Our final port of call had been Zeebrugge and we’d spent our final day with a truncated walk around Blankenberge followed by some photos inside Island Princess, so all that remained was to sail away from the Belgian port and make our way home across the channel to Southampton.

Zeebrugge is a port we’ve visited quite a few times now but if you think that means I won’t take far too many photos of the commercial port area from the balcony of our cruise ship then clearly this is the first time you’ve read any of my travelogue posts before.

“Ferries and cargo containers, Mark? Boring. What I’m here for are an excessive number of pictures of wind turbines!”

“Well, my fictitious friend, you’re in luck! Behold! Wind turbines on the exit from the port of Zeebrugge in Belgium!”

Eventually, the port infrastructure and ships passing in and out of the harbour entrance and even the wind turbines gave way to the open water of the English Channel and we enjoyed this final sunset at sea, albeit on the wrong side of the ship to truly appreciate how pretty it must have been. I like to take lots of photos, but sometimes I can’t be bothered to move from where I am to go and take better ones.

Dinner was taken in main dining room after pre-dinner drinks in Crooners. Then we spent the remainder of the last evening of the cruise in the main lounge being entertained.

One of the staff members – my namesake, Mark – sang for the passengers present and cracked a few jokes in his camp style. We couldn’t have known it at the time, of course, but we would end up bumping into him on a cruise aboard Ruby Princess almost exactly one year later.

And, to conclude, the sad photos of Southampton that mean the cruise is at an end, although we did have some decent weather to get off with and take back home to Portsmouth.

So, following a write-up about the final evening leaving the final port on a cruise, some final thoughts about Island Princess.

The ship was an older ship and it showed in places, but you expect that and if you book a cruise on a ship like this then complain about things liked dated designs or lacking modern equipment or signs of age then there’s no nice way to put this: you’re an idiot. Far from moaning about things like that you should embrace them and cherish them because the last thing you want is for all the ships to all become clones of one another. Cough, cruise lines, cough.

We very much enjoyed this cruise on Island Princess because we got to visit several new places, even if we didn’t take quite the advantage we could have with booking excursions. With the exception of Gothenburg, perhaps, we didn’t regret anything we did because we saw some lovely new things and had some lovely experiences.

In this post you’ll therefore find pictures of interior venues aboard Island Princess to give you a feel for locations on this particular ship. We liked that the layouts and functions for some of the rooms differed a fair amount from later ships in the Princess Cruises fleet, but that layout did lead to some places being a little underutilised in our opinion.

The Bayou Café is one of those frustrating spots on Island Princess. The thing we liked about it was that it provided a unique selling point for a cruise aboard Island Princess, offering up food you couldn’t get on most of the other ships and with a different theme than you’d find on other ships.

However, its location meant that you had to want to go there in the evening for any entertainment, and most people didn’t want to head to a different deck from other locations for it. This then meant there wasn’t much entertainment or a long-opening bar. Which put anyone who knew about the location off visiting it. A feedback loop of under-use.

Moreover, since our cruise aboard Island Princess we’ve learned that the ship has now effectively kicked the New Orleans theme under the sofa and switched it to a generic steak house. Don’t get me wrong: Princess do good steaks on their ships. But it’s a sad move. It’s a move towards making the ships indistinguishable which will please small-minded people who fear change, but it doesn’t make the ship a destination choice in its own right for fans of the line. Why cruise on the smaller, more expensive ship when you’ll get the exact same features on the big, marginally cheaper ship? It’s just a bad move from a customer perspective, to me, but I completely understand the financial reasons for the company in churning out unimaginative clones one after the other.

We loved the layout of the Wheelhouse Bar on Island Princess. Little nooks here and there, really giving it a cosy feel in a pretty large space. And a great place for some historical pictures and items.

The next post in this Island Princess cruise travelogue series will be the final one for this cruise and will see our ship sail away from Zeebrugge on its overnight crossing of the English Channel back to Southampton.

