Like many industrial ports that cruise ships use Zeebrugge was… not particularly exciting to look at, although some naval vessels did provide a slight distraction from the typical cranes and containers you come to expect.

With breakfast out of the way we had a little bit of time before meeting up to take our excursion into Bruges and as we got our bags ready for the day we got to watch as the Oceania Marina reversed into the dock behind us from our aft balcony viewpoint.

I don’t know much about the Marina cruise ship but it did appear that amongst its passengers were astronauts. Weird.

After our very enjoyable day in Bruges there was time for a few more shots from and of our balcony (to show how large it is again; see also: Crown Princess, Aft Balcony, Departing Southampton) before we settled down to the important job of seeing how far we could progress through the cocktails in the various bars on board the Crown Princess.

There was an interesting-looking vessel in Zeebrugge this time around – the Pauline – which caused a bit of a discussion for the couple sat behind us as we departed the port on our excursion to Damme; she was convinced it was a commercial vessel while he was convinced it was a cruise ship; she was right.

The last shots of Zeebrugge as we left Belgium in the evening coincided with some lovely low sunshine generating some beautiful pinks and oranges on the white surfaces as the light refracted through the thicker atmosphere.

But first, a word from our sponsor, Technology Drama.

It was a time of chaos and panic. A time of mayhem. Confusion reigned, and for the valiant people of this state-of-the-art, ocean-crossing vessel the unmistakable sound of hundreds of sets of gnashing teeth rose to drown out everything. The app wasn’t working. Drama! With the technology!

In times like this a hero will step forward; a champion of the downtrodden masses, offering aid to strangers and friends alike. His only need? You had to be using an Android phone, because fuck knows how anything works on Apple.

That hero’s name was Mark. Technology Drama is his story.

Yeah, you came for a cruise travelogue and the promise of tales of Belgian breweries but you’re going to have to skip over the next few paragraphs if you don’t want to hear about the exciting world of mobile phone app settings.

So, on the morning of our visit to the port of Zeebrugge the app wasn’t working on Valiant Lady for an awful lot of people. The app simply explained that access was denied and the only thing that could be seen were the titles of any messages. Pretty much most people who had newer phones were affected, and that included us, and the titles of two of the messages gave us cause for concern since we had booked a shore excursion for later in the day. One message said “Sorry, your excursion has been cancelled” and the other said “Here is the ashore time for your excursion” but both had the same timestamp so we didn’t know whether one superseded another; whether our excursion had really been cancelled or whether our excursion had simply been moved to another time. We needed to get into those message details to read further but access was denied.

Our Bruges shore excursion wouldn’t have been until mid-afternoon and we saw no reason to assume that if there was a rescheduling of our excursion it would be vastly different time-wise so figured we’d have breakfast then hunt down a member of the crew to see if someone could at least get us access to our messages or confirm whether and when the tour was going ahead. However, I’m a fast eater, which gave me some sitting about time while my wife was sullenly finishing up her breakfast (they’d got her order wrong) so I started playing about with my phone, looking at the various options for the app, then the connection settings to the ship’s Wi-Fi. And that’s when I noticed a setting I’d not seen before that increased privacy when connecting to public Wi-Fi by randomising the phone’s apparent MAC address.

Hmm, I thought. What if they’re using the MAC address to identify users rather than a generated token for the login credentials? Wouldn’t that cause problems if the address kept changing? I pondered. What if I disable that for the Virgin connection?

You know that bit in Die Hard where the power is cut to Nakatomi Plaza and the electromagnetic seal protecting the vault collapses? In my mind that’s exactly what played out as my app sprung to life. A minute later and I’d got both my phone and my wife’s working with Valiant Lady’s intranet again and we could see the messages.

