London Hotel: Holiday Inn – Heathrow M4, Junction 4

We can drive from our home to Heathrow in about an hour and fifteen minutes. With a midday flight we could easily have driven up in the morning but that presumes there won’t be any traffic problems and that the alarm will go off and that trees won’t have fallen down and blocked our road off and that the bridges that connect Portsmouth to mainland England aren’t hit by meteorites and it simply adds a stress to the start of a holiday that we don’t need so we will typically book a hotel before any flight these days if it doesn’t eat up any of our annual allowance. We’d previously stayed at the Holiday Inn – Heathrow M4, Junction 4 ahead of our flight to Asia for our Diamond Princess cruise the year before and had found it suited our needs perfectly so we booked it again.

We gave our name at reception to the wide-smiling guy there who made small talk while he typed away to find our reservation. At the time of booking I’d taken advantage of an offer to get a really cheap room and had requested a Queen bed configuration. That had triggered a reply from the hotel to state that they couldn’t guarantee that request but that they’d do their best on the day we arrived. With it being for the single night we weren’t that bothered. Our expectation, therefore, was for a room with two singles.

“Okay, we’ve given you an upgrade tonight. You’ll be in an Executive Room.”

“Really? For what we paid? Are you sure?”

“Shut up and let the man do his job, Mark.”

“Oh yeah, of course. Very sorry.”

And so, for ridiculously little money we found ourselves in an upgraded room for the evening. This one, to be precise:

A very nice room indeed with just the one tiny gripe to report should you be considering a stay at this hotel: the lighting was a pain. It was impossible to have the bedside lights on without the light by the door on too which would have been fine had that light not been fitted with a 200 gigawatt bulb. Perhaps that’s how executives like to sleep.

The reason we’d first chosen this hotel near Heathrow in which to stay in had been because of its proximity to a few pubs. In fact, there’s one – The Plough – mere metres from the hotel entrance. It’s not a pub with a huge range of beer but what it does have, it keeps well. It’s also not a pub with a vast range of food, but again, it’s prepared quickly, is a decent size, and is perfectly acceptable fare. When you consider, though, that the pub probably sees an incredible turnover of customers through its doors owing to its closeness to the hotel and travellers using its services, the one thing that stands out for us is the service which we’ve found on two occasions now to be superb: friendly and fast. When we walked in this time the pub was rammed – a marked contrast to our October visit of the year before – and we accepted immediately that food wouldn’t be an option so we’d grab a drink then head back to the hotel. But no, a member of staff saw us look around at tables, asked if we were after food, then gave us a spot that somebody else had reserved because they were either late or possibly not due for a while and could potentially be reseated. Fabulous stuff. That’s the sort of thing that endears you to a place. We had a couple of burgers – plenty of Indian spices in them if you like that sort of thing – washed down with some beers followed by a gin each. Well, we were on holiday!

Back to the hotel then and the chance to have a nightcap or two before bed and the excitement to come. The day after. There would be no excitement in the bed unless you count an exclamation of “Ooh, it’s nice and dark in here!” after the lights are switched off as exciting.

Opposite reception in the lobby of the Holiday Inn Heathrow was a well-stocked bar and plenty of seating. The decor was clean, if a little spartan, but that’s big hotels the world over for you.

We can definitely recommend this hotel. It’s got a very nearby pub if you don’t fancy eating or drinking in the hotel. It’s got a very pleasant bar. It’s got fabulously friendly staff. It’s just a few minutes away from the airport car parks. It gave us an upgrade. We can also recommend the pub.

Heathrow Airport, Terminal 3

We parked up in the Terminal 5 Long Stay Car Park and took the shuttle bus to the airport where we boarded the train to Terminal 3. Why did we park at Terminal 5? Because that’s where our flight back would bring us and we wanted to skip the additional time of the train on the return home as we’d be getting back late in the evening. Interestingly, after never having had this issue before, our last three flights abroad for cruises have all flown out of and back into different terminals. In the previous two instances we flew out from T5 and back into T3 whereas this one was the opposite. Kinda annoying as it means you’ve got to lug luggage around (well, what else would you do with luggage?), but it did give us the opportunity to see what Terminal 3 had to offer in terms of concessions as this would be our first time flying out from it.

For the most part Terminal 3 was simply a slightly smaller version of Terminal 5 but it had one bonus over its numerically-superior sibling: no fucking Wetherspoons. We no longer visit Wetherspoons by choice but it’s still a haunt of ours if flying when it’s the only good option for breakfast and a drink. It was so nice to not have to suffer supporting that horrible, horrible business. It used to be good and we used to support it around the country when we travelled but we started to notice a marked downturn in the clientele over the years (family-friendly, traditional ale-based establishments were all becoming lager-drinking, noisy shitholes), a reduction in quality of food and range of drink, and cleanliness slacking. And, of course, then the anti-EU tirades of its CEO started in earnest to try to make excuses for the noticeable decline and what was simply an attempt to be able to pay his staff lower wages and remove their employment rights. He’s a horrible shit of a man and it’s a horrible chain. We’re so glad Terminal 3 doesn’t have one.

What’s that? You didn’t come here for the anti-Wetherspoons rant? Well, nobody’s forcing you to stay.

Anyway, back to the travelogue. If we’re heading off on a flight then we’re having food in the airport and we’re having a drink. It’s an ale for me; it’s a Bloody Mary for my wife. As this was our breakfast time we both went pretty holiday-traditional for us too with scambled eggs and smoked salmon coming my way and Eggs Benedict being my wife’s fancy foodstuff of choice.

The flight to Barcelona took off on time and landed on time. As it was short haul there was no entertainment to be viewed or free snacks or drinks to be consumed so a decent amount of reading was had instead. Security was a breeze because we’re still in the EU. Just. A short delay ensued at baggage reclaim in Barcelona, though, as handlers were on strike and it was taking longer to get the cases through the system as a result. As we’d had our bags lost on our last flight out to Chile (see: Flight Issues, Luggage Issues, And Stress To Start A Cruise) there was a small twinge of consternation when the carousel ground to a halt with no sign of our cases again but at least we weren’t alone this time, with the vast majority of people on our flight also looking around with mild concern on their faces. After several minutes it all started up again, though, and we were soon through, found our Princess representatives, waited in the allocated spot for a few minutes, then were taken to the bus and were off on our way shortly after.

Emerald Princess In Barcelona

Arriving mid-afternoon at the cruise terminal was a vastly different experience to arriving in the morning. We’re used to crowds of people and being able to waltz past them because of our priority boarding status but the lateness of our arrival coupled with the fact that this ship was doing a series of back-to-back 7-nighters (so there was a considerable number of people aboard who were part-way through a 14 or 21-night cruise and didn’t need to be processed again) meant that the terminal space that could possibly have handled upwards of a thousand people in it only had to deal with the dozen of us who’d been on the bus. Check-in was subsequently lightning fast and in no time we were on Emerald Princess and hunting down our room to drop off our hand luggage.

We were staying in room C219. It was a little farther forward than we typically stay but it’s the deck and general location we favour: ten forward. On this class of cruise ship it also has the bigger balcony we like. I’ve posted photos of the rooms aboard Princess ships on numerous occasions and they’re all pretty much of a muchness now so no pictures this time around. Instead, just the observations that we missed the bedside lamps with USB chargers built in that we’d made lots of use of on our last trip but it was nice to see the technology in place ahead of the Ocean Medallion installation, due to be activated on Emerald Princess in the latter half of 2020. Not exactly “coming soon” but nice anyway.

Some people make heading for the buffet their first action on board. We alternate between heading off to take some photos or grabbing a drink as quickly as possible to post pictures of and annoy friends and family back home. On this occasion we went the latter route and made our way to Crooners at the top of the piazza. The last three Princess ships we’ve been on have had Crooners on the opposite side of the piazza so this was initially quite confusing for us. Emerald shares its design most closely with Crown Princess which we’ve cruised on twice before (and have two upcoming trips on for next year) so it shouldn’t have been that much of a shock and yet our minds seemed to have forgotten that detail. The drink helped us get over it.

Our original flight to Barcelona had been scheduled for later in the day and had we taken it we’d have missed the mandatory safety briefing and would have had to attend one for late arrivals. That and issues with the flight on the year’s earlier cruise from South America had led to me moving the flight forward enough to make sure we were on the ship in plenty of time to attend the main muster. It’s something that Princess does well and this was no exception, with the whole thing running to maybe fifteen minutes from our arrival in the theatre to being told we could leave. Our muster out of the way, we decided to check out Vines at the bottom of the piazza and make ourselves known to the staff there as we suspected we’d be regular visitors.

Drinks prices are not great on Princess but you know this and you accept it and you don’t moan about it on forums online and concoct devious ways to smuggle on your own alcohol because that just makes you look like a tightwad. One tip you can work out for yourself if you’re not a complete numbskull when it comes to arithmetic is that if you’re planning on drinking a couple of glasses of wine each then it works out more cost-effective to buy a bottle. An added bonus there is it means you’re getting a bottle freshly-opened just for you. A second tip is to make the first thing you say to the waiter in Vines “So, which of these reds don’t you have?” because a) you’re a person of taste who only drinks red wine and, b) I guarantee there will be at least three unstocked options from the list and you want to avoid all those “Oh, I’m sorry, we don’t have any of that right now but we might be having some dropped in by Chinook on our next sea day” excuses you can see the staff frantically making up on the spot when you ask for them.

We’d pre-booked speciality dining for a few nights of this week’s cruise but the first night wasn’t one of them so we headed off to the main dining room and said yes, we’d be happy to share with other people. We generally don’t mind sharing with other people because it’s always nice to remember you’re better than them in every way and in that respect this meal experience didn’t let us down. What we don’t like doing is sharing on a table for ten because the meal… just… str-e-t-c-h-e-s… on… for-e-v-e-r… Sadly for us, that’s exactly what happened, so we ate and smiled and nodded and only got into the smallest of barb-slinging attacks on the gun-rights fundamentalists on the table as we tried to find the earliest opportunity to pretend we had somewhere else we absolutely needed to be.

We absolutely needed to be away from those people so we popped into Explorer’s Lounge for a drink where we discovered a brand new drinks menu we’d not seen before. Oh, if only someone had taken photos of the new Explorer’s drinks menu! Oh, someone did.

We had a drink, naturally, then decided to check out a venue we’d been fond of when we’d cruised on Crown Princess in the Baltic Sea, that being Adagio’s Bar. It was decidedly dead which was partly to be expected as our Crown cruise had been when the BOGO was still in use and this had been one of the BOGO locations. Its distance from the heart of the ship makes it practically impossible to walk past and decide to just drop in so it really needs a promotion of some description to draw in customers. We had expected it might have somebody in it as it was next door to the Share dining venue (one of the locations we would eat at later in the cruise) but no.

Still, there was another reason to check out Adagio’s and that was to use its rear entrance and make our way onto the aft terrace as the time had come for Emerald Princess to finally leave Barcelona and begin our cruise properly. Owing to the lateness of the evening there was no loud deck party and no sounding of the ship’s horn as we headed away from the Spanish port. It was a very pleasant, quite serene end to the first day of the cruise.

Day two, covered in the next post in this travelogue series, would be spent at sea and will include speciality dining in Crown Grill.

There’s very little more relaxing than stepping onto your balcony first thing in the morning and just gazing out across the sea.

We’d left Barcelona the evening before and would be docking in Gibraltar the following day so as we cruised southwards to that destination our view from our starboard balcony was towards Spain. We were far enough out from land, though, that it couldn’t be seen and, just for a change, we decided not to try to calculate what our minimum distance from land or angle to the horizon was based on our estimated height above sea level, something we’ve done on far more occasions than I care to recall. It turns out that all those times in school when we thought to ourselves “Okay, knowing the length of the adjacent side and the distance to that point I can take the cosine and… wait… when am I ever going to need this?” the answer was “When you’re on a cruise ship and your brain suddenly recalls odd mnemonics from decades prior.” We’ve also used maths to work out how much a ship was listing in high winds before by looking at the angle of the drink’s surface in a cocktail glass. Yes! We are that nerdy.

Emerald Princess’s daily programme of events in Princess Patter didn’t produce many highlights for us but that was fine because a day of doing nothing felt like a good way to start the cruise.