Kind of a weird thing to lead with in an article apparently about cruising along the Nieuwe Maas canal out of Rotterdam, isn’t it?

Well, maybe. But I am known for being a little wordy in my cruise travelogues and sometimes I like to go off on a little tangent. In this case I’m trying to prepare the scene for the sort of feeling I got when Island Princess started to sail away from the Dutch city after sunset and we started to pass an awful lot of businesses and apartments with lights and an apparent aversion to curtains.

So, definitely not some kind of perverted Peeping Tom thing going on, then?

Absolutely not. Wink.

So, for the most part there’s not a lot else to say here. These photos of Rotterdam were taken from our cabin balcony on Island Princess as we made our way quietly along the canal that leads to the North Sea. It was fairly cold now that not even any radiation from the sun could find its way through the clouds to warm our bones, and our ship’s speed was understandably slow because locals don’t like huge bow waves washing against their buildings and moored boats, etc. As a result I kept popping out, shooting off a few pictures, then returning to the room to warm up again, only venturing back outside when some new arrangement of lights in buildings seemed interesting enough to warrant it.

A dome sat atop pillars caught our attention. With the Euromast behind it we could tell that the area behind and to the right was where we’d walked around earlier in the day, Het Park, so our initial thought was that this was something related to the park. Instead it’s one of the ventilation towers at the northern end of the Maastunnel, the oldest tunnel in the Netherlands. It was opened in 1942 to alleviate increasing traffic problems on bridges over the canal areas with the decision to build a tunnel rather than bridge because of the height needed to accommodate increasingly large ships that sailed down and made the seaport so profitable.

This part of the Dutch landscape we were now passing was technically Schiedam, a city just to the west of Rotterdam. In the photos below you should be able to see a distillery and a large windmill. That is the Nolet Mill, and at forty two and a half metres in height (fifty five if you get to the top of the sails) it is the tallest mill in the world. However, despite its appearance and resemblance to other historic mills in this part of the Netherlands traditionally used for grinding ingredients for distillery processes, Nolet Mill is a modern construction dating to just 2005 and designed as a show piece for visitors to the nearby distillery as well as being used to generate electricity.

Another building reaching forty two and half metres in height and also partly just to show off was the eye-catching De Bolder tower. This was built for a company called Mammoet who specialise in heavy lifting, so the entire two and a half thousand tons building was constructed elsewhere, transported by boat over the course of three days to this position, then lifted into place and connected up.

We eventually ran out of bits of the Netherlands to see as we reached the end of the Nieuwe Maas canal.

To finish off this post, some photos of dinner in the evening aboard the cruise ship. I assure you that there would have been drinking too but sometimes I just forget to take photos of them.

There’s just one more port of call to cover from this Island Princess cruise travelogue series and that will be fairly familiar to regular cruisers out of Southampton as an awful lot of cruises hit Zeebrugge, Belgium at some point or another. Most people will venture into some of the historic canal cities inland of Bruges or Ghent – and we’ve done that before too – but there’s also a city just along the coastline which we’d never visited before, so this time we decided to do just that and explore Blankenberge.

So, this post will mostly just contain photos taken on the walk from the historic house we’d just been to back to the cruise port where Island Princess would be waiting for us to take the weight off our feet. It might give you a little idea about the sort of things you can typically see in Europe’s largest seaport. The walking route we took was the simplest available, heading east along Westblaak then south down Schiedamsedijk to the Erasmus Bridge.

We’d already seen a fair bit of modern art in the parks we’d explored earlier in the day in Rotterdam but it turned out that there was no shortage of it along the main roads in the city either. Initially, most of the public artworks were sculptural, large, and colourful.

Of course, with this being the Netherlands the other thing that it was impossible not to notice was the amount of bikes everywhere. We certainly didn’t see quite as many as when we’d visited Amsterdam on a few occasions before but then again these were busier, more main streets in Rotterdam we were walking along, so cars had more of a presence.