The messages didn’t help clear anything up in the slightest so we still had to head off in search of some crew but in the meantime I tweeted the solution for Android users in case anyone was in the same situation, which helped some people. At the first helpdesk area we found there was one man having his phone looked at by two technicians and two others sitting waiting. We stood there for a moment until I asked if they were having app problems. Everyone nodded. I explained the solution about the dynamic MAC setting on the connection. While this didn’t help the guy first in the queue because Apple do things differently, I saw the two other people suddenly pull out their phones, fiddle around, then leave. I think I helped them. Sadly, the helpdesk crew couldn’t tell us about the excursions and sent us to the other helpdesk area. After a wrong turning that saw us finding our way into an apparent crew area accidentally (more signs with arrows please, Virgin) we reached the other helpdesk area. There were more crew there because there were a lot more people waiting to have things checked. I overheard some people moaning about not being able to access the app and again provided my solution but Apple users were everywhere. Following a short wait we got to a member of the crew who confirmed that the excursion we were booked on was still going ahead and it had been moved an hour earlier in the day. Phew. What a saga.

One other bone of contention we overheard here was a confusion regarding the timing of activities. Ship time and shore time were one hour apart, and ship-organised trips were running at ship time but shore-organised trips (which the ship was also organising just to add to the confusion) were running at shore time, and there was no indication which were which. We talked to one couple in the queue here who’d gone ashore to meet their bus for their trip only to find it had left an hour earlier.

Later that day, Virgin would resolve the issue with denied access for everyone. I suspect they disabled the use of the MAC address verification.

Bruges Brewery Tour Shore Excursion

Our tour was going ahead, a little earlier than originally planned, and, importantly, this meant we didn’t have to come up with another plan for the day that might have involved taking a walk into nearby Blankenberge or taking public transport to not-so-nearby Bruges.

We didn’t do a whole lot while waiting around for our tour time to approach, limiting ourselves to a quick nose around on the aft deck (very cold wind out there), then some reading in the extremely quiet ship. The most comfortable (for height), most practical (for light) seats for reading in were around the Draught Haus area. Virgin’s seating theme on Valiant Lady is often wild and wacky, but this does tend towards the soft and low and therefore liable to make you look like a right tit when trying to stand up if you’ve got dodgy knees or are just plain getting on in years.

Knowing we’d be drinking once ashore we made certain to grab a small bite to eat in the Galley. This turned out to be some superb garlic or rosemary bread and a selection of small, pretty, sickeningly-sweet, lovely, filling cakes.

The time of our Virgin shore excursion arrived.

Valiant Lady’s Bruges tour didn’t involve any meeting ahead of time in a dedicated venue, nor did it involve wearing stickers. In keeping with Virgin’s philosophy of a more laid-back, figure-it-out-for-yourself approach to organisation we simply knew we had to be dockside at the departure time. We were dockside ten minutes before because we don’t like to hold anyone up, and from there it was a case of looking at one long queue waiting to board a single-decker bus, and a couple of people hanging around outside a minibus. After asking a question of someone with a clipboard we headed off to the smaller of the two, were assured that this was the correct bus, and boarded.

In total, nineteen people were on the tour bus, including us, and we quickly surmised that most of them knew each other based on comments and shouts and laughing. As the bus set off and our guide started talking about the area and the plan for the tour it was explained that we were actually two groups in one, with four people just getting dropped off and having time to spend in the Belgian city on their own. So, just the fifteen of us from the entire ship had opted to pay for this shore excursion.

We’d been to Bruges a few times before – and you can click on that link to read about those occasions and what we learnt or saw then – so anticipated that we wouldn’t really pick up any new knowledge on the first part of the tour, the walk to the brewery. However, that wasn’t the case, with us walking a route we hadn’t done before on the way from the bus drop-off point and having several new things pointed out to us, including Ten Wijngaerde. The Princely Beguinage Ten Wijngaerd (to give it its full name) presently serves as a convent for Benedictine nuns, but prior to 1927 it was a beguinage (no, me neither, but I’ll explain in a second) and is the only preserved beguinage in Bruges. A beguinage – see, I said I’d explain – can be thought of as a convent for lay religious women who haven’t taken vows, and in countries such as Belgium from around the thirteenth century they took the form of buildings such as a church, boarding rooms, infirmaries, bakeries, etc. arranged around a central courtyard. The area might be protected by walls and gates but these were left open during the day so that people inside and out could come and go as they pleased.

With just fifteen people on a tour you might think this would be an easy experience for the local guide. You would be wrong. Our walking tour took the form of us closely following the guide as he reached something he wanted to point out, him turning around to talk about it, him looking past us down the street we’d just walked, and him looking at us and asking where everyone was. We didn’t know, but they would all eventually drift up, or a few would who would then tell the guide “No, don’t worry about the others, they know where to go.” It was strange, it was chaotic, and it felt rude at first to our experienced-cruise-excursion-taker selves, but it was all good-humoured.