There were three films showing that we did like the look of as we’d not seen any of them before – Captain Marvel, John Wick: Chapter Three, and Avengers: Endgame – but we didn’t really want to spend several hours inside on such a lovely day so that ruled out John Wick, and we didn’t want to watch the last of the Avengers movies before we’d seen Captain Marvel, and we didn’t feel that Captain Marvel in bright sunshine would be the best of conditions to watch that sort of movie in. We don’t really go in for the port lectures, haven’t yet considered taking part in physical games on the decks or in the piazza, and roll about on the floor like Smash Martians whenever one of us jokingly suggests a health seminar. Trivia games (unsuccessful but bloody close), reading, and a long swim in the Lotus Pool would be the order of most of the day then.

And drinking, of course. You can’t forget the drinking. You try to forget the drinking by drinking but you can’t when you have formed the habit of taking a photo of every drink that magically appears in front of you when you’re on a cruise ship like I have. You look at the camera roll later and think “Ah. Oh yeah.” You also think to yourself “Did I take the same picture of a couple of glasses of wine four times?” but then you look at the timestamps and subtle differences in the backgrounds and how much of your book you got read in the afternoon and you realise that no, you didn’t, and the staff in Vines just did a mighty fine job of making you feel comfortable.

I’m only including one photo of wine. You don’t need to form horrible opinions about the state of our drinking by seeing any more.

This first day at sea aboard Emerald Princess would culminate in a formal night. That tends to be the way these things work out on Princess and knowing this from experience we’d pre-booked speciality dining at the Crown Grill restaurant a few months before the cruise as we knew it would be difficult to guarantee if we waited until we were onboard. This would give us the option to not have to dress up so formally should we desire because if you’re paying extra for your meal you can get away with a lot more. That said, Princess aren’t particularly fussy when it comes to formal nights, anyway. P&O have a far more rigid adherence to the formal dress code in certain locations after a certain time in the evening, for instance, but the vast majority of passengers on a Princess ship still make an effort and you can look a little out of place if you choose to go more casual.

So, we didn’t have to dress formally but we’d packed the tuxedo and fancy dress anyway (a dress that’s fancy, not actual fancy dress; I’m sure you knew that) so we figured we’d put up with a little stuffiness for one evening. And who doesn’t like dressing up and pretending they’re rich and snobby for a few hours, especially if you’re then going to a fine dining establishment?

Fake Rolex and EU cufflinks finished off my attire nicely as I made sure to have a traditional formal night Vodka Martini. My wife still doesn’t believe that I’ve started to acquire a taste for what was originally to me (and still to her) an absolutely vile concoction but it’s true. The olives are an important part of the mix but they must be removed once half the drink is consumed and they must under no circumstances be eaten because there are limits to what I can stomach, with olives being way beyond them.

Let me start by saying that this Crown Grill experience aboard Emerald Princess wasn’t the best. It certainly wasn’t the worst (no, Royal Princess, you still hold that particular prize) but the venue seemed a little chaotic, especially at the start of our meal, and the initial waiting time to even be asked our food and drink choices was unusually long. This seemed to be down to one or two staff too few in my opinion. We cannot fault our waitress at all who was very amusing despite being clearly rushed off her feet, and the food, once it started to arrive, was as wonderful as it always is in the speciality steakhouse.

It was nice to see they’d blanked off the unavailable wines from the wine menu as we almost without fail will pick something they don’t have. I’d like to think that this was because of my repeated feedback after cruises to do this very thing. Previous dining experiences have tended to include a conversation along the lines of “This?” “No.” “This?” “No.” “You must have this!” “I’ll just go check.” “They won’t have it.” “Sorry, we don’t have that.”

There were no surprises on the menu. You don’t visit the Crown Grill for the seasonal offerings; you visit because of the steak.

For our appetisers I went with the Hand-Cut Beef Filet Tartare while my wife took a gamble on Bay Scallop Timbale, a gamble as she’s not a fan of cajun spices.

Shrimp and Pancetta Bisque was my soup while my wife picked Black and Blue Onion. There wasn’t even a moment’s thought about going for the salad. We can be a little odd but we’re not crazy.

While our appetisers and soups are occasionally changed around a bit depending on how we feel the same isn’t true for the main course in the Crown Grill where we always both pick the 8oz Filet Mignon (rare because there is no other way), french fries between us as a side dish, with creamed spinach just for me and wild mushrooms just for my wife.

Dessert, as always, was the Crown Dependence, the sampler of all the sweet dishes available.

Another absolutely lovely meal from the Crown Grill, just as we’d expected, and we left feeling just the right side of bloated.

As we hadn’t been to Skywalkers Nightclub on embarkation day – we’d been shattered and crashed into bed quite early for us – we made sure to give it a visit on this first full day aboard. We entered to find there were actually a handful of people there which was a pleasant surprise as it’s not unusual for us to be the sole occupiers of the late night venue. Before heading to grab a seat at the edge of the dance floor (we like to people-watch and it’s convenient if we want to get up and dance and keep an eye on our drinks) we made a bee line for the DJ’s booth. From several metres away he looked up, pointed, and opened his mouth in shock.

Hey! I know you two!

Yeah, you do. Star Princess, March, Chile to Los Angeles.

Yeah, yeah! That’s right! Wow! You’re going to want to dance to Rob Zombie, aren’t you?

You know it.

Another night on a Princess Cruises ship, another nightclub spot being run by DJ Mateo, another couple of British people in full formal gear strutting their stuff badly to the sounds of Dragula.

The following morning would see Emerald Princess arrive in Gibraltar and our travel diary report of that will be covered in the next post in this cruise portfolio series.

Gibraltar is a small place and it would be fair to say that it doesn’t have the hugest range of attractions to excite a visitor. Princess Cruises did have some tour options but there was nothing there that couldn’t be done on your own, for less money, and without much in the way of risk of missing out on getting back to the ship. Its biggest draws for the majority of cruisers were probably the impossible-to-miss Rock of Gibraltar and those duty free shopping prices.

On that last point it’s worth noting that we normally buy cigarettes for my sister-in-law on cruises because a) she can’t kick the filthy habit, and b) this saves her quite a lot of money compared to buying cigarettes in the UK. In the past we’ve had issues where the ship sold out of cigarettes early so we’d “been sensible” and “ordered” some on the first day aboard Emerald Princess. The nicotine cylinders of death are normally delivered on the last day along with any alcohol but we’d been surprised to find that there were no limits for their purchase and we could take them immediately. So we did. In hindsight, a poor decision that we should have been immediately suspicious of where it came to Princess’s treatment and of which we should have given more thought. To cut a boring piece of advice short: if you want to shorten your life or the lives of others around you while encased in a cloud of stench and your ship is docking in Gibraltar then don’t buy cigarettes onboard; far, far better prices in the little headland off Spain.

We weren’t interested in the duty free shopping; it was to the Rock that we wanted to go as soon as possible. Breakfast downed, we disembarked the ship and walked into the centre of Gibraltar, a simple job of following the road out of the port and going straight over three roundabouts to the walls and the Grand Casemates Gates.

This brought us into Grand Casemates Square, an attractive, open space with plenty of cafés with outdoor seating and pleasing views. A casemate, if you didn’t know – and I certainly had never heard of the word before – is a fortified gun emplacement, and with Gibraltar’s long history of being a strategic military outpost this square takes its name from the large defensive structure to the north of it. The square itself sits at the northern end of the main shopping area of Gibraltar which we fully intended to have a nose through once we’d seen what we really wanted to see in the place but for now we simply strolled straight through it.

The Rock of Gibraltar

The top of the 426 metres high, limestone Rock of Gibraltar can be reached in one of four ways.

• You can walk up if you are young and/or fit and/or tight with money. We are none of those things.
• You can take a taxi up its winding and narrow roads if you are boring. We have been accused of being boring but I’d like to think we aren’t and I can produce a Powerpoint presentation outlining evidence to support this opinion in a three hour show called Is Dullness Really In The Eye Of The Beholder? if you’re interested in knowing more.
• You can parachute in from the back of a Hercules transporter if you are James Bond and you’re filming The Living Daylights. I feel compelled to point out that neither of us is James Bond but that Timothy Dalton was for this film and he remains the best Bond ever and I will flick olives from a Vodka Martini at anyone who disagrees.
• You can take the cable car up if you are a tourist looking to do touristy things. As it turns out, we were tourists looking to do touristy things so this is what we did.

Ahead of the cruise we’d used the internet – everyone’s doing it these days – and bought tickets for the Cable Car and Nature Reserve. The benefit of buying tickets in advance is that you can skip what might be a long line waiting to buy tickets and join the long line waiting to get on one of the two cars heading up the promontory roughly every five minutes. There was no long line, however, as we’d timed our walk from the ship to perfection and arrived pretty much dead on when the first cable cars would start running. This didn’t mean we didn’t have to wait, though.

The thing you should know about Gibraltar’s cable cars is that one goes up while the other comes down, then the process is reversed. You might think that being in a queue to board a car means if you don’t get in the first one but you’re at the front of the queue then you’ll get in the next one. You might think that but you would be wrong. In addition to the queue for people who’ve just turned up or booked tickets online there is a second queue which snakes up a set of steps with No Entry signs around it and which jumps your queue. Surely not! That doesn’t sound very British! But yes. This is the queue for pre-booked groups so it might not be used normally but when a cruise ship is in and the cruise ship is arranging excursions then they get to steal half the cable cars capacity to the top of the Rock. Annoying when you’re near the front of the queue, a car is descending, you think you’re about to board, then a minibus full of passengers with their coloured stickers pulls up, debarks, and a crowd wanders past you. On the plus side the trip is a quick one so the wait isn’t too long but some people might be grateful for the very limited amount of seating in the waiting area if standing for a sustained period is an issue.

The video below (temporarily removed) contains highlights of the entire day in Gibraltar and includes some footage of the ascent to the top of the Rock in the cable car.

The views from the upper cable car station were lovely, the sea mist still clinging to the lower altitudes while the clarity of the upper reaches cast everything in a clean, crisp feel. We’d wondered whether t-shirts would be enough and whether it might be sensible to carry some layers but that sea mist is testament to the fact there was very little wind around at all and the early September temperature was near enough perfect for us.

Almost half of Gibraltar’s land area is classified as a nature reserve and it’s within that reserve on the top of the Rock that you can find much of the indigenous flora and fauna, plus those famous monkeys too. You might spot a monkey outside the nature reserve because they refuse to recognise man-made borders but if you want to guarantee a sighting then you’ll need to buy a ticket for that area. Incidentally, the Barbary Macaques on Gibraltar are monkeys and not apes as some people insist on referring to them as. It’s likely that people have looked at the absence of a tail in the past and decided that this makes them apes but people have a tendency to be wrong a lot of the time and this is one of those occasions. There is a lot more to biological classifications than physical appearance. If you’re a simian primate (site analytics indicate a strong likelihood for this) and are an orangutan, gorilla, bonobo, gibbon, or human then you’re an ape; anything else and you’re a monkey. I know you probably didn’t come to this post about Gibraltar’s tourist highlights with the expectation that you were about to get a lesson on primate definitions but that’s the kind of guy I am: I’m an annoying guy.

You’re warned before you make it into the reserve on the Rock not to carry plastic bags with you as the monkeys associate them with food. You also hear stories online about people having their sunglasses stolen or their phones swiped or being pressured into buying timeshares across the border on mainland Spain but we found the monkeys to be very well-behaved while we were there. We did talk to a couple later in the day who mentioned that while they were exploring Gibraltar’s landmark feature one of the Barbary Macaques had jumped onto the backpack that another passenger was wearing, swung upside down, unzipped a pocket, and snatched items from it but there’s no way to tell for sure whether that passenger had not previously taken those items from the monkey and it was simply retrieving its possessions. I don’t like to judge and I don’t think you should either without knowing all the facts.

We did get to see a female with child which was nice and generated a few “Aaaww!” sounds from people around.

I’m not an expert when it comes to monkey facial expressions (that’s right; I have some limits) but I’d like to think this monkey’s furrowed brow was from calculating distances to the horizon using trigonometry (an activity we decided not to do for a change on the previous day at sea) and not a sign he was getting infuriated at people pointing cameras in his general direction.