As we turned to head south we noticed more street art painted on walls and shutters and fewer sculptures. Not the best examples of the art form, but always appreciated.

The Low Light of the Hook of Holland is the long name for the relatively small lighthouse that originally stood at the Hook of Holland before an expanding coastline pushed it too far back from the sea to be effective. The lighthouse was built in 1899 and has been standing in its present position beside the Maritime Museum since 1990.

A building on the corner near the bridge we’d be soon crossing caught my eye. I can just imagine the architect holding open a page of designs.

“And these are the types of windows we can do.”

“I like them. Yes, they’ll be great.”

“Which ones?”

“All of them, thanks.”

The structure in the photo below is the national monument to the Dutch merchant navy personnel who died in service while aiding the allies in wartime.

This brought us to the northern side of the Nieuwe Maas canal where we immediately spotted our lovely cruise ship, Island Princess, at the port, waiting for us with the promise of rest and a drinks package that longed for us to continue using it.

Oddly, neither of us could remember walking past a luminous, lime green rhinoceros when we’d left the ship earlier in the day but we couldn’t help but notice one on the approach to the terminal.

As we weren’t completely sure whether my wife’s walking woes would have an impact on the next and last port on this cruise, and as we’d been there a few times before so it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world to stay aboard, we decided to empty our pockets of all the Euros we had on us in Rotterdam’s cruise terminal. There were a few options for souvenirs but we ended up getting several packs of Stroopwafel, knowing it would be easy to distribute these to family members as something we’d brought back to them even if there wasn’t much thought in it.

We spent the remainder of our time docked alongside in Rotterdam on the ship, enjoying sitting down, drinking, reading, backing up photos, watching water taxis and water buses pass by our balcony, and lights in the city start to switch on as the evening started to draw in.

In the next post in this 2022 Island Princess cruise travelogue series we’ll take a look at Rotterdam from the balcony of Island Princess as we sail away down the Nieuwe Maas canal at night ahead of a short overnight cruise to our final port of call in Belgium.

For us, attending is something we do if there’s nothing else going on of interest – and they tend to schedule them so that there isn’t anything of interest occurring – and if we’re on a Grand-class ship then we like to see how many drinks we can get delivered to our table from the staff from Skywalkers who we generally know pretty well by this point in the cruise. Like the newer ships, though, Island Princess lacked that great nightclub so ingratiating ourselves with the staff was harder and our drinks collection while waiting for the speeches to commence was poor for us.

The Captain’s Circle event took place on a sea day after leaving Norway and before reaching the Netherlands, and here’s how it all looked on Island Princess.

In the next post in this Island Princess cruise travelogue series we’ll be visiting a new port for us in the form of Rotterdam.

On top of that, my wife’s knee was aching from the sculpture park stroll so the one thing we’d told ourselves we definitely had time to do when we got back – look around Akershus Fortress right by the port – we eliminated, too.

“We’re bound to come back to Oslo again,” I said. “Next time we’ll definitely explore the city on our own and we’ll definitely explore the fortress.” And maybe we will. For this particular day in Norway, however, we decided we’d just get back on the ship and enjoy a few hours in the sunshine before departing.

We’d normally head to our balcony in a situation like this; order a drink, sit out and read, etc. But the weather was so nice in Oslo that we decided to hit the top deck instead. It would put us closer to a bar and give me lots of opportunities to see the views from all around the ship rather than a fixed view as the evening’s light touched and changed the scenery of this capital city and the fjord on which it was situated.

A number of local tour companies offer opportunities to see Oslo from the water aboard various types of vessels. I particularly liked seeing some of the older ships taking tourists for an early evening sail on the Oslofjord.

We had spotted Viking Venus when we’d arrived in Oslo in the morning, had driven past her as our tour bus left the city, and we could still her over trees in the distance from Island Princess.