At one point we suddenly twigged that one woman who’d been doing a better job at keeping up than the others was a member of the Virgin Voyages crew as she started asking us questions about how we were finding things. It’s typical to have one or two crew on tours to keep an eye on passengers. We mentioned that we felt sorry for the guide and she smiled and said that most of the others had been to Bruges before so they didn’t need to hear the tour explanations so much. Okay, but that was true of us as well and it still felt a little disrespectful, and when, on occasion, all the group were together to hear about some building or other – near the Gruuthusemuseum and Church of Our Lady Bruges, for instance, where a connecting passageway had been built between the structures – there were plenty of very good questions asked by clearly interested tourists.

We then reached a point where the guide explained where he would take us for the next part of the tour but that was shot down by another couple of our group. “No, I think that’s enough. Let’s have a break for some shopping. We can all meet up somewhere just before the brewery.” My wife and I were starting to suspect there were more than just one or two members of crew with us, and when we mentioned this to the woman we’d talked to before she said that she and a number of others had been to Bruges a week or so before on a fact-finding mission.

A little bit of shopping suited us as we wanted to stock up on some soap from Bubbles At Home. Some people hit Bruges for the chocolate but for us it’s this place and its absolutely fantastic soap that we’ll always hit to take goodies back home.

We didn’t have time to give any of the smaller museums a worthwhile look around but took in the views for a while in the market square opposite the belfry while a group of Spanish tourists demonstrated that they had not learnt the concept of personal space while climbing all over the walls behind where we were sitting so that someone could take their photos. We steadfastly refused to move despite the horror of appearing in some strangers’ memories of a visit to somewhere because we’ve long ago passed that point into grumpy old age.

As we headed down to our meeting point with the tour group on the Nepomucenusbrug we popped into 2be, a small but well-stocked shop for souvenirs, outside which, in an alley alongside it, was the Beer Wall. We’d heard of this but never seen it before and can confirm it was both a wall and contained beer.

Once most of the group had arrived at the designated place at or rather just after the designated time (microscopic sigh) we were led to the brewery: Bourgogne des Flandres. We gathered in a small courtyard area while our guide went back to see if the others were going to turn up and once everyone finally had we were introduced to the brewery tour guide and a glass of beer was given out to everyone to start. It would be fair to describe the brewery guide’s style of presentation as manic. A lot of fun, in other words.

We were taken through numerous, often cramped rooms, up stairs, down stairs, onto a rooftop section looking north towards the belfry over the rooftops of the Bruges buildings, shown old equipment, modern equipment, had fermentation styles explained to us, saw vats fermenting beer, shown a video describing how the brewery had changed over the centuries, and shown different sorts of hops with explanations about why Belgian beer and British beer are different (it’s to do with hop sex, as I’m sure you knew already). At one point our guide made a reference to people getting high and singled out the female member of crew with whom we’d talked. Being Latina she loudly proclaimed “I think I’ve just been stereotypically racially-profiled” but it was said in a light-hearted manner.

The tour ended with a combination tasting and blending in a side room in the main public area of the brewery. Sat on two long benches we were given some lambic beer and some brown beer with guidance on how to taste them. Most people seemed to favour the lambic (spontaneous fermentation) but it’s a little too sour for my personal taste; for me, the maltier, brown ale (top fermentation) was nicer. We were then encouraged to blend the two beers to try to get the best taste. Mixtures and results were all over the place but it was a lot of fun to hear the comments from everyone around as they were mostly disappointed with whatever concoction they’d come up with. Snacks were present in the form of pretzels, meat balls, cold meats, and cheese, and it’s fair to say that they were met with universal approval. We then finished up our time in the brewery with a glass of the proper blend of lambic and brown in the red ale that’s produced and sold by Bourgogne des Flandres.

During the tasting and blending session I had a short chat with Billy, a guy sitting opposite me who looked rich as all hell: immaculately presented, camel overcoat, Hermès Birkin bag with handle wrapped in a scarf to prevent oils from his hands damaging it, jewellery you could see from outer space. Yeah, turned out he was another member of the crew as well. During our talk I asked him just how many people on this tour were crew. After a quick glance around the room he said eleven.