And it’s almost impossible to travel far in the western world in tourist-heavy areas without bumping into street entertainers so it wasn’t a complete surprise to discover this form of begging/non-taxable-employment had penetrated deep into the animal kingdom. We’re not huge fans of Shakespeare but it was a masterful performance of Hamlet’s soliloquy and very deserving of the cascade of fruit that came his way afterwards.

Navigating around the top of the Rock is typically just a matter of picking whether to follow the road that’s ascending or descending whenever a choice needs to be made. If you really want to get lost, though, then open up the map that is supplied with your entry ticket. Nothing is more confusing than trying to read a map of roads up and around a steep hill and trying to figure out which of the routes you’re actually on. In many ways this reminded us of our visit to Jiufen the year before where the map again appeared to be more closely an artist’s impression of the area as opposed to being of any practical use, only served to baffle us and numerous other people we bumped into with equally confused looks on their faces, and was soon ignored in favour of gut instincts and the occasional signpost. We figured we’d head roughly southwards from where the cable car deposited us and trust that we couldn’t really get too lost. Part of this walk took us along the Douglas Path, steep in places with some uneven steps to cope with but also plenty of photo opportunities to catch our breaths. The views from the batteries were spectacular even if the amount of rubbish that we kept finding in them was decidedly unattractive. Sort it out, people.

The Rock of Gibraltar effectively splits the territory into two with the overwhelming majority of businesses and residences located to the west of it. There is some inhabitation on the east side, though, and from our vantage point we could see directly down to a place called Sandy Bay at one point. How did it get that name? A mystery for the ages!

A popular tourist stop along the top of the Rock is the Skywalk, one of those glass-floored viewing platforms jutting out a little from the edge of the sheer cliff face. We arrived at it at the same time as a fair number of other people, most of whom decided not to walk out onto it after they saw one of the glass panels was taped off on account of the large cracks through it. We had no such qualms. It was okay, just not massively spectacular if I had to be honest. It could have done with more of a drop under the glass to really be effective. The nerds in us were quite pleased to see that the Skywalk had a plaque celebrating its official inauguration by Mark Hamill.

After completing the Douglas Path we started descending (which was very welcome) in the direction of St Michael’s Cave. This afforded us a lovely view to the African continent’s half of the Pillars of Hercules. It was fascinating to think that we were standing on a bit of Britain able to look north and west towards Spain and Europe while also gazing south to a completely different continent and the country of Morocco. While I’ve visited Morocco before, Africa is yet to be travelled within by my wife, something we keep saying we need to rectify but still haven’t got around to. One other thing we noticed was a warning sign about butterflies. I haven’t looked too deeply into just how dangerous the lepidoptera on Gibraltar can be but it’s worth noting.

St Michael’s Cave

Our cable car and nature reserve ticket also granted us access to St Michael’s Cave. The name of the place derives from the fact that it is a cave. No, wait, you’d guessed that bit already. The name is purported to be in reference to the Saint Michael Archangel Grotto in the Sanctuary of Monte Sant’Angelo in Italy. While the British tried for a while to use the name St George’s Cave (because the British just love any chance for a bit of jingosim) the name wouldn’t stick with the local inhabitants and the anglicised version of the Spanish name first noted in the sixteenth century retained its dominant position and appears to be here to stay.

With Gibraltar being limestone and thus fairly susceptible to water erosion it has a vast number of caves but St Michael’s is the most-visited by tourists with over a million visitors per year. It initially opens into a large chamber with seating arranged for concerts. The views in the caves are what you’d expect – stalactites, stalagmites, almost alien-skin-like textures that you just know H.R. Giger would have liked – but the lighting was a surprise with constantly changing colours illuminating the columns and ceiling. Initially interesting, this lighting soon proved to be a pain in the arse for photography with the camera making a best estimate of exposure time for a light blue scheme only to have the surroundings plunge into deepest red and screw everything up. Phone cameras struggled as well with the naturally long exposures these devices take in low light conditions occasionally capturing two or three colour changes in one shot. It all kinda looks cool, though, even if none of it was quite what I was after.

Descent And The Windsor Suspension Bridge

There’s a good opportunity to exit through the gift shop as you leave St Michael’s Cave which we duly did, picking up a few souvenirs on the way. We weren’t the only people in there and we weren’t the only species either with monkeys occasionally running in to snatch things while the shop owner swung brooms at them. Very entertaining.

We then had the choice of either ascending a little more to try the Mediterranean Steps route (described as steep and arduous) or making our way down. This choice was more-or-less made for us as my wife had aggravated an old knee injury at some point in our exploration of Gibraltar and, while she doubtlessly would have said yes and soldiered through the discomfort had I said I was keen to try the steps, she also would have harboured a deep grudge and I would have been killed in my sleep during the week. You don’t spend half your life with someone without learning to read the signs.

And so we made our way downwards, following the narrow and winding roads, avoiding the buses and taxis, hugging shade where it offered itself, and taking photos through gaps in foliage every now and then as that’s my way.

I feel I owe a public apology right here to the group of women who we’d found ourselves bumping into in numerous places along the clifftop walk thus far and who we spotted ahead of us and descending a set of steps. We followed after them as it was heading down only to then find them at the bottom, puzzling over the next-to-useless map in their hands.

“Hi,” said one of the women. “Are you heading for the suspension bridge as well? Is it this way?”

“Er, no, we were on our way back to town actually. But I’m pretty sure I saw a sign for it at the top of the steps and pointing back that way,” I gestured.

“Oh, this stupid map! Typical! Thank you!”

And with that they turned around and headed back up the long set of steps we’d all just come down. My wife and I carried on around a corner.

“Oh. Here’s the bridge,” I said absolutely pointlessly to my wife who could clearly see the bridge right in front of us.

“Maybe that sign you saw points to another way to reach it,” she offered.

“Yeah, well let’s just get across here quickly before they spot us and realise we sent them the longest way possible.”

Over 70 metres long and with a 50 metre drop to a gorge below, the Windsor Suspension Bridge was officially opened in 2016. Neither of us suffer from vertigo so the drop and the slightly bouncing, swaying motion as we walked across its length was not a problem for us. There weren’t many padlocks on the bridge but I suspect that will change over time as tourists do like to put padlocks on things. The activity was probably started by the padlock industry to keep them in business. We also noticed a sign at the start of the bridge instructing travellers to walk around the bridge (a path circles the gap) if any monkeys were on it.

Our descent continued steadily with no further major points of interest. We stopped in a battery on the way down, albeit very briefly after discovering two topless, burly guys in there, one of whom was watching something loud in Spanish on his phone while the other just stared at us. I can’t even hazard a guess as to what was going on there. We passed close to the cable car while one was passing overhead too but generally kept an eye on the ground conditions more than anything else as the steps down at this point were very uneven indeed and it was all clearly having more and more of an impact on my wife’s ability to walk without pain. It was a relief to reach sensible-sized concrete steps as we came upon the main town.

We headed back through the town with a tiny plan formed, that being to check out the shopping options, grab some more water as we’d run out of what we’d taken, then find somewhere to have a proper drink because that’s the sort of thing we like doing when we travel. And when we don’t travel too. We like to drink is basically what I’m saying here.

The duty free prices were good but we didn’t see anything that was so amazing we absolutely had to have it. We also knew that stopping in one of the pubs or cafés along the main area of the town would mean being immersed in a sea of people and we’re not really people people. However, our research into where we could potentially get a drink in Gibraltar ahead of our visit had already given us a decent location to head for.

Ocean Village, Gibraltar

Heading back out of Grand Casemates Square and towards the port we took a right turn towards Ocean Village. This was an attractive marina area with boardwalks and plenty of eating and drinking establishments as well as a ridiculous number of fish in the water. It was also pretty much devoid of any ship passengers as near as we could tell so if you’re looking to get away from the throng on a cruise visit then this is a nice little area to hit.

We were accosted on our way in by a saleswoman pitching dolphin boat trips – the Blue Boat Dolphin Safari to be precise – and while we declined the offer this time around because of time constraints, tiredness, and aches we also explained that we would be back to Gibraltar in June (unless some sort of viral pandemic stops those plans, haha) and it’s our intention to do that boat trip that time around. We’re actually hoping we bump into her again because we spent a fair amount of time talking with her and she came across as really pleasant.

We generally like to find something local to drink when we’re travelling but when it comes to beer there simply isn’t anything available in Gibraltar. We thought we’d found some in a shop in town only to see it was brewed and bottled in the Isle of Man. The prevalence of soldiers and British tourists in particular to the territory probably explains why if you’re not interested in lager then you’re going to struggle to find something palatable but we fell back to my heritage and managed to grab a couple of pints of Kilkenny in an Irish bar in the marina. It might have been nicer, sitting out in the sunshine with a drink and views of the boats and buildings, had they decided not to start drilling and cutting up part of the bar (I guess) while we were there but it was good to get off our feet anyway. During breaks in the maintenance noise the bar’s speakers pumped out Irish tunes and I treated my wife to a singalong with Seven Drunken Nights to her shock (as she’d never heard the song before) and embarrassment (for obvious reasons).

Gibraltar Port

We left Ocean Village and walked the short distance back towards the port and Emerald Princess. On the approach to the port area we could see other passengers returning ahead of us in small groups, all of them being stopped at the gated entrance where they needed to fish out cruise cards before being allowed in. With us having eyes and seeing all this happening way ahead of us we made sure to have our cruise cards in hand long before we reached the security checkpoint and we had them showing from tens of metres away. This earned us a “Yay!” from the security guard and a high five for probably being the first people in ages she hadn’t had to stop and ask for identification and wait while they rummaged through pockets and wallets accordingly.

We had one further and brief stop before boarding the cruise ship, that being to take a look at the duty free shop set up in the building alongside it. It was here that we discovered that while Gibraltar didn’t brew its own beer it did make its own small batch gin using botanicals found only on the Rock. Well, we had to buy it. You’re not allowed to open liquor you bring on a Princess ship; they confiscate it as you pass through security and return it to you prior to disembarkation. Well, they do if they spot it and if they’re not distracted by other people as you board; we sorta forgot to turn ours in even though we were told to because a load of other people arrived at the same time and heads turned in different directions. We didn’t plan on opening it on the ship anyway.

I can confirm on tasting the gin once we got back from this cruise that the Campion Gibraltar Gin has a very distinctive taste and it’s bloody lovely so we’ll probably pick some more up next year.

In the next travelogue in this series I’ll cover our departure from Gibraltar and the evening’s entertainment including some speciality dining in a new venue for us aboard a Princess Cruises ship, the Salty Dog Gastropub.

In my defence, I wasn’t really thinking, which isn’t really a defence at all. You see, what usually happens when we board a ship at the same time as a lot of other people is that many of them will congregate around the elevator and there’s usually only one of them. We’re both considerate in that we like to allow the typically older or less able-bodied people boarding to have priority access, but we’re also both pretty misanthropic and introverted so we also don’t particularly like sharing a confined space with a lot of strangers. This means we don’t normally take the elevator or, more accurately, we don’t usually take that one. What we’ve found over the years is that the middle and aft entries to the ship are used more often than the front ones and we typically have a cabin near the front. So, what we tend to do is board in the middle, climb one flight of stairs to the lowest level of the piazza, then walk forward to the bank of four, mostly unused elevators there where we can take the easy way up the rest of the way without a crowd or huge delay. But on this occasion in Gibraltar’s port we boarded at the front. I, on automatic pilot, climbed a flight of stairs with my wife limping slightly behind me. That’s when it dawned on me that all we could do was keep walking or head away from our room towards the middle of the ship to then come back again because the only other alternative would be to wait for ages for an elevator to come that wasn’t rammed with people trying to get on.

Ah. Do you want to go back down and wait for a lift?

(through gritted teeth) Keep walking.

Or we could head towards the piazza. Get one of the lifts there. It’s a bit out of the way but…

(through gritted teeth) Keep walking.

Or we could call a lift going down. Get in it, ride it down one floor, then everyone else can get in but we’re guaranteed a spot.

(through gritted teeth) Keep walking.