Oslo City Hall is a building that interests me a lot because the architecture straddles that boundary between Art Deco and Modernism. It’s got just a small hint of the former with a lot of the latter represented by the functional form in its material choice and overall design. It’s also the host location for the annual Nobel Peace Price ceremony.

We were out on the top deck of Island Princess long enough for the Viking cruise ship to leave the port and for the sun to creep towards the horizon for sunset before it got cool enough for us to consider returning to our room to change and get ready for the night.

After we’d showered and changed we enjoyed another very good dinner on the ship, settled down for a drink, and planned to have a few more of those while hunting down entertainment around the ship before calling it a night.

As Island Princess finally left Oslo and started to cruise down the Oslofjord we then had an announcement from the cruise director that it might be possible to see the Northern Lights from the ship’s aft as the conditions were right for it. We hurried back to the room, grabbed warmer clothing, and made our way to the back of the ship where it was already quite crowded.

We’ve seen the Aurora Borealis a few times now, but it’s not like it’s something you can tire of seeing. Subsequently, we knew what to expect, which was a lot more than other people who’d come out for glimpses of the phenomenon. We heard disappointed grumbling from more than a few people who thought they’d be seeing vibrant green shimmering sheets of light in the sky. We knew that we’d see incredibly faint, dull patches of barely green at best. In fact we didn’t even see that. Part of it was because we were pretty far south as far as displays of aurorae go so it was naturally very weak and part of it was because there was a lot of light pollution from the city of Oslo itself. What we did find was that playing around with longer exposures on our phones and on the camera could bring out some of the greens that were invisible to the naked eye. Naturally, being handheld on a moving vessel this also meant blurry photos of the city lights and water in the ship’s wake, and a fair bit of illumination of the smoke coming from Island Princess’s funnels.

No brilliant photos of the Northern Lights from Oslo, but we can say that we have now seen them in Norway as well as several (better) occasions in Iceland and that’s no bad thing.

In the next post in this Island Princess European cruise travelogue series I’ll share some photos of the Captain’s Circle Event on Island Princess from a sea day ahead of our penultimate port stop in the Netherlands.

We’d just had a lovely half day in the Danish capital and by the time we got back to the ship following our morning and afternoon of walking, exploring, and drinking in Copenhagen we were a smidge tipsy. Those beers may have been small but they packed a punch. Our immediate thoughts were that it made sense to have something to absorb some of the alcohol without filling us up too much, and since it was pleasant right at that point – it had been changeable all day in Denmark – we headed to the top deck of Island Princess for something from the lido grill.

From here on it was all about just relaxing in our room for a few hours, getting some drinks delivered (you don’t stop drinking once you start in the afternoon or you get a headache; that’s a scientific fact!), having a bit of a read, and waiting for, then stepping outside occasionally for, the sail away from Denmark northwards along the coast of Sweden towards our next port of call on this cruise.

I do like a nice wind farm, but who doesn’t? Gits who put profits before the planet’s future, that’s who. And people whose parents were abducted by wind farms when they were children, instilling a deep fear of the thrum of turbines ever since and a longing that won’t go away. I can excuse the latter group.

That changeable weather was on show with clouds bubbling up and hiding the sun on occasion, sometimes showering us for a minute or so, then passing quickly. Our balcony was on the starboard side of the ship which meant the sun was on the other side of the vessel, so when it started to rain in Sweden we saw evidence of it from our cabin in the form of a rainbow over the distant land. Thanks, physics!

As we cruised further north, so the sun sank in the west, and that brought a range of fantastic colours in the sky and clouds, even casting everything in shades of light purple at points. Light reflected from water at different wavelengths to produce rainbows, then light refracted through more of the atmosphere to change its wavelength all in the space of half an hour! What a treat! It was fantastic to watch Sweden passing by with completely different light from minute to minute.