“So, just four of us passengers actually booked to come on this tour!?”

“Yes! We were amazed when we heard you were coming!”

It was quite a shock, though perhaps indicative of the sort of people who’d choose to go on a maiden cruise and a weekend one to a very nearby country at that. It certainly explained why the group as a whole had been more boisterous than we were used to, more chatty, more prone to altering the parameters of the excursion on the fly.

It was nice to listen in to some of the crew talking, though; especially in regards to the tour guides. “We have got to get [the brewery guide] on the ship at some point. He’s a scream!” and “Why isn’t [the general tour guide] drinking and eating with us? We need to make this more inclusive.” Good to hear that sort of adjusting of the experiences being discussed.

When it came time to leave we were directed back into the main bar area and were handed a bag each to take on our way. Each person ended up with two 70cl bottles of the red ale to take with them. Everyone was surprised and everyone was happy, even if it meant we were all clanking our way back through the now-dark streets of Bruges towards the bus. There were photo stops along the way because cats just don’t like being herded.

If you can remember that far back, there had been another four people on our bus originally who were being dropped off to explore Bruges on their own. We were supposed to meet them just on the outskirts of the city but when we arrived (somehow at the correct time) there was no sign of them. A bit of standing around in the cold ensued with some phone calls being made by the guide and some of the crew. An attempt at a group photo took place without us featuring in it despite much cajoling. It was then suggested that perhaps the others had made their way back to the bus already so half the group went off to check while half remained behind. We opted to remain behind to keep the guide company as much as anything else and about ten minutes later one of our half of the group got a call from the other half of the group to say that no, the others weren’t on the bus, but that they’d been told that they were all making their own way back to the ship. As Valiant Lady was staying overnight in Belgium that wouldn’t be a huge issue.

The bus ride from Bruges to Zeebrugge was entertainingly loud and full of amusing comments about the tour. It had been entertaining on the way out, but now we’d all had some beers too. At one point we spotted the moon starting to rise. You’ve seen the moon rise before, I’m sure. It’s more orange than white, and it always appears larger closer to the horizon.

“It’s so big. Are we closer to the moon here in Belgium?” asked one of the American crew. Well, we laughed.

Evening Aboard Valiant Lady

We bumped into another cruise blogger as we boarded Valiant Lady. She’d been booked on another tour that should have included drinks in Belgium but this had been simply cancelled, possibly due to lack of interest. When we mentioned how few actual passengers were on our tour she rightly wondered why she and anyone else who had booked the same as her weren’t at least offered the brewery tour instead.

We’d arrived back on the ship an hour earlier than we’d initially expected because our tour had started an hour earlier which meant we now had some extra time before our dinner reservation. We decided to fill in some of this time with a sit down at the diner and some alcoholic milkshakes from the Social Club. Bloody gorgeous.

Our evening meal in The Wake was a mixed affair. The food was lovely and venue is fabulous, but the service in a restaurant for which we had the last possible sitting and which was at best 40% full was glacial. As I stared out of the aft-facing windows into the blackness of the port at night I imagined continents raising from the sea bed through tectonic activity, erosion fashioning out landscapes, cycles of evolution populating and depopulating this world, before cataclysms erased all evidence of it ever existing between courses.

The later-than-we-expected late night for us was spent in the company of friends, first at On The Rocks where a very good blues band were performing (and where we were treated to an impromptu (maybe) tap dance show from one of the crew), then at the Draught Haus into the early hours where it was easier to actually talk and be heard.

Virgin Voyages Excursion Thoughts

That’s the end of the second day on Valiant Lady – the next day and next travelogue in this series will see the ship leave Zeebrugge for a sea day heading home to Portsmouth – but some concluding thoughts about this brewery tasting tour arranged by Virgin are demanded by the blogging demons.

Whenever you’re talking about a Virgin experience with regards to cruising you’re probably going to be using the phrase “Well, that was different” and this is no exception. Yes, there were some points during the tour early on when we felt that some of the people were being inconsiderate by not keeping up with the guide or in dictating that the tour needed to have its guided bit cut down, but that was when we thought they were a group of passengers like us. Once we realised that, realistically, we were being treated to tagging along with a ship’s crew outing, and that this was as much a bonding and learning experience for them as it was an unexpected behind-the-scenes look at how the crew operate on these ships for us then the feel of the whole thing changed.