Do you maybe want a rest on deck seven? We could hit a bar.

(conveyed through a death stare and without any words) Keep walking.

We may as well keep walking, I suppose.

We got back to our cabin, offloaded our purchases, and I stepped out on the balcony to take some photos of the port of Gibraltar while I waited for the sound of the door sliding open behind me and the inevitable sharp shove into my back that would have sent me to my doom below. I’d have deserved no less.

But, as I said, my wife didn’t kill me. Perhaps the walk had tired her out or perhaps she simply recalled to mind a quote from one of our favourite films – Revenge is a dish which people of taste prefer to eat cold – but for now I can confirm that I live.

We’d already decided before we booked this week-long cruise in the Mediterranean on Emerald Princess that we were going to go speciality-dining heavy for it on account of the number of venues aboard that we’d not seen before on any of the other Princess ships. We’d already dined at the Crown Grill the night before (a familiar location and a regular haunt for us on any cruise) as we’d been able to book that prior to embarkation and we had another night at the Share restaurant for later in the week to look forward to as well since that could be pre-booked too. For the other locations it wasn’t possible to book ahead of time online so we assumed these were more of your rock-up-and-see-if-there’s-a-table-free locations. Well… not quite. It turned out you still had to book those but you could do it on the day. We discovered this by chance as we wandered through the Wheelhouse Bar after freshening up and getting changed. The Salty Dog Gastropub is a section of the Wheelhouse on Emerald Princess and we spotted what looked like a dining appointment book near it. We found a member of staff and asked if we could just turn up later in the evening to dine and were informed that we’d need to book. We picked a time, glanced at the barely-filled page as the staff member scribbled down our name and room number, and that was it.

It was still late afternoon at this point and the cruise ship was getting closer to departing from Gibraltar so we made use of our loyalty status and headed up to the Elite Lounge for some nibbles and a cheaper-priced cocktail or two. Emerald Princess pulled away from the dock while we were there. After we’d had enough of cocktails we paid a visit to Vines for a glass of wine, then, because it still wasn’t close enough to our dining slot, we treated Explorers Lounge to our presence and grabbed another drink before eating up the last chunk of time ahead of dinner with a slow wander around the Promenade Deck as the sun setting behind the clouds painted the sky in a rainbow of colours. The video (temporarily removed) below the following photos of drinks contains some colourful shots from the starboard side and aft of the ship.

Salty Dog Gastropub

The time to dine finally arrived. The Salty Dog Gastropub, as has been mentioned, occupies a section of the Wheelhouse Bar, perhaps comprising a dozen or so high tables with stools on which to sit. For your $12 per person cover charge you get to pick two small plates of food and a dessert from the menu and you get access to some specialist cocktails too (for an additional cost, naturally). There’s also a whiskey selection, apparently, but you have to enquire about it and we didn’t realise it was an option until after the meal because the writing on the menu was small and the venue was dimly lit. Besides, I don’t want to enquire about whiskey; I want whiskey to tempt me; I want whiskey to flirt in front of my eyes and whisper naughty things like “I’m peaty with a fiery kick and you want to let me slide down your throat and warm you up” in a husky brogue.

The meal started with Ernesto Dip Sticks comprising of crunchy bread sticks, beer-cheddar fondue, and flaked, smoked salt. They were fine. They were bread sticks. There’s not a lot you can really say about bread sticks because there’s not a lot you can really get wrong with them or massively change without them then becoming not bread sticks. I was more impressed with my knife to be honest because I liked the curves and flat edges it sported. Here I am, expressing admiration for a piece of cutlery. That’s the sort of quality content I’m providing on this website free of charge.

We were keen to try one of the cocktails specific to the menu and we both ended up ordering the Salty Dog Smash. I can’t remember being overly wowed by it but it was nice to have something you couldn’t normally find elsewhere on the ship.

For the main meal my wife opted for the Lobster Mac & Cheese and the Beef Short Rib Poutine and you can see them both in the photo below. She reported that they were both good but nothing spectacular.

I felt compelled to try the Ernesto burger because it’s the big thing they promote on the website and around the ship in places with it apparently having been voted “Best Burger At Sea” by Cruise Critic. Ah, yes, votes by members of the public who have registered with an online cruising forum; that’s definitely the metric by which you should pick food. I also went for the Maryland-Style Jumbo Lump Crabcake. You can see both of these in the photo below.

The crabcake was very nice. I like sweet potato fries and these were very nice too.

About that Ernesto burger…

The meat was nice and tender and tasty. I have no problem with the meat of the burger. I do have a problem with the burger construction as a whole. To me, a burger is a fancy sandwich. You have a filling inside two pieces of bread. For a burger the filling is almost always a thick slice of meat with sauces and vegetables and the bread is a roll of some kind. You can either eat the burger in a fancy way – with a knife and fork – or you can eat it in the more common way – grabbing it with both hands and stuffing it in like that. In both cases the burger is supposed to be eaten in a way that you have a bit of all the individual pieces of it in every bite. The prerequisite to eating it that way, though, is that the burger – the buns, the meat, the additional fillings – must actually be able to fit in your mouth. This is not possible to do with the Ernesto. The picture may not do it justice but that burger sits about 12 centimetres in height. Figuratively, I’m known to have a bit of a big mouth. The physical reality, though, is that I am unable to dislocate my mandible and flip my head back on a neck hinge enough to be able to push the Ernesto into my gullet. Oh, and the beer-battered jalapeño: yeah, grim as hell. I did try it because you never know until you do so but I can categorically state that whoever suddenly thought “Ooh, I know how we can make this burger even taller and simultaneously introduce the texture of cracked rubber with all the taste of cracked rubber too” needs to be institutionalised.

Anyway, the dessert was nice. I had the Bourbon Chocolate Pot de Crème (pictured below) while my wife went with the Coffee & Doughnuts (strangely missing from the camera roll). We enjoyed both of them.

So, how did we feel about our Salty Dog Gastropub experience then? It was the better side of okay. We did like the venue; nice to be away from the main dining room and not in a particularly noisy or busy area. There were enough choices that we could go back a couple of times to try some different combinations of food, drink, and dessert, and the portion sizes were just about right. None of the food blew us away but there were no complaints with quality either. I’d say it’s worth a visit and the cover charge is reasonable.

Evening Aboard Emerald Princess

Our meal done and with us feeling pleasantly filled inside we made plans to head up to Skywalkers to see if DJ Mateo could entice us out onto the dance floor in order to work off some of those calories. However, it was still too early for Skywalkers so we headed for Club Fusion first at the aft of the deck we were on. Hailing from St Lucia, the band Topaz were playing in there and we enjoyed a drink while watching people strut their funky stuff to the live music.

We then jumped in the elevator straight to the top of the rear of the ship and Skywalkers for another drink and to grab our seat by the dance floor where we satisfied ourselves until tiredness overcame us with a little more people-watching and quite a lot of fun seeing fellow passenger trying to group dance to tracks such as The Cupid Shuffle and Wobble.

In the next post in this Emerald Princess series of travelogues I’ll cover the second full sea day of this week in the Mediterranean as the ship made its way from Gibraltar towards France. Movies, more speciality dining, and a good walk around the ship taking loads of photos can be expected to feature.

If you’ve read the previous few posts in this Mediterranean cruise travelogue series then you’ll know that on the day before my wife had aggravated an old injury during our wander around the Rock of Gibraltar so she especially wanted to do as little as possible this day. Looking at the daily programme of events – on Princess Cruises ships this is called the Princess Patter – this looked like being an easy desire to achieve with only a few activities sparking the mildest of interest in either of us. We had some plans for the evening but it looked like the morning and afternoon was going to be one long stretch of relaxation as Emerald Princess cruised up the Mediterranean towards the French coast.

Breakfast done, we drifted back to our room to pick up our morning equipment. For my wife, her Kindle, while I grabbed my camera and snapped a few shots from the balcony. It was going to be another warm September day.

Morning At Sea

We weren’t in a trivia-participating frame of mind (not that we ever do well in the mornings anyway) and it had probably just started by this point so I left my wife in Crooners then drifted down to the bottom of the piazza to start grabbing some more pictures of this ship. Some people think you can have too many photos of the same places on the same sort of ships but I don’t really talk to people very much so they don’t factor into my decision-making. Let’s go for a walk around Emerald Princess together.

What’s become a regular haunt of ours on Princess ships was situated here, that being the Vines wine bar. The next time we’ll be on a Princess ship will be in 2020 when we board the brand new Enchanted Princess and it’s a slight disappointment to discover that there appears to be no place for this venue on that vessel. We shall wait to see if the service and somehow always superb banter we seem to find in Vines translates to one of that ship’s other bars.

Bypassing the shops on the next floor up in the piazza brought me to the entertainments deck for want of a better word. It’s actually the Promenade Deck, deck 7, which in addition to housing a full wraparound promenade on the outside houses numerous bars, lounges, and eating locations. At the top of the piazza staircases is Crooners where I carefully avoided getting any photos of my wife in any pictures taken here. We have rules.

It’s an interesting to me that these Grand-class ships operated by Princess have subtle design differences in the various sub-classes and the Crown-class to which Emerald belongs includes one at this very spot with Crooners being located on the port side of the ship as opposed to the starboard side with which we’d become more familiar on cruises aboard Star, Diamond, and Sapphire over the eighteen months ahead of this cruise. To be fair we shouldn’t have been that surprised as we’d cruised on Crown twice before but we’ve got to that age where things that happened over two years ago might as well be ancient documents to be unearthed and shocked at for the amount they factor into recollections.

Heading aft from the piazza afforded some views of the new information screens that have been appearing on Princess ships over the last few years as the technology platforms aboard have been upgraded in preparation for the Ocean Medallion system as well as a wall of plaques that vessels receive the first time they visit a port. I find these plaques quite interesting to look at as they give you an impression of the city or country in question if you’ve never visited before; is this a place that has put some thought and effort into welcoming a new ship to its shores or did someone in the harbourmaster’s office run down to the nearest trophy engravers the day before? I’ve always wondered how those places stay open.

Explorers Lounge was set up for the art auction and ever since The Incident we no longer have any dealings with Park West, the people who run that particular activity, so no photos there. Club Fusion was hosting the trivia that we’d skipped out on so I wandered quickly through it too.

Rather than head back through the same area to the section forward of the piazza I decided to take in some sea air, it being one of the things you can get all the time on a cruise that is somewhat lacking if holidaying in a bungalow on the outskirts of Birmingham.

Nothing much was happening in the Wheelhouse Bar when I stepped back inside the ship, although this was hardly surprising given the time of day. This is a place that we’ve generally enjoyed on cruises but for this week in the Mediterranean aboard Emerald Princess our only time spent here was the evening before when we tried the Salty Dog Gastropub, the seating for which takes up the section closest to the corridor.

With that I headed up to the top deck to take photos of the sea, the swimming pools, the Movies Under The Stars screen, and the wake. I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves here because there are only so many times you can say “And then I came upon another pool” or “And this is what the Princess Cruises Sea Witch logo looks like” without it starting to resemble the sort of comments I often find in code I’m looking over in my real-world job, and nobody wants that sort of reminder during a post about exploring a cruise ship.

I will just point out ahead of this photographic cascade that another one of those design tweaks in this ship’s subclass was evident on the top too and it was something that took my wife and I a couple of days to work out. We knew that something was different between this ship and those we’d more recently been on and we eventually twigged that the movie screen was over the aftmost of the two large pools whereas it was over the foremost of the pools on the other ships. I know you probably couldn’t care less but I’m going to leave that little snippet of knowledge remain for posterity. My site, my rules.

Anyway, pretty photos of Emerald Princess.

An area that had had a bit of modernising was around one of the pools and was the last location I photographed on the top deck of the cruise ship before heading back inside. The pizza joint, bar, and burger joint were rebranded as Slice, The Mix, and the Salty Dog Grill, and with that rebranding came some striking and bold black and white designs plus some colourful hearts on one wall. It was a much nicer, less dated look and I’d love to see some more of this styling make its way into other places around Princess ships in the future.

Our favourite artistic flair was the wall area that looked like it needed colouring in. Maybe we’ll take some colouring pencils with us next time. Maybe we’ll get kicked off for vandalising the ship and banned from the fleet. Maybe we won’t do that, after all.