To some people they’re eyesores but I do love the look of industrialisation. All those chimneys and warehouses, the silos and conveyor belts, the steam, the cranes. That’s what growing up on a steady diet of post-apocalyptic movies in the 1980s will do for you. Somewhere over there, I thought, there’s a gang of survivors barricaded while a biker gang looks to break in and commit horrible acts of violence on them, and maybe I’m the hero who arrives on a shiny, white ship to lead everyone to safety.

Again, we’d been drinking.

The narrowest point of the waterway between Denmark and Sweden was at the northernmost end so this is where we got closest to land. This was Helsingborg in Sweden, and if we’d been inclined to head up onto the top deck and gaze across in the other direction we’d have seen Helsingør in Denmark, and, more specifically, Castle Kronborg, that we’d visited on our first visit to Denmark a few years earlier. Clearly, as the photos will show, we weren’t so inclined.

For the rest of the evening it was the usual fare for us in the form of showers, changing, a little bit more drinking and entertainment, then dinner.

In the next travelogue in this Island Princess series of posts we’ll be making our second visit to Norway’s capital city in four months when we visit Oslo. We’ll also be taking the only excursion we booked at all on this cruise, which starts with a glass blowing demonstration that isn’t what we expected at all.

“You can’t really appreciate a country and its people and its culture until you’ve been begging for money to get the bus out of the isolated village where everyone pees in the street and the dogs won’t leave you alone,” is the sort of thing I imagine they might say. Or: “Two weeks on a cruise ship can’t possibly compare with really getting to know everything there is to know about this tree and the bush nearby I’ve been sleeping rough in.”

We like to see things differently. Cruising for us allows us to quickly get a feel for historical aspects and architectural aspects, and enjoy local food and drink, all admittedly within a reasonable distance of the coast of a country. That short visit that coincides with a hefty injection of money into the local economy (sly dig!) gives us a chance to decide if we do want to see more of the place. Call me cynical, but I suspect the only reason a lot of “real” travellers return to a place time after time isn’t to learn more about it and see new things but because it’s cheap and they’re seeking revenge on the guy who stole their wallet last time.

Hey, we’ve all got our prejudices against anyone who doesn’t travel in exactly the same way as us. It’s fun to denigrate an entire class of people.

“Mark, really appreciating you telling me this, really helping me get to know you more, but what does it actually have to do with Gothenburg?”

Good point, narrative device. I’ll get to that now.

A single day, I must admit, may not be quite enough time to know everything about a place but it’s enough time to form an opinion, and sometimes you just get a strong feeling for somewhere. And we didn’t enjoy this day in Gothenburg very much.

We concluded our time in Gothenburg by making our way as quickly as possible from the Universeum to where the shuttle bus could take us back to Island Princess docked a decidedly inconvenient nine kilometres away from the city.

We may not have visited Gothenburg on its best of days. We may have picked the wrong direction and wrong things to see. The weather wasn’t particularly pleasant so that didn’t help. But the people were the thing that put us off Gothenburg the most. Aren’t the people the “real” part of a country? We didn’t meet a single happy or polite person at all. I fully accept that the common element in all this was us, but we actually get on pretty well with most people even if we’re not the most forthcoming, and I only generate an air of menace when someone upsets me.

When we travel somewhere we almost always think “Yeah, lots more to see, we could definitely come back here and explore more, maybe stay and experience more.” But after just a few hours ashore, Gothenburg left us with more of a “Well, we’ve been here now, I suppose.” Perhaps it takes the “real” travellers two weeks to get that feeling about pee-ridden villages and the mystery of their missing passport, so whose form of travelling is truly the best?

Ours, obviously. Duh. We get cocktails at the end of every night.

We headed back towards the city centre, accompanied by light drizzle in the air and grey clouds in our heads. You want to know how unimpressed we were with it all? We didn’t even try to find a bar to see if it could persuade us the city had had any saving grace.

Gothenburg still has some nice if not exactly exceptional architecture, and with a few canals here and there it certainly felt like it could look considerably more appealing on a sunny day.