There was more smiling, more laughter, more chatting with the guide, and more chatting with fellow tourists (even if they, strictly speaking, weren’t) than we’ve had on any other excursion. Alcohol always helps, of course, but there was plenty going on before we even had a drop. The tour of the brewery itself was also excellent in its own right and can be recommended highly, with a great mix of information about the hows and the whys of the brewing process at the start plus the fun tasting and blending part at the end. Our guides were very different people, and neither could be faulted, the company we had was great with every member of the crew we spoke to being perfect representatives of Virgin as a whole, and this will go down as one of our most favourite shore excursions we’ve taken to date.

Our final day on Valiant Lady, therefore, was one that saw us open up the curtains to a view of a somewhat overcast, dreary-looking port, and because we’d stayed up perhaps a smidge later than we might normally do, we woke up late enough to skip breakfast and get to the point where the cruise ship was getting ready to leave Continental Europe. Doesn’t that make it sound glamorous? Doesn’t that completely not fit the photos below?

Departing from Zeebrugge was mostly only interesting in respect of the view afforded from our balcony of the local dock workers removing the gangway from the ship. A crane operator was lifting and swinging the metal walkway around while a man and woman were trying to line up the unwieldy mass onto the back of a truck’s flatbed. It took forever. It was almost comical. This group made The Chuckle Brothers or Laurel and Hardy look like professionals. The amusement was only tempered by the occasional ducking under of the swinging frame by the female worker to the rear which caused my inner Health and Safety Demon to start screaming maniacally. I kept expecting to see her head get hit, to hear the sound of steel on skull, and to see a scarlet river spread out across the concrete.

Anyway, she survived, and Valiant Lady headed slowly out to sea, observed by and waved off by nobody that I could see.

Razzle Dazzle Brunch

We missed breakfast, as I’ve mentioned, but food is almost always available on cruise ships, and there were plenty of options available for brunch. We checked our app and saw that it would be possible to get into Razzle Dazzle, so booked up. When we’d sailed on Scarlet Lady the year earlier, Razzle Dazzle was one of the dining venues we didn’t get around to trying, but we had visited this spot on our first night aboard for dinner for this cruise – you can read that here if you’ve not done so: Valiant Lady Mermaiden – and figured we’d give it another try since the experience had been… just okay. That’s down to my wife’s very low tolerance for chefs thinking that extreme heat and inducing sweat and numbing the sensations of the lips is the exact same thing as seasoning things and making them taste nice.

Our Razzle Dazzle brunch was pretty similar. I tolerated without massively enjoying what I had, and my wife spent a while interrogating our server for any food option without chili sauce or peppers in it, was assured that one choice would be fine, and cursed constantly when this turned out not to be the case. We both tried the Unicorn Toast, which was incredibly sweet and incredibly messy to eat. I don’t know that I’d try that again, and I don’t know that I would be able to persuade my wife to visit Razzle Dazzle again; we gave it a fair go, but it’s just not to our taste.

Therein lies a small problem with Virgin Voyages as a whole, and their approach to dining: across two cruises now we’ve tried most of the restaurants, and have now eliminated two from likely trying again (the other being the Test Kitchen); Razzle Dazzle isn’t for us, and the Test Kitchen offers nothing new once you’ve done it one time. The lack of a venue with a more traditional Main Dining Room-style of daily, changing dishes limits the long-term appeal of Virgin to us. We don’t want to be stuck in the buffet (I know it’s not called that, but…) or alternating between the two places we kinda like with their static menus, and certainly not on a cruise of more than about three or four nights.

Always remember, though: for every person who says “I have some concerns about this thing” there will always be one who will counter with a “Well, I thought everything was amazing!” Your experience is yours, and yours alone.

Valiant Lady Cruise Ship Photographs

Guess what this next section is going to feature! Go on! Guess!

