’d first tried this dining location on a P&O ship. That may be partly us, becoming older and more jaded, but looking at the menu and photos now there’s not enough difference and innovation from the main dining options to me. I do believe these speciality dining rooms on ships should maintain a core identity but they also need to evolve a little more faster.

I’m being picky to some extent, and if you’ve never cruised with P&O before or you’ve never had an Epicurean meal on a P&O ship then it’s definitely worth doing as we all have different expectations and tastes, but we’re more likely as time goes on to become more selective in choosing to pay extra for these places if they can’t entice us in with something new.

So now we reach the final day on board Britannia and as I’ve already mentioned, it was grey, cool, and not particularly inviting outside – although the pools still attracted some hardy swimmers – and there wasn’t a whole lot to interest us inside either, although there’s nothing unusual in that. We like to relax in quiet places, do quizzes, read books, and have a few drinks, and the delights of free foot assessments, seminars on the benefits of sleeping with pink quartz under your pillow, and bingo (for which the jackpot still hasn’t been won!) don’t excite us.

A few photos from the top deck during our post-breakfast wander, and the view from our balcony a little later in the day after we’d given our room steward enough time to clean our cabin.

To finish this final sea day, some cocktails – we didn’t drink many because we weren’t on the drinks package (never worth it for us with P&O) – and the last evening’s meal in the main dining room.

We ended up chatting for some of the evening with a couple consisting of a Danish husband and German wife which I only mention as it’s fairly unusual to have non-Brits cruising on a P&O ship. A lot of these more regional cruise lines mostly appeal to and are patronised by their home nations’ travellers so P&O is almost exclusively British, AIDA is German, and Costa is Italian, but there’s nothing to stop anyone else from booking a cruise if they’re prepared to jump through a few hoops to do so. We may even try something like that ourselves one day.

And that brings this cruise on Britannia to a close.

We weren’t sure we’d like Britannia ahead of this holiday for a number of reasons. Being a Royal-class derivative we knew she’d have small balconies, the lack of an affordable drinks package for cocktail drinkers is not in P&O’s favour, and cruising on ships with fellow Brits is never our first choice for getting away from it all. We also didn’t know where she’d lie on the scale that has the older, smaller, better ships (for us) at one end and the larger, more modern, awful ships (for us) at the other. As it was, closer to the better ships by far. We liked Britannia and we’d be happy to cruise on her again with the right itinerary and pricing.

We were very happy with this itinerary too, giving us a chance to head back to some ports we’d not seen for a decade on what had been at the time the cruise that really instilled the cruising bug into us, and we got to new places too; not as many as planned, but that’s the weather for you, and if you’re going to have a cruise affected by the weather then you could do a lot worse than have it happen in the stunning surroundings of the Norwegian fjords.

I have eased off taking pictures on the cruise ships over the years – not that you’d really be able to tell if you took a look through my cruise history photos here or elsewhere online – as we’ve cruised on some ships or with some lines often enough that there’s little new to see, and even with some new-to-us cruising experiences, once you’ve cruised a lot you tend to see the same things over and over again and it’s nicer to just enjoy it rather than try to capture it all. However, Britannia is P&O’s only Royal-class design of ship so I was keen to see how it compared to other ships in the P&O fleet and to the similar class that Princess operate.

Some pictures of the top deck of the cruise ship to start with, simply because I made sure to take my camera with me when we left the room for breakfast in the buffet. It was a little overcast to start with and with this being the North Sea in May, it wasn’t very warm, hence the lack of many other people around.

One of the things we’d seen in photos of Britannia from years ago was a lot of straight lines in the decor and design, although we knew she’d had a refurbishment that had tried to round and soften some of that. On the top deck you could still see a lot of straight edges and symmetrical layout, but it worked there. The huge deckchair – a staple feature of P&O cruise ships – was also present.

You can’t take photos from the top deck of a cruise ship without making sure that there’s a wake view in there, somewhere. Everyone likes that ship’s wake.

Inside Britannia it was easier to spot more flow and curving elements in the furnishings and layout. There’s no doubting that Britannia’s design was very stylish across every venue we ventured into even if the darker colours sometimes made a place feel a little claustrophobic when the designers were possibly looking for cosy.