The statue of King Karl IX we passed by has an interesting history attached to it. The king himself only ruled for seven years and they were spent almost entirely at war partly due to siding with the Protestants during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation conflicts, but he was seen as forming an historical bridge between his own father and that of his more respected son, Gustavus Adolphus, whose statue we’d seen when we’d been dropped off at the town square in Gothenburg. The original statue was supposed to be of the king on foot but the instigator of the plan to erect a statue raised enough funding to put up the equestrian statue of Karl IX instead.

The statue was erected in 1904 but in 1935 it became necessary to move it out of the way of increasing traffic. This wasn’t without protest by the people and some council members but the move eventually took place, shifting the statue ten metres and turning it to face west.

The king’s sword was stolen in 1977 and a new one was commissioned to replace it. In 1998 the original sword was found in someone’s house and can now be seen on display in the Museum of Gothenburg.

Continuing with our theme of grumpy Swedes, as we approached a fountain we’d passed earlier in the day we saw some people demonstrating for or against something. They were being filmed. They had a loudspeaker. Some were holding up photos of women in lingerie. Absolutely no idea what was going on, but I do know that as soon as they saw me with my camera we had their attention and whatever it was that they were declaring loudly (and in an unfriendly tone, naturally, since, you know, when in Gothenburg and all that) was directed at me now. Accusations or general statements or questions, we didn’t know. We were able to play the roles of Tourists Who Don’t Know What The Hell You’re Saying So We’re Going To Ignore You And Hope This Doesn’t Escalate so well it’s a wonder we didn’t get nominated at the Oscars.

The centre of the granite fountain near where the loud locals were congregated hosted a bronze statue of a woman, the first statue of a woman to be erected in Gothenburg. Dating from 1883 and officially known as The Sowing Woman, it’s more colloquially known as Johanna in Brunnsparken for one of two competing theories: either that was the name of the ballet dancer model who posed for the sculpture, or the statue’s opening day coincided with Johanna’s name day in Sweden.

That concluded our somewhat disappointing time in the city of Gothenburg as we made it to the square at the perfect time to board a shuttle bus and take us back to Island Princess docked at the not-so-nearby port.

Back on the ship we grabbed a snack and a drink, headed to our room, and did all the usual things such as showering, charging batteries, and backing up photos ahead of the sail away from Sweden.

Gothenburg’s port has a number of little islands dotted around and, probably like the city itself, could look very nice on a day with better weather. It was a little flat and grey for our cruise away but I still enjoyed the views of low-lying rocky land with small lighthouses, though, and as you can see, I took plenty of photographs of the departure on the ship.

Of course we’d like to go back to Gothenburg at some point, despite everything I’ve said, and give it a second chance. We are people who are prepared to change our minds in the face of new evidence or the introduction of some happy drug in the city’s water supply just before we arrive. But for this cruise, that was Sweden completed.

The evening aboard Island Princess was more of an “Ah, that’s better” time. That’s the joy of cruising, after all; no matter what happens ashore you can always get back and have a nice meal with drinks before, during, and afterwards. And that’s exactly what we did.

In the next post in this cruise travelogue series we’ll be visiting Copenhagen for the second time in a year and our third visit overall. Spoiler: we like Copenhagen a lot. Not so much of a spoiler: we like Copenhagen more than Gothenburg.

After our walk through the The Garden Society Of Gothenburg And The Palm House we continued in a roughly southerly direction. Architecture in Gothenburg was fairly mixed so elements stood out as a result. Immediately outside the park we spotted a nineteenth century theatre, then one road over something that could have had a history as a church or fire station but was now a table tennis facility.