Brunch over with, we headed out onto The Dock, Valiant Lady’s lower aft seating area, because we wanted to give our room steward a chance to clean our suite in peace. The Dock is a pleasant spot if the sky isn’t grey and the wind isn’t occasionally gusting across your arms and face. Actually, it’s quite pleasant at any time. We liked this location, although it wasn’t warm enough to stay there long, admiring the ship’s wake and the various plant arrangements.

Now, on the basis that I’m not going to promote this post on social media, as a calculated reward for being one of the microscopically small number of people reading this far or skimming past the pretty pictures until this paragraph, I’m going to let you in on a little secret. We don’t appear in photos or videos by choice. It’s because we’re hideously ugly and we care about you, or it’s because we know what we look like and don’t need to see ourselves in every shot, or it’s because we’re both very introverted. I can never remember which. Maybe it’s a bit of all three. Anyway, the problem with cruising with other people is that you just can’t help getting caught on camera sometimes despite your best efforts to avoid it. Look at the first photo from The Dock area above; the one looking up to the netting on the top of the ship. There’s somebody on the netting, but ignore them. Look two balconies down and you can make out an arm. That’s one limb of one half of David and Graham (Cruise Show UK), and if you take a look at their Sweet Aft Suite Review you can see that not only did we catch a glimpse of them, but they caught some footage of us too. Don’t tell anyone.

We spent a bit of time inside, playing in the games arcade before figuring it was safe to return to our room. From there we grabbed our books (okay, Kindle in my wife’s case; she’s embraced modernity while I’m still old school when it comes to reading) and found a quiet spot with relatively comfortable seats to just relax and read for a bit. That lasted as long as it took me to realise that outside sight of Belgium we’d encountered what can only be described as “a bit of blue sky.” That’s photographing weather.

My wife’s accompanied me on more cruise ship photography walkabouts than I care to remember, and with Valiant Lady being as near to identical to Scarlet Lady as makes no difference she decided to stay put while I headed off with camera in hand.

The melted sculptures by Dan Lam were a welcome improvement over the artwork that had been on Scarlet Lady; those I’d found rather plain and unexciting, unbefitting a ship with Virgin’s branding behind it. The touch of colour in these pieces of artwork was the bright and fun sort of the thing the ship needed. It’s a shame that they spelt the artist’s name wrong, though.

As I approached Richard’s Rooftop – the private area at the front and top of the ship for VIP and Rock Star Suite owners only – I spotted a guy peering over the glass partitions with a look that said “So that’s where the other half relax, eh?”

“Do you want to take a look inside?” I asked him, because I’m friendly like that.

“Can I actually get in there?” he asked.

“I can,” I replied, waving my Rock Star bracelet thingy at him.

And that’s how I let one of the riff-raff into the VIP area. And how I let his wife in when she suddenly spotted him having a nose around the spot too. I gave the pair of them a bit of a tour, reported that I wasn’t the ship’s official photographer, explained about the suite perks, and showed them photos of our suite. They said they were planning on booking another cruise with Virgin and that they’d choose a suite next time. And maybe they will.

Inside the ship, on the hunt for my wife who’d moved from where I’d left her, I could see indications of preparations for the final night aboard Valiant Lady’s festivities.

Making A Scene

Access to the VIP rooftop area isn’t the only perk that comes with choosing to cruise with Virgin Voyages as a Rock Star. Very close to what Virgin refer to as their swimming pool is a private room – not large, but with plenty of low, soft seating and some floor-to-ceiling windows offering views out to sea – called The Scene. The Scene is reserved for VIPs and Rock Stars and it’s a place where champagne can be drunk and you can chat with your agent about any issues you have, or just to talk.

“Oh, it’ll be just like the Elite Lounge on a Princess ship,” we thought.

It’s nothing like the Elite Lounge on a Princess ship.

You get complimentary champagne. Complimentary Moët & Chandon, as it turns out. And as much of it as you can manage or that they have. We might have only stayed for a few glasses and made our excuses except it turned out that we were sitting next to David and Graham (I mentioned them earlier) and we got to having a natter about cruises, ships we’ve been on, ships we’ve mutually disliked (Iona, I’m talking about you), gossiping about bloggers (no names mentioned), etc. All the usual stuff. And every time our glasses got nearly empty there would magically appear a member of staff with a bottle in hand to top us up. And top us up. And top us up.