Britannia’s atrium was a lot better than older photos of it showed, and the central art piece was nicely abstract, but the layout and design of the decks around it with those thick pillars kept bringing to mind a sort of shopping mall from the 1990s feel. To be fair, though, we rarely hang around the atrium areas of any cruise ship, largely because the space makes them so very noisy and completely at odds with the relaxation we’re after when we travel by sea. Good for five minutes of people-watching, sometimes, but for us it’s a hub to get to better places – well, hopefully – and not somewhere to hang out.

A large point of booking a balcony for us is that it does give us the perfect spot to relax, soak in those sea views, and not get deafened by music and tens of dozens of people trying to hold audible conversations over that deafening music. With our slow amble around the outside and inside of Britannia done, and once we’d judged we’d given our room steward enough time to clean our cabin, we returned to it for a cup of tea with the sea air, our books, and one another for company. The morning’s cloud cover had disappeared but the sun was behind us and our balcony was in the shade so it wasn’t the warmest place to be, but still fabulous.

We don’t do an awful lot on sea days normally but prior to this cruise on Britannia we’d booked the additional cost Afternoon Tea at the Epicurean. We’d had this before on P&O and enjoyed it – although Virgin still wins the cruise line afternoon tea prize for us, I’m afraid – and it was good, but it wasn’t quite as good as we remembered. Some people on a table near us had some allergies that needed to be catered for and that seemed like that took an awful long time to resolve for them, leaving them sitting like lemons while we and others made our way through the food selections and teas. Yes, of course we had a glass of fizz with it. We were on holiday, I’ll have you know.

The afternoon tea filled us up nicely enough that we decided to forego dinner in the main dining room. Cruise lines like to put their formal nights on sea days if they can so this saved us having to dress up too smartly, although we were then limited to certain bars and lounges. That was okay with us, though, and we spent a bit of time in The Live Lounge being entertained by P&O’s house band, Pulse, performing a mix of songs from the 1970s.

We grabbed a bite to eat in the late-night buffet, just because we could and it had now been long enough for that afternoon tea to weigh less heavily in our tummies, then called it a night.

In the next post in this Britannia cruise travelogue series we’ll be making our first stop in Norway when we arrive at Stavanger for the first time in nearly ten years.

The meal before the show was perfectly fine even if, as on our previous experience at the Limelight Club, it didn’t exactly excel. What we most enjoyed was that we’d arrived to queue early enough that we were seated with a great view close to the stage. Each table was nicely-spaced from neighbouring ones too, making Britannia’s design of the club far superior to that on Iona, in our opinion.

And after the meal, Chesney Hawkes took to the stage. There’s not a lot to say about this other than he was very talented, had a very polished set, was very funny, and had some great anecdotes. A very good performance that I think anyone would enjoy whether you like his music or that of his dad’s band, the Tremeloes, and if you get a chance to see him perform then we’d definitely recommend it.

Photos of parts of Chesney Hawkes’ show in Britannia’s Limelight Club are below. I have video too and may add that in at some point.

In the next post in this cruise travelogue series it’s a sea day aboard Britannia and a chance to take a look around this new ship for us.

We had nevertheless tried to book a cruise on Britannia just before the pandemic for some reason but that plan had been scuppered and we’d put the ship out of our mind once more. However, following a better experience on Royal Princess’s sister ship, Regal, coming out of the pandemic lockdowns and some enjoyable cruises on the next generation along in the Princess fleet in the years after and seeing that Britannia had undergone a bit of a refresh to bring it kicking and screaming into the 21st century we started to reconsider. In May 2023 we made it aboard Britannia after booking a late deal just two months earlier.

As is so often the case with a cruise on a P&O ship, we started just along the coast at Southampton.

I don’t often post photos of what our cabin looks like on cruise ships, largely because for familiar ships it’s not something I think will be interesting to anyone who might read any of the travel write-ups on this website. That’s not to say I don’t take those photos, though, because we often like to taunt friends and family on social media with an “Oh, woe is us! This will be our home for the next week or two weeks while we explore strange new lands!” post. That said, I do know that there are people absolutely obsessed with what a cabin looks like, what a bathroom looks like, etc. and in this case, since this was a new ship, but mostly because I have some things I want to point out, I shall present some pictures.