As we approached the Universeum there was a lot of building work taking place; excavations, demolitions, and construction were in evidence in every direction. With plenty of boards up to protect the roads and passers-by from any debris or to prevent trespassing there were also a lot of canvasses on which street artists could work. Actually getting any photos of any of it was incredibly difficult, though, as the pedestrianised areas to walk along were very narrow, squeezed between the busy main roads and hoardings. We thought we might be able to find more advantageous photography positions after our visit to the museum but that would not prove to be possible.

The Universeum itself was a very impressive building with a multistorey jungle setting inside one side accessed along bridges and up and down steps, but also capable of being visited by elevators on each level. Airlock-style entrances prevented any of the wildlife from escaping because some of the birds were free-flying. It was a great environment but warm, busy, and with lots of ups and downs requiring a fair bit of exertion – and we’re no spring chickens – that we soon realised that our tactic of entering at the lowest level was a mistake.

We abandoned our look low down and took the elevator to the top with the intention to explore from there downwards instead. Happily, we also saw that it was possible to head out onto a balcony area so it gave us a chance to get some fresh air and see Gothenburg from high altitude. The metallic-looking towers we immediately saw belonged to a hotel. The nearby dinosaur sculpture looked like it might have emerged from the excavation work taking place in all directions.

While one side of the Universeum held the tropical zoo-like environment, on the other side on each of the floors there were other rooms and that gave us the chance to look around the aquarium. Clean, large tanks, lots of varieties of fish and coral and sea urchins, and we’re rarely if ever disappointed with just stopping for a moment or two to watch fish swim effortlessly around.

Back to the other animals then before we decided to leave, and that took us past numerous reptiles, and, like the fish, they’re creatures that just make me relax. A lovely variety of snakes and lizards to admire curled up in various desert or jungle settings, and exotic flowers to ooh and aah over as well.

We spent less time in the Universeum than we’d expected, despite its large size and arguably good attractions that should have suited us perfectly. In truth, this was more a place for families with kids, so if you’re visiting Gothenburg with children then there’s a lot to recommend here, especially given the large amusements area next to the Universeum that we weren’t interested in checking out.

We mostly enjoyed the building and things in the Universeum although we encountered some behaviour from locals – visitors and staff – that we wouldn’t quite describe as rude, but would definitely put down as just over the border there in Unfriendlyland. It affected the experience. You know the stereotype about Londoners on tube trains being sullen and unapproachable? This was like that, but colder. We’d interacted with a couple of people while walking around the Palm House before this, too, with similar results; holding a door open for someone and smiling but being met with an icy stare and not even a nod of acknowledgement; that sort of thing. Something about the people of Gothenburg did not endear us to their city.

And that’s part of the reason that we decided that we’d cut short our walk around the city at this point. There was another area we’d considered taking a look at on this day in Gothenburg: Haga, the old town. This would have meant the almost-circular route we’d planned before returning to the shuttle bus pick-up point, but the general downbeat feeling at this point coupled with light rain that had started helped us to decide to head back early instead. In the next post in this cruise travelogue series we’ll do just that when we say goodbye to Gothenburg.

The bulk of this post will be photographs taken around the outside spaces of the Island Princess cruise ship since we occupied our post-breakfast time with a decent explore of the ship’s top deck and promenade. When you’ve been on a few cruises – and we’ve been on a few cruises – and especially if you cruise with the same line a lot, then there’s not a lot to surprise you even when you hop aboard a new ship but there were a few things that did make us say “Huh! That’s different.”

The first thing we really noticed, especially given that the ship was small relative to the rest of the fleet, was how spacious Island Princess felt. Admittedly, there was next to nobody about on the decks for these pictures so it looks quiet, and if you ever view the videos by other cruise bloggers or watch the TV adverts for cruising then you might think this is normal. This is not normal. Cruise bloggers tend to take a lot of their video at stupid hours of the day so they can avoid people appearing, and advertising companies work in a similar way and have a lot of control regarding who can go where and when in order to present a serene scene. Lovely, but very atypical for an actual cruise and I really wish they’d all stop doing it because it gives a false impression to would-be cruisers that may then put them off for life. For our cruise on Island Princess, though, it simply never got crowded at all, and that was at full capacity. Itinerary and date and slightly elevated pricing for the smaller ship may have played a part in dissuading the younger crowd here.