“Oh, Marie, I’ve drank so very much champagne,” said David, grabbing hold of my wife’s arm for support as we left. Yeah. I think we each polished off a couple of bottles there.

Duel Reality

We had a booking to see the Duel Reality show immediately after our champagne session and were planning to meet a couple of friends there, but it turned out that David and Graham were also booked for that so the six of us ended up watching it together, with four of us ever-so-slightly the worse for wear.

Duel Reality is an acrobatic take on the West Side Story-style reimagining of Romeo and Juliet. Two gangs dancing and competing in leaping, climbing, spinning, and bouncing activities while squaring up and acting tough. It was fabulous and I can safely say that it was the best show we’ve seen on a cruise ship but, to be fair, you could count the number of shows we’ve seen on cruise ships on one hand with a couple of fingers lost at sea in a propeller accident.

Dinner And Dancing

Discovering that our dinner booking at the ship’s Italian restaurant, Extra Virgin, was just 15 minutes different from our other friends, Paul and Carole, we headed to the venue together and asked if we could shift from two bookings for two to a single booking for four. No problem. We ordered drinks from the bar then enjoyed the best meal of our short cruise aboard Valiant Lady, although it’s hard to disappoint us with Italian-style offerings.

Entertainment during the meal came in the form of two women – who’d possibly also been indulging in some alcoholic beverages during the day – sitting next to us, one of whom, I swear despite all that earlier champagne I’d knocked back, was flirting with me. I’d knocked her phone when being seated because our tables were very close to one another; she’d mentioned my backside; I’d commented that everything gets bigger and in the way with age; she’d made some double-entendre remarks during the meal; when she went to leave I theatrically moved glasses away from the table’s edge so she wouldn’t knock them as well; she leaned down and offered to knock them off with her breasts; I declined the nice offer; she then remarked “Why are all the good ones gay?”

“There’s a first time for everything,” I told my wife.

“Indeed,” she replied. “Nobody’s ever called you a good one before.”

Post-dinner events on the ship were happening but it perhaps wasn’t as lively as it could have been given that this was the final evening and a fair number of people would be getting off the ship early in the morning and in many cases driving home. That was true of most of the people we were with so we chatted and had a few drinks but didn’t go crazy.

Once everyone else had called it a night we took advantage of the fact that we merely had to walk off the ship home and popped along to The Manor Nightclub for a nightcap, a bit of people watching, and a bit of wondering just what the hell was that music they were playing and asking why did it have to be so loud. We’re at that age where it’s our duty to behave like this. Don’t judge.

Valiant Lady Cruise Conclusion

That brings write-ups of our time aboard Valiant Lady on her Mermaiden cruise out of Portsmouth to an end. We clanked off the ship in the morning with all the bottles from our mini-bar and our excursion in Bruges.

We really like what Virgin Voyages have done in the cruising world, bringing some welcome differences to cruising that aren’t so different they’ll put regular cruisers off, but fresh enough to inject some new love into this form of travelling for old hands.

We knew we’d like Valiant Lady because we liked Scarlet Lady, but, truth be told, we were hoping for more individuality in the ships. We’ve sailed on identical class ships in the P&O fleet and in the Princess fleet, and they all have their personalities; layouts a little different, venues moved around or different, decor changed subtly or more noticeably. Valiant and Scarlet felt as close to carbon copies as it’s possible to be, with just the barest changes in artwork and nothing else. More importantly, with all the restaurants being the same and the menus not changing, there’s nothing to truly differentiate the ships at all. We are destination-first cruisers, but we know a lot of people who like to check off ships in a fleet. I question the long-term enjoyment of the ships themselves if they aren’t going to try to attract those people with something unique to the vessels. I know, though, that in the short-to-medium term it will be Virgin’s crew who keep that loyalty going because the crew, whether serving or entertaining or joining us on our excursion, have been among the very best we’ve sailed with.

If Virgin do more short cruises out of Portsmouth then we’d cruise with them again. As things stand, though, given the pricing of their cruises and the lack of variety aboard, it’s going to take a spectacular itinerary to get us back on one of their ships. We hope that happens, because we really enjoyed our time cruising with them, and Virgin have got some cracking vessels and people here. And, please put in a proper pool.