My intention at this point was to rejoin my wife in Crooners and plan what we’d next do but I got distracted at the top of the piazza due to the 60 Second Frenzy taking place. This involved people volunteering to take on challenges against the clock. It wasn’t particularly frenzied looking down on passengers attempting to drop pencils into a bottle. It wasn’t even mildly interesting now that I think about it. But activities don’t need to be mildly interesting on a cruise. They can be utterly mindnumbingly awful. And there’s a sort of charm to that. You kind of have to be there, really.

Before heading back to the room to decide on the afternoon’s activities we had a quick browse through the outlet sale taking place in one of the dining rooms. The only thing to grab my attention were socks with pineapples on them. I didn’t purchase them – pink isn’t really my colour – but I had to take a photograph because the pineapple symbol has an ever-so-naughty connotation on cruise ships and it amused me to see them. If you know what that connotation is then you understand and if you don’t then feel free to ask.

Afternoon At Sea

And so the afternoon came around. I couldn’t persuade my wife to join me for a swim so I enjoyed some quality thrashing about like a spawning salmon time in the Sanctuary pool alone. After that we both decided to grab some lunch in the World Market Place following an aborted attempt to have the Deep Dish Focaccia without chili flakes from the Slice pizzeria. Apaprently, if you’re not a fan of chili then screw you. Thanks, Princess. We picked up a beer and a cider then headed back to our room to watch Captain Marvel on the TV. The free and recently-released movie offerings on Princess ships is something that we have come to really appreciate on these sorts of sea days.

The Mediterranean Sea was as flat as a pancake by the time the movie finished.

We decided at the last moment to head to Club Fusion for the afternoon trivia. We still weren’t really in the right mood for trivia for some reason even though we knew that not taking part would mean that we’d definitely lose our run of having won at least once on every Princess cruise we’d been on. It was something of a shock, therefore, to not only win it but to win it with a perfect score. So untrustworthy were our faces that the staff member running the quiz had to check with the team who’d marked our work to ensure we really had got everything right. I suppose it’s important to show due diligence when the prize is as Earth-shatteringly valuable as rubber coasters of the Emerald Princess. To celebrate our win and to try to get over having had our honour called into question we took our winning prize to Vines for a glass of wine and to be praised by the staff there when they saw we’d been victorious. They didn’t question if we’d cheated.

Evening At Sea

It was time for our Captain’s Circle event. This is something held for those returning passengers on Princess Cruises voyages and can span a couple of days and times depending on just how many people aboard aren’t first-timers. We knew it would never be able to compare to the Captain’s Circle evening we’d had on a Star Princess sea day earlier in the year because there’s no captain quite like Captain Tuvo. Still, Captain Steven Lewis did a fine job and was better than expected with some entertaining jokes.

Of course, you don’t attend these things for:

• the jokes or
• to hear about upcoming ship builds in the fleet or
• the information about how many passengers are aboard or
• to applaud the passengers who’ve spent the most number of days on a Princess ship or
• to think dark thoughts about the passengers who’ve spent the most number of days on a Princess ship or
• to mumble what bastards the passengers who’ve spent the most number of days on a Princess ship are

although all those things will happen. You attend because there’s a chance you might win champagne (it hasn’t happened yet) and because you will get a free drink. Free drinks are good. Even better, when you’ve become friendly with bar staff elsewhere on the ship (and Skywalkers is a great place to do this because it’s a sorely underused place so it’s easy to become memorable quite quickly) you might just get singled out for special treatment and get more drinks than other people. It happened again on this cruise.

Dinu: Hello Mr Mark, hello Miss Marie. Can I get you a drink?

Me: Hey, Dinu, nice to see you! How are you doing!? We’ve already got these ones, thanks.

Dinu: That’s okay. I’ll get some more anyway. What would you like?

Me: I’ve no idea.

Dinu: How about a gin and tonic?

Me: That sounds good. That’s great. Yeah, two of those please.

Tip: the staff will be nice to you but be nice to the staff and they will be nicer to you.

And so to the evening’s dinner plans. You already know what we ended up doing because I’ve thoughtfully included it in the title of the post but that’s not what we wanted to do.

Emerald Princess has two speciality dining venues at the rear of the World Market Place buffet, these being Planks BBQ and Steamers Seafood. We’d anticipated being able to attend both locations during our cruise even though it wasn’t possible to book online ahead of time. We’d assumed quite wrongly that these would be places you could walk up to and see if there was availability as a result but what you’re supposed to do – just like the Salty Dog Gastropub that we also made this mistake on the day before – is book while you’re on the cruise by phoning the number in the Princess Patter. The other thing you’re supposed to do is realise that Planks and Steamers open on alternate nights.

We chanced our arm and wandered up to Planks to find it was closed. We strolled across the landing to Steamers and asked if it was possible to get a table for two. “Well, you’re supposed to book,” answered the woman there there, “but you’re in luck because two people who reserved a table haven’t turned up.”

The cynics in us wondered if that was true but what did it matter? We were seated with a fabulous view of the evening sky to the rear of the ship.

The menu in Steamers isn’t very large so we ended up ordering the same starter and main. Our starter was the Clam & Smoked Ham Chowder while the main was the Princess Broiled Platter, consisting of broiled (that’s grilled to you and me) scallops & shrimp and crab-stuffed flounder with a side of crispy seasoned fries and tangy Old Bay dipping sauce.

Dessert was Key Lime Pie in a Jar while we took advantage of the selection of cocktails available to try the Mermaid’s Wish and a Limoncello Collins.

What’s our verdict on the Steamers Seafood experience? The food was above average but not massively so, so in that respect it’s borderline as to whether we’d consider the cover charge worth it. You can’t fault the portion size if you want value for money, though, but for us it was just slightly too much and we ended up close to bursting at the seams. We’ve found this a common problem on Princess ships – quite possibly because American culture demands huge portion sizes for some bizarre reason – with the exception of Diamond Princess where they target the Japanese culture as well and the portions are far more sensible as a result. Naturally, we don’t have to eat everything but it seems rude not to. And that’s why we put on so much weight on cruises. That and the excessive drinking and the lack of a decent amount of physical exercise.

So full were we that our end-of-evening stint in Skywalkers was a short one and I can’t remember if we got up and danced but it seems unlikely.

This was the last sea day of the cruise with four days in ports and excursions to finish it off coming up. In the next Mediterranean cruise travelogue on Emerald Princess we’ll arrive in the French port of Marseille ahead of a full day’s tour well away from the port.

But we wouldn’t be spending any time in Marseille as we had a full day’s excursion taking us into the Provence countryside and two locations, the first of which was the city and commune of Arles. Sometimes we’ll do a fair bit of research into a place we’re visiting, read the description of the excursion, try to read between the lines of what’s in the excursion description because they invariably gloss over elements, take a look online to see what other people have seen or thought of a place, that sort of thing. Sometimes we’ll see a pretty picture of an amphitheatre and go “Ooh! An Amphitheatre!” and that’s all that’s needed. Our decision to visit Arles was due mostly to the latter way of thinking but we did also factor in the time of year in order to rule out for now a visit to the slightly farther afield Avignon (although that’s on the list for the next time we take a trip to this part of the world).

Once our bus pulled up in Arles we found ourselves beside the river Rhône where we could see a Viking River Cruises boat moored (more on them in a little while) and a few people enjoying the pleasant morning sunshine including a local painter. This was our first chance to experience one of the things other than Roman and medieval architecture that Arles is famous for: art. Vincent Van Gogh lived in Arles for a year and it was here that he painted many of his most famous pieces of work. The city has a walking trail with signs showing some of the locations in which the artist painted and we would spot a few of them on our half-day exploring but while we like art our tastes tend towards the more modern so, yes, Van Gogh’s connection was interesting and a bonus experience but it wasn’t our reason for wanting to visit the city.

Walking southwards from the bus parking spot near the train station we passed the location where Van Gogh lived but only a painting of the house remains – The Yellow House – as the building was badly damaged by allied bombing in World War 2. With nothing to actually see we continued and this brought us to the remains of city walls and towers. These formed the Porte de la Cavalerie (Cavalry Gate) and are medieval, having originally been built in the 13th century for and by the Knights Templar and at one point used to house prisoners. Their damage cannot be attributed to planes dropping munitions but instead to deliberate attacks during the French Revolution.

Through the gate we immediately encountered a monument inspired by a similar one in Place Saint-Michel, Paris erected for a former mayor of the city. The Fontaine Amédée Pichot (Amédée Pichot Fountain), despite its name, is no longer a functioning fountain. The monument itself, though, comprises some interesting historical elements such as an Auguste Cain-designed lion profile, the fountain design by Joseph Flandrin, and the most prominent piece of all, the enamel medallion created by Paul Balze. The fountain doesn’t appear in any of Van Gogh’s works despite it being around during his time in the city and very near to his house so I’m guessing he didn’t think much of it but I liked the classical feel.

We followed the road southwards which rose slowly away from the direction of the river and which was flanked by tall houses. As we reached our first major stop in Arles, the amphitheatre, we stopped to take in the view and noticed that not all the shuttered windows we could see nearby were quite what they seemed. This would turn out to be a feature on a lot of buildings during this week-long cruise along Europe’s southern coastline.

Arles Roman Amphitheatre

Almost any photos of the city will include pictures of the very prominent tourist attraction of Arles Amphitheatre – it is what attracted us to this cruise excursion, after all – and it’s easy to see why. Already on a high point of land in the landscape its two arched tiers rise up a further twenty metres. The building was constructed a little later than the Colosseum in Rome (somewhere we’d not seen at the time of this tour) and is understandably not quite as grand in scale, designed to hold less than half the Italian capital’s capacity. Still, it could cope with over twenty thousand spectators, something that seemed completely at odds with its size because despite appearing impressive – the white stone especially bright under the clear, blue sky – I will admit to thinking it was a bit smaller than I’d expected.

We gathered at the entrance and waited to go in, our guide going on ahead to pick up the tickets. It was at this point that a tour group from Viking River Cruises strolled up. The members of the two groups eyed each other; some did so warily; some glanced and smirked. Some people started playing with the rings on their fingers and chewing imaginary toothpicks. Fingers were clicked. Music from West Side Story drifted across the concrete. A rumble was on the cards. Our gang were there first and we outnumbered the river cruisers with their fancy headphones in to hear their guide without her shouting but they had that cocky self-assurance and oozing smugness of superiority that river cruisers always have – I think it comes from paying too much per person per night and needing some way of suppressing that realisation – which made them dangerous opponents. Dangerous, yeah, but I wasn’t worried. We were the younger group overall and my wife and I are veterans of brawls with bullies. We could take them. It only needed a spark to set it all off.

Our tour guide popped her head back out and called us in. The Viking group tried to move at the same time but we kept our discipline and slipped past the ticket booth as the person manning it tried to count us off and keep the river cruisers from messing up the total. It wasn’t pretty but the Princess gang won.

Inside the amphitheatre we stopped briefly in the gallery where our guide was able to point out that the lower tier used wholly Roman architectural techniques but that the upper one borrowed Greek elements for strength and practical reasons. I’m sure you can probably tell that just from looking at the photo, though.

It was to the main arena of the amphitheatre we were then led where we could quickly bake under the sunshine from above and reflected off the sandy, dusty surface and the seating. Some of that seating was the original stone but there were plenty of modern though uncomfortable-looking benches and seats too. The reason for the latter’s presence was that Arles Amphitheatre is still used these days. It no longer plays host to bloodthirsty activities such as gladiatorial combat but instead embraces the more enlightened practice of *checks notes* tormenting animals into a frenzy before stabbing them for the entertainment of sadists.

Van Gogh’s painting Les Arènes depicts people in attendance at Arles Amphitheatre and was painted from memory (as no fights were taking place at the time) in The Yellow House just a few weeks before the artist’s famous ear-cutting incident. Maybe the idea of subjecting animals to needless cruelty played on his already somewhat fragile mind.

Not all of the Arles Amphitheatre is Roman in origin. The towers were later additions and were built when the amphitheatre was fortified further and a walled town grew up inside for protection following the fall of the empire.