Let’s take a look at our balcony cabin on Britannia, which was cabin C621. Further back than we typically cruise but beggars can’t be choosers when you’re booking late. We liked the look of this cabin; muted but modern decor, good-sized TV opposite the bed, an additional chair so two entire people could sit down at the same time. But… the bedside cabinet count came to one which was the first annoyance. With a long draw on the desk this wouldn’t have been too bad but the bedside charging points also came to one and that was nowhere near the side I usually sleep on and therefore nowhere near my phone which plays sea sounds at night and has the alarm set to avoid missed breakfasts and port excursions.

Sea sounds at night? On the sea? Yes. I have tinnitus and silence is unpleasant, and leaving the balcony door open is both frowned upon for environmental reasons and something you only do once when trying to open the door to the room before you learn an important science lesson in air pressure dynamics of moving vessels.

To a typical cabin bathroom on Britannia now – I guess; I’ve not been in anyone else’s to be fair – and first impressions, like the room, were that it was bright, airy, modern. A large shower cubicle with a glass door was good. However… the gymnastics involved in getting out of the shower, shimmying around the small space onto a towel without stepping on the tiled floor with your wet feet and skidding off into the mirror, just to get enough room to close the door so you could actually commence drying was a chore. A small chore, yes, but one that the layout caused. And I’m easily irritated.

The balcony was no surprise for a ship of this class in that it was barely worthy of the name. Seats that can’t face the sea unless you’ve had your legs amputated at the knees only make sense when you consider the conspiracy theory I’m just now inventing that this is all a plan by the onboard spa to create sore necks for those who actually like looking at the water on order to generate more massage bookings. That said… it’s always nice to get outside in a little private space of your own, even if it’s just a quick look at the stars at night followed by a “Jesus! That wind’s bitter! I should’ve put some clothes on!”

With it being a bright day in Southampton we decided to go crazy and head up to the top deck and soak up some of the atmosphere of those boarding and getting ready to enjoy a week ahead cruising up to the Norwegian fjords. There were a lot of families around because it was half term – not a time we typically will pick to cruise in but this worked well with my wife’s work schedule – but it wasn’t too hectic. It was, however, quite chilly, so we had one revolting Piña Colada each beside the pool area – very artificial-tasting and it started to separate out as we were drinking it – before making our way to a lounge.

We ended up at the Crow’s Nest. Despite Britannia being derived from the Royal-class, itself an evolution of the Grand-class, both of which were initially designed for Princess, Britannia did have a few unique design quirks and the Crow’s Nest was one of them; a spacious area high up at the front of the ship with panoramic windows out to sea. It also had its own drinks menu with some exclusive offerings, which was nice to see, although the ones they actually had available were few and far between and not of great quality. Nice idea, poor execution. We ended up having one cocktail here then grabbing something larger to take back to our cabin ahead of the sail away from Southampton.

I’ve included scans of the Crow’s Nest drinks menu on Britannia, simply because you just know that someone, somewhere may be looking for them yet be unable to locate them in any of the other million places they’re uploaded on this increasingly awful internet we’ve allowed to fester. Just bear in mind that this is a snapshot of available drinks (well, in theory) and pricing from May 2023, and if you’re reading this site in the future – and if my recently-completed twelve-part course on What Direction Does Time Flow In? is any guide then you will be – then things may be different. And by different I mean more expensive. Wouldn’t it be great if drinks prices went down one year? Can you even imagine!?

Back on our balcony it was time for us to leave Southampton – always a good time even if you’re not on a cruise – and the first sight was that of MSC Virtuosa sailing out down the Solent ahead of us.

“Good prices but terrible reviews,” I mentioned to my wife. “I can’t see us cruising with MSC at all based on what I’ve read online.”

One year later we’d be on that very same ship sailing down that exact same stretch of water. Just goes to show what I know.

Not long afterwards Britannia was on her way too.

In the next post in this 2023 cruise to Norway on Britannia travelogue series I’ll break with tradition and not jump to the next day but continue with what we got up to on this first evening of a new P&O Cruises ship for us: dinner in the Limelight Club and entertainment from Chesney Hawkes.