In our many years of cruising I’ve still not managed to persuade my wife to join me for a game of chess on a ship. It’s not like I’d beat her; I’m terrible at chess too.

Island Princess has an indoor pool called the Lotus Pool and this was the second thing about this particular class of ship that gave us a moment’s pause; we absolutely loved the look of this. The retractable roof can be opened if the weather warrants it but late in the year on the North Sea did not warrant it even though it felt surprisingly warm outside to us.

You can tell the pool is from an older ship because of those straw hut coverings over the small pavilion at one end of the swimming pool and the hot tubs either side. You could argue that they’re dated, especially if you’re more familiar with modern ships, and I wouldn’t argue with you (although I might point at the ship’s name with a condescending look on my face) but I would ask “So what?” Dated doesn’t mean bad. They’re just different, and different is good. Different is why Island Princess factored high in our cruise-planning in the first place.

We knew we’d be swimming in that pool later in the day, and more on that a bit further down.

We concluded our exterior exploration of Island Princess with a walk along its promenade deck. Island Princess has a wide promenade deck for more genteel strolling without getting in the way of speed walkers and it’s nice to see them returning on the larger, newer ships, but it would be really nice if they covered them over so that the light pollution and noise pollution from the newer ships doesn’t completely ruin the point of having a balcony cabin in the first place. I know, I’ve moaned about this problem with promenade decks before. On Island Princess, however, the promenade deck is a great place to appreciate the sea views without bothering anyone else.

With our walk around Island Princess complete and breakfast now long-consumed we checked that our room had been serviced – it had – then changed into swimming gear so that we could try out that Lotus Pool.

Oh boy.

The Lotus Pool was not heated. The Lotus Pool was freezing cold. It wasn’t the coldest swimming pool on a cruise ship we’ve ever been in; that record is currently held by Diamond Princess when we felt in danger of cardiac arrest with shock. No, this swimming pool wasn’t quite that bad but it took a very, very, very large amount of inching down and trying to dab water on exposed flesh to acclimatise ourselves to the temperature before we could start swimming, and it never really seemed to get any warmer. We rarely use hot tubs on ships but with there being hardly anyone around we treated ourselves to some warming-up time after the swim to get the circulation going again.

Despite the cold temperature of the swimming pool it was still a lovely location and we like swimming so we subjected ourselves to more torture during the rest of the cruise too.

The afternoon found us in Crooners with some Prosecco and our books, overlooking the piazza where speed painting was taking place. I keep telling my wife that we should take part in more ship activities and she keeps agreeing with me and we keep not doing it.

As the afternoon turned into the evening we returned to our cabin to change for the night – sea days are often formal nights on cruise ships and that was the case here – and we enjoyed some lovely dusk views from our balcony.

We were back in Crooners before dinner in order to uphold a cruising tradition for me in the form of a Vodka Martini on formal night. If I’m going to go to all the effort of putting a tuxedo and bow tie on (real, not a clip-on!), then I’m going to go the full James Bond route.

We could see the champagne waterfall being set up below us. We don’t attend these; it’s not something we’ve seen being done since the earliest cruises when drinks packages didn’t exist and loyalty hadn’t been built up and the desperate urge to get a free glass of questionable fizz was overwhelming. But a lot of people seem to enjoy the spectacle and it’s good to see the return of them as a thing because they went away around the pandemic, for obvious reasons.

As for the remainder of this sea day on Island Princess, there was simply dinner to get through, and that was lovely, then a few drinks in the Wheelhouse Bar to round the night off.

In the next post in this Island Princess cruise travelogue series we’ll be visiting a country we’d visited once before – Sweden – but a new port this time when we dock at Gothenburg.