The next stop on our tour of Arles was a few minutes away on foot and through some narrow streets to the amphitheatre’s southwest.

Roman Theatre Of Arles

To give it its French name, the Théâtre Antique D’Arles was constructed in the last years of the first century BCE and was one of the very first stone theatres in the Roman world. Like most Roman theatres this one in Arles consisted of three sections: seating for spectators (the cavea, with the higher-ups in society at the bottom and the general public above that, typically with men in the middle and women at the top), the stage (wooden, around fifty metres in length, housing mechanical apparatus for plays), and the back wall which was decorated with columns (two of which remain standing) and housed an awning which protected the stage and also allowed a curtain to be held in front of it and dropped as the performance started.

The seating capacity in the Arles Theatre was about half that in the amphitheatre which makes sense as the design was a semi-circle as opposed to an oval. Like the amphitheatre, the theatre is still used these days but you’ll be pleased to know that the French haven’t devised another way to torture creatures unless the music or festival shows they occasionally perform are offensive to human ears. And knowing them…

In the latter half of the first millenium CE the theatre, like the amphitheatre, was fortified for further protection for the people remaining in the city. The south wall of the theatre includes the Rotland Tower, part of those defensive additions. The land area inside the seating and where the stage once stood were turned into narrow streets and buildings were erected to form a fortified town, again just like in the amphitheatre. It wasn’t until the nineteenth century that the area was cleared and the historic space recovered.

With its use as an actual theatre stopping altogether following the decline of the Roman empire, stone from the spot was taken and used in other building projects around Arles, hence the more ruinous look to the place. Exploring the grounds of the theatre many of those stones have since been retrieved and returned as an indication of the workmanship of the time where it has been possible to do so.

While the amphitheatre in Arles is the more complete ancient site it was the theatre to me that felt more interesting. It may have been less easy to imagine the stage, the curtain apparatus, and the huge backdrop but there felt more a sense of a connection with history because of the state of the ruins, and the more evident, artistic elements of design in the stonework held a lot more interest.

Place De La République

A couple of minutes west of the theatre on foot was the Place De La République; effectively the town square.

The first thing to catch the eye upon entering was the Obelisk of Arles. Originally erected in the fourth century CE during the reign of the Roman emperor Constantine II who had been born in the city this twenty metres high monument was rediscovered in two parts and re-erected in the fourteenth century, this time on a pedestal. In the nineteenth century a fountain was added because adding fountains to things was apparently the business to be in during this period of time in France.

Important buildings surrounded the square on all sides but the key one was the former cathedral, The Church Of Saint Trophime. Trophimus was the first bishop of Arles, around the third century CE, but the cathedral’s construction didn’t start until the late eleventh century. During the first couple of centuries it was used on a few occasions to crown the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire.

The semicircular arches are strong indicators of the Romanesque architectural style used in the church’s design but it was the fine, intricate sculpting, especially in the tympanum and around the columns either side of the doorway, that really stood out. The theme depicted is The Last Judgement with figures shuffling from left-to-right and past an impassive deity, their clothes removed, chained, and with flames at their feet. It looks like beard-wearers are going to hell so consider your style choices carefully, hipsters.

Free Time In Arles

At this point in the cruise excursion we were given free time to look around Arles on our own, do some shopping, etc. All we needed to know was where and when to meet for the lunch that would be provided as part of the tour experience.

Guide: Okay, so we will meet at one o’clock at the Best Western Hotel Atrium. I will show you on a map. It is here. From the Place de la République where we are now you head down this alley, cross the road, and it is right in front of you.

Person walking up: Wait, what time are we supposed to meet?

Guide: One o’clock.

Couple coming back over: Is everyone going off? Where are we supposed to meet?

Guide: The Best Western Hotel, here on the map.

Another person leans in: Is the hotel through there? And what time are we supposed to meet?

Guide: Yes. One o’clock.

Person tapping guide on shoulder: One o’clock, but where?

Guide: It is this hotel on the map, see.

Person (loudly): Did anyone get the name of the place we’re supposed to meet at?

Me (to wife): Let’s get out of here before I kill someone or our guide does.

We don’t prioritise shopping if there are interesting historical and architectural sights to be seen but since we’d already visited a few we decided not to explore the interior of the church and make a beeline for a shop we’d spotted bordering the square. We tend to pick up specific types of souvenirs for ourselves when travelling, these being shot glasses, mugs, bookmarks, alcohol, and soap. The area of France in which Arles is located is well-known for its soap and it was to a shop that we saw stocking a lot of it that we ventured. The woman in Folies de Provence was very friendly and gave us too much change when we stocked up with our purchases (but we returned the money as soon as we realised because the English have a poor enough reputation as it is without us adding to it). You’ll notice we didn’t pick up anything with lavender in it. My wife associates the smell of lavender with old ladies peeing themselves. That’s all that needs to be said about that.

We had a slow stroll through Arles on a curving course towards a large area of greenery we’d spotted on the map. The only interesting sight spotted on the walk was the facade of a former Carmelite chapel, now privately-owned building.

Arles Summer Garden

Passing through a large street market (but not taking any photos because everyone looked like the sort who attend car boot sales and experience tells me they’re moody buggers) we entered the Jardin D’Été (Summer Garden). It was a very pleasant little area to walk around, especially on a gorgeous day such as the one we had, and the grass space was broken up with occasional statues and sculptures. The garden area to the east seemed to be more formal – a sculpture here, for instance, was to a Doctor Urpar, a former mayor of Arles – while that to the west had more modern pieces of abstract artwork in it.

The west side of the garden also had one of the occasional markers around the city’s Van Gogh trail showing that he’d visited and painted Entrance to the Public Garden at Arles in this spot.

The northern end of the western side of the Summer Garden butted up against the gate to the Roman Theatre and the fortified Rotland Tower. In front of it was an attractive pond with statuary.

We started to make our way towards the meeting point for lunch. This took us past the Arles tourism office where we were pleased to see an old carousel set up (though it wasn’t possible to take a nice photo of it in its entirety thanks to fencing around it) and some pretty decent street art adorning the building.

Lunch In Arles

Incredibly, everyone from our excursion group managed to find the hotel and only a couple were slightly late. Lunch was described as “traditional Provençal” but we’re not naive enough to believe that many people in the region dine in quite this way. The food may not look particularly appetising from the photos but we had no complaints; it was all cooked or prepared well and the servers were very engaging. Our company on this table was towards the superb end of the spectrum with – including us – one couple from the UK (that’s us there), one couple from Canada, one couple from America, and one couple from Australia. What brought us all together was that not one couple there liked the party or person running their own country (yes, that’s right, we did talk about politics; it started when we mentioned we were British and received a “Wow! What the hell are you lot doing with Brexit over there?” and rightfully so). It was interesting to hear the Canadian couple’s views about Trudeau but mostly a pleasant change to find Americans who despised Trump because they seem to be very much in the minority on cruises.

We were mostly keen to experience the red wine during lunch since we like to try local alcohol whenever we’re travelling and we’re big fans of red wine but we’ve yet to find a French one we like. Let’s be generous and say that it wasn’t the worst we’ve tried but we still cannot grasp the wide regards of the country’s production in this respect. Our Canadians, on the other hand, really liked the red wine. Really, really liked it. While we limited ourselves to a single glass they managed to finish that bottle, take most of another one from another table that wasn’t wanted, and persuaded the staff to open yet another for them too. The small coffee to finish was probably going to come in very handy in keeping them upright and awake in the next part of the day’s excursion. And, weirdly (or perhaps not when you factor in their love of alcohol), it would turn out that we would end up on the same excursion as this Canadian couple on each of the remaining days of the cruise.

Once lunch was over our bus arrived to pick us up and head off for the afternoon’s portion of the day trip, that being a visit to Les Baux-de-Provence, covered in the next post in this Mediterranean cruise travelogue series.

Sometimes on excursions you can find that you get to see all or most of what a place has to offer in that short trip but that wasn’t the case with Arles. It appeared to have a lot more to see that we simply didn’t have time for on this occasion and we’d love to give it a more in-depth visit at some point. I’d definitely add a few days exploring Arles into any itinerary you might have for visiting the south of France.

Les Baux-de-Provence is located in the low mountain range, the Alpilles, and is mostly set on a rocky spur. Indeed, the word baux is derived from the Provençal word for rocky spur and it’s from this particular commune that the name bauxite comes as it was here that the aluminium ore was first discovered in the early nineteenth century. The elevated location involves a winding, mostly shallowly inclined ascent to the spot where buses are permitted to pick up and drop off tourists but not linger any longer than necessary. Swiftly debarking – or as swiftly as cruise passengers who’d only very recently had lunch and drinks ever manage – we were promptly guided up the gently sloping, pedestrianised area around to the main entrance of the town which gave us some views north of the location at the various outcrops that surrounded us.

As impressive as the views around Les Baux-de-Provence were it was impossible not to be distracted by the row of steel plate art pieces that lined the route to the entrance. These were the German artist Stefan Szczesny‘s Shadow Sculptures, the earliest of which he started working on in 2005. In 2019 Szczesny created an exhibition titled Szczesny aux Baux-de-Provence so it was handy that this was the year we were visiting as we’re fond of stumbling on little shows of culture like this. The sculptures typically incorporate abstract female forms, as you can probably tell, and are not supposed to be anatomically accurate, as you can probably tell too if you’ve ever seen a woman.

We were given a quick walk through part of the town by our guide to take us to the key points of interest ahead of a little free time to explore on our own. Les Baux-de-Provence is mostly narrow, cobbled streets rising from the entrance with grey, stone walls and other evidence of the fortifications that sprung up during its medieval historical period. Whenever we passed a point with a view down into the valley around the area and to the houses situated lower down and closer to the occasional streams that flowed during the winter months I felt compelled to snap another shot. Les Baux-de-Provence has some spectacular vistas to gaze out upon and it’s not hard to see why it’s such a popular tourist destination just to visit, soak up those views, and relax outside one of the many little cafés.

Our short walk along the occasionally steep but still perfectly manageable roads brought us to Place Saint-Vincent where two buildings of note were located.

The first building we entered was the Chapelle des Pénitents Blancs (Chapel of the White Penitents). The building was erected in the seventeenth century, the purpose of it being to treat victims of disease and to house deceased members of the brotherhood for whom the chapel was named. In 1937 the chapel was restored and rededicated to Saint Estelle and in 1974 the artist Yves Brayer (for whom there is a museum nearby, although we didn’t have time to visit it) decorated the interior with frescoes depicting scenes from the nativity in the local landscape. The nativity theme is closely connected with the commune which might surprise you if you’ve read the bible and can’t remember the chapters about Provence in it but more about that is explained a little later on.

A dozen or so metres from the chapel was the Saint-Vincent des Baux church. This church dates back to the twelfth century and has an exterior design in the Romanesque style popular in this region of France but is also partially dug out of the surrounding rock face. This would be the second church we’d visited which was incorporated into its natural surroundings, the first being the Rock Church in Helsinki we visited a couple of years earlier. The circular tower on one side of the church is known as the Lantern of the Dead and was lit whenever a resident of the town died.

Inside the church were three naves but while the building itself and a lot of the appearance of the interior felt old much of what was seen of most interest to us was actually relatively modern. The cenotaph, for instance, dates back only to the early twentieth century and the stained glass windows were designed by Max Ingrand and donated to the church by Prince Rainier of Monaco.

We were then given free time to explore and a time by which to be back on the bus. Les Baux-de-Provence isn’t very large – barely a couple of hundred metres in length north to south – so we weren’t scheduled much time here at all and that proved to be a shame. In terms of points of interest there wasn’t a huge amount to see after you discounted the churches we’d visited, and we weren’t bothered about visiting a café or shopping in one of the small number of shops dotted around the streets, but the town did house the ruins of a castle that looked interesting and with a little more time we would have liked to pay it a visit. There just didn’t seem to be enough time to do it justice so we skipped it and had to satisfy ourselves with a gentle amble around in search of more pretty sights to photograph instead.

The Post Tenebras Lux Window is the remains of a house that most likely served as a Protestant temple in the late sixteenth century. The latin inscription translates as “After darkness, light” and ties in nicely with its Renaissance era age.