One other option while your cruise ship is docked at Zeebrugge is to look around nearby Blankenberge. For anyone wanting to catch the train to other Belgian locations then this is the city you’ll need to get to first anyway and there are usually options to reach Blankenberge from the port. Sometimes those options are complimentary, sometimes you’re on your own, and sometimes – like on this occasion for our Island Princess cruise – a local company will run a chargeable shuttle bus service.

We paid for the shuttle service to Blankenberge but our intention was to take a walk around the seaside city just to see what it had to offer. It helped that we had absolutely glorious weather for our day in Belgium. We were dropped off beside Saint Antonius Church, just opposite the train station, and with a very prominent city sign for tourists to head towards.

Travelling to Blankenberge in October meant that the city was quiet but it’s a popular place in the summer months with Belgians and international visitors too thanks to its long, golden sand beach. This post covering several hours in Blankenberge will mostly comprise of our walk along that beach admiring the views out to sea and back at the many hotels and apartment blocks along the coastline which, to me, just looked spectacular with the cloudless sky as backdrop.

The large church on the walk towards Blankenberge beach was dedicated to Saint Roch. The church was built in the late nineteenth century during the Belle Époque when the city grew in size and became a popular seaside destination with tourists in a similar way to that happening in Victorian Britain. The church’s tower was an early twentieth century addition. The saint was chosen as there had been a smallpox outbreak just prior to its construction and local people had associated an improvement in their conditions and a reduction in transmission with praying to the saint. Something something correlation, something something causation.

The small, older-looking building we passed was the former town hall of Blankenberge. These days it’s used as a space for displaying art exhibitions throughout the year.

Blankenberge is protected from the sea by a dyke but it’s only obvious that this is the case when you reach the northern part of the city and realise you need to climb up steps to reach the sandy expanse beyond. Three sets of steps were constructed on the cusp of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The large casino building on the seafront caught my attention for a number of reasons. Firstly, it was an impressive building and dates to 1859. Secondly, obviously, there were terrifying sculptures of babies crawling over its surface. That’s the sort of thing that does catch a person’s attention.

The disturbing sculptures are called, appropriately enough, Babies, and they’re by David Cerný. They were actually built to celebrate the nomination of Prague as a cultural capital in the year 2000.

If you like beaches of fine, pale golden sand then Blankenberge will appeal to you.

Before we spent all our annual leave allowance on cruising around the world we used to spend all our annual leave allowance taking breaks in the United Kingdom and, because we’ve always had a fondness for the sea, we would more often than not stay at seaside resorts. This in turn gave us an appreciation for piers because our country has a lot of them.

What we hadn’t realised is that piers are not that common in the rest of Europe but you can find one in Blankenberge – it’s called the Belgium Pier – and it’s interesting for a couple of reasons. The first pier that occupied this location was actually the first pier at all on the North Sea or Atlantic Ocean coastlines of mainland Europe. This replacement, though, dates from 1933, is three hundred and fifty metres long, concrete, and in gorgeous Art Deco style.

We did what we always do when we see a pier at the seaside, and walked down one side to the end then back down the other side, braving the blustery wind and loving the views out to sea and back towards land.

We didn’t have any firm plans for things to do in Blankenberge because it was late in the tourist season and there wasn’t a whole lot to do, so this visit was mostly getting an idea for the lay of the land, getting off the ship because we could, and just looking at a new place. But another thing we’ve enjoyed when travelling has been to visit a place’s aquarium if it has one and so it was that we spent a bit of time in SEA LIFE Blankenberge. Certainly not the largest or most impressive aquarium we’ve visited but nice, friendly staff, and we enjoyed it.

By this time my wife’s ankles were aching (an old injury) so we decided to cut our time in Blankenberge shorter than we’d originally planned and had a wander back to the shuttle bus pickup spot.

We generally liked Blankenberge; it had some nice architecture and a very attractive pier. Other than the aquarium there didn’t seem to be an awful lot to do in the city but I think there’s enough there to warrant a look at more of the city centre next time we cruise to Belgium.

In the next post I’ll take advantage of the quiet ship because a lot of people were still ashore in Bruges, Ghent, Brussels, or Blankenberge, and share photos from some of the public areas around Island Princess.

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.

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.