We stumbled upon several more examples of Stefan Szczesny’s sculptures around the town and in a small, open square some of his other art pieces were on display.

As our time in Les Baux-de-Provence came to an end we passed a gate with a sixteen-pointed star motif on it. This was a reference to the Princes of Baux, the feudal rulers of the location during the medieval period who had fortified the town and who considered themselves descendants of one of the biblical three wise men, Balthazar. Hence the star. You might recall from your Book of Matthew:

Having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they left for their own country by another path. Balthazar asked his fellow wise men to accompany him to France where he planned to lord it over the peasants but Caspar said he had a hot date he couldn’t pass up and Melchior was worried he’d left the iron on.

For a cruise excursion we thought that we needed just a little more time in Les Baux-de-Provence to really see everything we wanted; half an hour would have been enough to either add in a visit to the museum and a pleasant break in a café or, for a more adventurous trip, take in the castle ruins without introducing unnecessary risk of a heart attack trying to get there and back before the bus left. If you were visiting on your own as part of some time in the south of France then two to three hours should suffice and for the excellent views and just for being somewhere a little different from the typical tourist draws of the region it’s certainly a place we’d recommend seeing at least once.

The small area of Les Baux-de-Provence meant we could leave it until the last minute to make our way back to the bus meeting point. We found it odd as we headed there that some people from our tour group were walking in the opposite direction at quite a pace but assumed that they must have forgotten something or needed to buy something urgently at the last second. You never know when the compulsion to pick up lavender soap will fall upon you.

There was a small delay at the bus location because the bus wasn’t there yet. The limited parking space and time was strictly enforced by the local police so buses needed to pull up, get people on, and get moving as quickly as possible. For this reason, I guess, the bus was scheduled to arrive a few minutes after we had been told to get in position because the excursion operators knew all about the cat-herding qualities and reliability of getting cruise passengers to get to the same place on time. As the bus arrived I couldn’t help but notice that the people we’d seen heading deeper into Les Baux-de-Provence as we left were nowhere to be seen. We boarded. A head count was made. There were discussions. There were frantic looks. Suddenly, we heard an American gentleman talking loudly on his phone.

We’re all waiting on the bus. Where are you? Are you close?
You just head down.
Downwards.
Down.
No, just head down and you can’t miss the entrance.
Down.
Down.
No, not that way, just keep walking down.
Down.

Several minutes and one grumpy-looking police person gesturing at the bus later our transportation was filled with the same number of people with which it had arrived at Les Baux-de-Provence and we set off back through the southern French countryside towards the port and our cruise ship.

In the next post in this Emerald Princess travelogue series I’ll cover our departure from Marseille and a brand new speciality dining experience for us aboard a Princess Cruises ship at the Curtis Stone SHARE restaurant.

Marseille wasn’t the most interesting of ports to gaze out upon but I’ve never let a little thing like interest dictate what I take photos and videos of before and I had no intention of starting on this cruise so please enjoy or suffer through (delete as applicable) some pictures taken from our balcony and a small piece of video of Emerald Princess sailing away from France.

SHARE By Curtis Stone

Let’s get onto the meat – quite literally – of this post and the reason you’re most likely reading this unless you’re taking part in a controlled experiment to see just how much misery the human mind can withstand, your arms strapped to a chair, your eyes held open by staples as page after page of some of the worst content on the internet is slowly scrolled past your unblinking, terrorised form. You’d be surprised how many visitors to this site are in that demographic.

One of the many things we were excited about regarding this cruise on Emerald Princess was that it would be the first ship in the Princess Cruises fleet that we would travel on which featured the relatively new speciality dining venue of SHARE by Curtis Stone. We love Crown Grill and we love Sabatini’s, two stalwarts of the Princess experience, but we also just love eating in general so the chance to try out something new was too good to pass up. We’d booked SHARE online prior to the cruise and the day we’d picked was this one in Marseille so the evening saw us getting ready to see how it would compare to the other restaurants.

SHARE is located at the aft of Deck 16 next door to a small lounge we’d loved on the Crown Princess cruise to the Baltics, Adagio, and it was to Adagio that we headed prior to our dining slot in order to have a pre-dinner drink. We were the only people there. Please pretend that there is a lamentation about the removal of the BOGO hour here because I’m tired of writing it out in full but never want to let Princess get away with quietly removing it from their ships. Anyway, the drinks were nice even if I can’t remember what we ordered.

At the appropriate time – that’s dead on the dot in case your awareness of what constitutes appropriateness when it comes to time-keeping is concerned is lacking (my family, I’m looking at you right now) – we walked the couple of metres from our seats in the lounge to the SHARE restaurant and were quickly seated.

The important first order of business was, of course, choosing wine to go with the meal. No, we didn’t pick the $989 bottle. The Zinfandel we went with was okay but still suffered from the same problem all red wines on Princess suffer from (in addition to the exorbitant markup) in that it was thinner than we prefer. There’s possibly a reason why the cruise line finds it impossible to stock a full-bodied red but Princess haven’t seen fit to share it with me. It’s something we’ve just learnt to accept onboard and moan about online every time we get a chance. Like now.

To the main menu, then, and as you can see there are six courses in a SHARE dining experience with a choice of two or three options in each course. I’ve no idea whether this menu changes on occasion or seasonally or geographically depending on availability but I’d like to hope so as otherwise the limited number of combinations will lower the likelihood of return visits to the restaurant for diners like us who want to try new things as much as possible.

There was bread on the table which always warms my half-Irish heart and our first courses turned up. I chose the Charcuterie while my wife opted for the only other choice, the Taleggio Cheese with Accompaniments. I don’t like cheese so this was an easy decision for the pair of us to reach and while the restaurant is called SHARE and you are encouraged to share I was happy to not do so for this course. The accompaniments to the cheese were olives which, as anyone who’s read formal night cruise posts on this site will know, belong in a Vodka Martini and then only temporarily until they are binned. Olives are not for eating. That’s not up for discussion.

Course two – the salad; something we would never deliberately pick – saw my wife select the Tomatoes and Burrata while I went for the Asparagus and Radish. Weirdly, for me this was the stand-out dish. The textures and tastes of my salad, helped a lot by the really fresh pesto, was just about perfect.

Pasta was the third course and for me this was the Pork Ravioli while my wife selected the only other choice, Ricotta Tavatelli. The green curry filling in the ravioli was why my wife didn’t opt for that as she’s not a curry person at all. I’m not a curry person either but, you know, for science there’s little I won’t try once. It was quite nice.

The only course at SHARE where we didn’t actually offer to share any of our food with each other was the seafood course where the lure of crab and eggs was too much for both of us to resist. That sounds awful now that I read that back. The Alaska King Crab was very nice, however, and I thought the textures on the dish combined really well again.

The penultimate course produced what my wife thought was the best dish of her selection, Strip Loin Steak, “perfectly balanced deliciousness” in her own words and yet she’s not a professional restaurant critic! What gives!? I chose the Duck Leg Confit. Very tasty.

As I’d gone for the Dark Chocolate Crémeux that only left Toffee Cheesecake for my wife’s dessert choice because you’d need to put a gun to her head to get her to eat marzipan and that would only occur accidentally after her head slammed forward into the foodstuff as she’d request death first. She’s not the biggest fan of marzipan. The desserts we selected, though, were both very good indeed.

As I’ve already indicated, there’s a potential lack of combinations if the menu doesn’t change but that’s about the only small negative I can bring up about our speciality dining evening at SHARE. We really enjoyed the themed courses, the textures and tastes were fantastic, the portion sizes were just right, the variety of food in each course was good, and there was a definite sense that everything really was special and none of the courses were just slightly fancier dishes than you’d get in the main dining room.

The final positive to report was that the restaurant venue itself was perfect with a gorgeous view out over the aft as the sun started to dip in the Mediterranean.

We’d certainly dine at SHARE again.

In the next post from this cruise travel diary series I’ll cover the first part of the first of our Italian port stops while on Emerald Princess.

We woke to a pretty typical day for the region at this time of year with a nice, warm temperature and a fair bit of humidity evident in the form of a low, light blanket of cloud. You can sometimes get too used to nothing but sunshine on a Mediterranean cruise so it can be nice to change it up now and then but the lack of brightness did have an impact on the appearance of the buildings surrounding the port area which looked as though they might really explode with colour if the sun had been out. Their colours were also very typical for buildings in Italy with pinks, oranges, yellows, and pale greens dominating.

The excursion we’d be taking for this day docked at Genoa would be a boat trip which, if you’ve read previous cruise travelogues or if you’ve just clicked that linked text back there, you’ll know we do a lot. Yes, even when we’re off on a cruise we often look out for trips we can do that then also involve boats. What can I say? We live in an island city in an island country. We like the water.

After a sensible breakfast – something not too filling because you never know quite what a boat trip will be like especially when it’s one, like this, that will be at sea rather than down a river – we disembarked to meet up with our excursion group dockside where we were given headphones in order that we would all be able to hear our guide. There was then a fairly considerable walk through the port buildings and around the rear to where our boat was waiting. The walk, in fact, was long enough that one person with walking difficulties got left behind and her son had to get off the boat to go find her which delayed our departure a little.

The boat was one of those with seating on two levels, most of it in benches on the top with some spaces below and under cover as well as exposed at the front and rear. With three tour groups taking the same boat and with ours being the last to board all of the seating on top was already nabbed by those who’d arrived first so we ended up sitting on the lower level and at the back which wouldn’t have been my first choice. As it would turn out this would be a blessing in disguise, though, as some of the boat trip was quite bumpy which would have made standing up top more difficult and I would have blocked views of the other passengers (I’m considerate like that, you know). Our location meant I was never in anyone’s way so could remain standing for the entire trip and use some of the railings around for support.

You can sometimes forget just how big your cruise ship is once you’ve been on it for a while. Comparing the size of Emerald Princess with the other vessels in Genoa’s port and with the buildings visible around from around the water level really brought it all back into perspective as we slowly left the city.

This video (temporarily removed) really shows you the size and length of the ship.

Our only prior stop in an Italian port had been three years earlier when we’d visited Naples aboard Royal Princess and we’d noticed the very distinctive artwork decorating a Moby cruise ferry nearby. We were pleased, then, to see another very prominent Looney Tunes-decorated ship of the fleet, Moby Otta. If we ever take a land-based holiday to Italy and have the time we are definitely going to have to look into booking a trip aboard one of these ferries just to see what they’re like inside. The Moby ship wasn’t alone in sporting impressive hull artwork as the port was also hosting a couple of Tirennia ships (also run by Moby) including the Batman-decorated Tirennia Nuraghes, as well as the GNV Rhapsody ferry which appeared to be running an advert for a music festival on its exterior. I’m not sure how I feel about adverts on ships but I’ve got an inkling that I don’t like them.

People who know me know that I like looking at the architecture of buildings and that my favourite style is brutalism. Before we were treated to hours of gazing across the water at very Italian-style houses and churches along the coastline, therefore, I was immensely pleased to spot a particularly nice-looking concrete beauty in the Genoan port. It was a very typical port structure, similar to ones we’d seen in Buenos Aires and Montevideo, likely built around the same time and for the same purposes, and now similarly abandoned-looking (I wonder if you can get photo tours of these places).

Harbour controls keep vessel speeds low in the port areas for obvious reasons which gave me plenty of opportunities to go snap-crazy with the camera (what a surprise) as we slowly made our way out to the open sea.

The only really interesting sight as we left Genoa was spotting a statue of the Virgin Mary with sceptre, crown, key, and baby Jesus at the port entrance. This was the first reminder that we were now most definitely in Roman Catholic territory and all the horrors of my childhood and my private education by monks (yeah, you didn’t know that about me, did you?) came flooding back. But then I remembered I was at sea on a cruising holiday and all the horrors quickly drowned and sank beneath the waves. Hooray for cruising!

The first stop on our boat trip excursion would be at the village of Camogli, a journey of around 35 minutes. Along the way we would be treated to views of the sometimes rugged Italian coastline and the many buildings erected to take advantage of the clearly fabulous views of the sea as well as some of the impressive infrastructure development in terms of scenic roads and arched bridges for road and rail traffic.

Bagni Santa Chiara is a popular location just to the east of Genoa, renowned for its sunset views and opportunities to enjoy them with cocktails and wine.

As we moved farther along the coast away from Genoa the colours of the buildings seemed to become brighter and closer in tone to those you see in all the super-saturated images begging you to visit this part of the world as if the Italian city had dulled the vibrancy of those in closer proximity; perhaps an indication of pollution from all the harbour activity, perhaps a statement about how busy life is nearer the city and how it reduces the opportunity to clean the buildings, perhaps the buildings are newer, perhaps they’ve just got better paint in the fancier spots of Liguria.

The church you can see in the first of the following pictures is the Church of Santa Maria Assunta while the impressive-looking building with the tower in the second photo is a school with scenery I’d probably find quite distracting if I were studying there. This was Porticciolo di Nervi, another one of those gorgeous little villages along Italy’s coast with undoubtedly beautiful evening views and thoroughly relaxing experiences waiting to be had when the weather’s just right.

A very short distance from that pleasant marina area was the train stop you’d want if you were visiting this area of Italy and wanted to use public transport. The church to the left is the Church of San Siro and the attractive little station with sea views is Genova Nervi.

Bagni Scogliera is a reasonably sheltered location with some picturesque rocky outcrops making for a pleasant and popular location to bathe in the Mediterranean water.

You never seem to be very far from a church in Italy and it’s quite likely that the locals use them to navigate in much the same way that we use pubs (our own buildings of religious worship).

Pieve Ligure is a municipality about 13 kilometres from Genoa, easily identifiable from sea by the huge arches carved into the rock at the base of the cliff on which it stands. A pieve is a rural church with a baptistry. This lesson from our course Things You Never Wanted To Know And Have Probably Already Forgotten was absolutely free.

The final place of note spotted on this first part of our boat trip was the municipality of Sori nestled in the valley between two hilly areas of the coast. Unlike some of the other places we’d passed, Sori was large enough to have a little bit of interesting history behind it. It’s claimed that the city was founded by Greek immigrants but the first time Sori was mentioned in writing was in the twelfth century. In 1580 Sori was affected by the plague, evidence for this coming from the number of wills that were hastily drawn up and saved at that time. Just four years later 1500 Algerian pirates in 22 galleys landed at Sori and sacked it over the course of a day, taking 134 people (mostly women, of course) as slaves. Money was collected to pay for the release of the slaves but to no avail and even pleas to Donna Zenobia del Carretto, the wife of the Admiral of the Genoese Fleet, Giovanni Andrea Doria, met with failure. The bridges you can see in the photos were built after the second world war, the originals having been naturally targeted by allied bombing raids.

In the next post of this travelogue series I’ll detail what we got up to in Camogli, the first of the three stops we would make on this excursion along Italy’s coastline by boat.

If you’ve been following along with the cruise and this excursion in particular so far then you’ll know that our boat ride from Genoa along the Ligurian coastline had been accompanied by numerous towns and villages along the hills, beaches, and cliffs we passed, mostly sharing that range of colours you seem to find in central and northern Europe. Not so much in the UK or in the warmer, southern reaches of the continent for some reason. I don’t know why that is. Camogli’s houses had that same colourful look to some extent although the range was weighted heavily towards yellows and pinks with far fewer of the blues and greens you often see elsewhere.

The harbour told us a lot about Camogli that was probably also being explained by our tour guide but which I wasn’t paying attention to and that was that this was a fishing village first and a tourist destination second to that. That may be still true – it certainly is the case that it was; in an 1880 census nearly 5% of the population were registered as captains of vessels – but tourism plays more and more a part these days for the local economy and Camogli is being discovered by more foreign visitors to Italy when it’s previously been a little-known secret for locals.

If you’ve been on a cruise excursion before then you know the drill; you turn up at the place you’re meant to meet when you’re due to, you get assigned a group number, you wait to be called then hop on the bus for your group. This, though, was a boat tour and not a bus tour and the boat was large enough to get everyone aboard at once so there had been three groups of us on the vessel that arrived in Camogli. As we disembarked we regrouped according to our assigned number once more and each headed off with its guide to be shown different points of interest in the fishing village in an order prearranged so that the entire boat’s capacity wasn’t trying to see the same thing at the same time. You can see the common sense in this approach when you see the narrowness of the alleys between the buildings surrounding the harbour area below. This is where our group was initially taken in order to see the compact nature of the village, the height of the buildings, and the religious shrines decorated with shells – families praying for their loved ones to return safely from sea – which reminded us a little of the common shell motifs in Santiago de Compostela as well as Margate. Those are some pretty diverse locations of which to be reminded.

That little diversion into the narrow confines of Camogli’s alleys gave enough time for whichever group had met in the main square in front of the harbour to move on so we emerged from the darkness and Instagram-worthy steps (well, one couple in our group thought so; classic photos of her facing away, angled head, playing with hair, clichés dripping all over the treads and risers, that sort of thing) and back into the light of the Piazza Cristoforo Colombo. This was the open square area right at the harbour entrance and other than providing pleasing views of the water and boats therein as well as being bordered by several charming-looking cafés and drinking establishments, also sported a decorative stone pattern on the ground made from black and white pebbles and in the form of a compass rose. We would see more of these decorations during our excursion along the Ligurian coast.

In fact, we saw another decorative pattern made from black and white stones almost immediately as we were taken up a set of steps to the exterior of the Basilica di Santa Maria Assunta. The pebbled mosaics are called Risseu, the Genoese name for pebbles, and they are a very typical design of the Ligurian region dating to around the seventeenth century but with origins far older than that, some people maintaining they can be traced to Mesopotamian cultures while others assume they are more likely equivalents of Roman mosaics instead. They’re quite striking and very pretty.

A minor basilica now, thanks to Pope John Paul II, but originally just a parish church erected in the twelfth century on the rocky peninsula of Camogli, the interior of the structure came as quite a shock. Rather drab, weather-worn walls outside were replaced with very ornately decorated ones inside in a typically baroque style. Gold and marble was in abundance as you can see from the photos below.

Opposite the entrance to the church was a tiled decoration for the rocky islet attached to the mainland on which we were standing. Adjacent to the church was Castle Dragonara which either sounds like a terrifying beast of legend or a type of pasta sauce depending on how your mind works but which was named for neither of those things. In addition to being used for defensive purposes and sanctuary during pirate attacks the castle had also served as the meeting place to elect town leaders and during the 1970s housed an aquarium. We didn’t go in but instead clambered around its exterior for some lovely views out to sea and back across to the beach of Camogli and the tall, colourful building façades back from the shoreline.

We had some free time then to explore Camogli on our own before meeting up to get some focaccia. Each of the three groups had been allocated a time in which to see focaccia being made and to have a tasting with some wine with one group doing it as soon as we’d arrived, the second group doing it in the middle of the visit to the village, and our group doing it at the end.

Our guide gave us some general advice about what to see or do on our own which basically amounted to “You can’t really get lost because this place is small, there are plenty of cafés along the seafront, and in that direction is a giant frying pan.” A giant frying pan, you say? Guess where we headed.

An easy stroll along the promenade set back and above Camogli’s beach saw us pass some attractive, flowering cacti and presented numerous lovely views outwards and back the way we’d come even on an overcast day like this. Only one other couple from our group wandered along with us and that was Mr and Mrs Instagram All The Things. They’d stride ahead, pose ridiculously for photos as we ambled past, then they’d rush past us again for the next one. They did provide some mild entertainment.

In case you’re worried that you might miss the giant frying pan in Camogli then rest assured that you can’t miss the giant frying pan in Camogli.

Every year on the second Sunday in May – a tradition that started in 1952 – the Piazza Cristoforo Colombo (where we’d disembarked from our boat) becomes the site of the Sagra del Pesce fish festival. A giant pan is used to cook fish for the locals with money raised going to charity. The pan weighs around 28 tons and its total length is ten metres. The one on the wall that we’d come to see was one of the earlier pans used and isn’t the one used annually.

Beyond the pan to the south of the main beach area of Camogli there didn’t look like there was much more that was interesting and we didn’t want to head too far away from where we’d need to meet up for our food and drink as that would require a faster pace of walking. We don’t do fast walking paces. We’re on holiday, darling. We turned back here. The wall of one of the buildings we’d passed by caught my eye as I noticed a lot of trompe-l’œil designs on it and I was reminded of our visit to Arles the day before. We would end up seeing walls decorated like this several more times along the Mediterranean coast during our cruise and can only assume that seagulls flying into houses is a major problem in the region requiring the use of decoy windows to stun the birds and encourage them to remain outside.

We retraced our steps back into the heart of Camogli, a short journey thanks to the small size of the fishing village and one that made us wonder just what this place must have looked like in 1797. At that time Camogli had been under the rule of Napoleon and the place had hosted a large contingent of his fleet in addition to hundreds of tall ships, and it was hard to picture the scene from what we could see. It was a lot easier to imagine the scene in 1798 as those naval vessels had been captured or destroyed in the Battle of the Nile by Nelson. We always like stumbling on places with tenuous connections to our home city of Portsmouth.

We had a little bit of time to kill before our focaccia-making demonstration so I dragged my wife out onto the short, concrete jetty projecting from the peninsula hosting Camogli’s basilica and castle. This gave me a chance to take some photos of the buildings around the shore and the beach itself from a slightly different angle and also satisfied some perverse desire I have to always find a way to get out over the water somewhere when we’re travelling (see: all the times we find ourselves on piers).

You’ll notice that the beach is rather grey and lacking sand and if you’re the sort of person who only adores a golden stretch of shoreline then it probably doesn’t look too appealing. Pebbles are clearly a widely available natural resource in the region and it’s likely for that reason that they are used so much in the decorative patterns we’d already encountered. Personally, we’ve no problem with stony beaches simply because where we live that’s all you get too, although with some more variation in the colour and a generally warmer look. I was amused to read a local guide’s description of this beach, though, translated from Italian:

Burning pebbles optimistically defined as a beach. In the middle of the bathing season, they are stacked one on top of the other as intensive breeding chickens. Absolutely to be avoided. If you want to take a bath, use the tub of your home, throw two stones on the floor, turn on the oven and point to a 1000w halogen lamp in the face. The effect is identical.

This then brought us to the time for our focaccia experience. Focaccia is big business in Camogli. If you’ve been paying attention to any of the buildings in the photographs so far you might have seen the odd one or two or three or more focaccerias; you’d have to be supremely unlucky to miss one if you were visiting this village. If you’re still not convinced that Camogli likes focaccia then this piece of artwork near the piazza might persuade you.

The location for our focacceria demonstration was off one of the narrow alleys connecting the beach area to the harbour area just east of the rocky peninsula. The kitchen was too small to get everyone in at once so we took turns with about eight at a time squeezing into the very, very hot environment to watch the focaccia makers do their stuff. You can see some of that in the video at the end of the post. As we rotated out of the kitchen we then walked a few doors down to a café where focaccia and a glass of local white wine was laid on. I’ll note here that there were a number of high steps to ascend into the café and the seating area at its rear that caused some problems for at least one person in our group who had walking difficulties so bear that in mind.

That was our first experience eating focaccia and it was good; I wouldn’t say outstanding, but it was nice to have done it. We always like to eat and drink locally when we’re travelling.

All that remained was to head back to the piazza by the harbour and wait for the rest of our group and the other two groups to gather and board the boat for the next portion of our excursion along the Italian coast. I had enough time to grab some more photos which will come as a surprise to literally nobody in this universe.

If you were visiting Camogli you wouldn’t need a whole lot of time here to see all it had to offer but it had a very appealing, very relaxing charm to it and would make a great base for exploring the region especially as its mostly western-facing location should produce plenty of opportunities to watch the sun go down with some Italian food and wine to enjoy and only the occasional thump of seagulls careening into painted walls to break up the gentle lapping of the waters on the pebbled beach.

This video (temporarily removed) includes highlights of Camogli from our visit, including views of the beach and of the basilica and castle plus the focaccia-making experience and some footage of our boat’s departure from Camogli harbour then back out into the Mediterranean Sea.

In the next post in this cruise travelogue series I’ll cover the second of the three stops we had on this boat trip, that being a visit to Santa Margherita Ligure.