Island Princess is one of the older vessels in the fleet (launched in 2002), and one of the smallest. She is one of only two Panamax ships (that’s ships that meet the requirements to pass through the older locks of the Panama Canal) owned by Princess Cruises, the other being Coral Princess, and the pair of them being Coral-class vessels.

When we cruise, for us it’s the itinerary that is the primary driver, coupled with value for money next. The ship is less important than the cruise line because not all cruise lines suit all types of people – for instance, I really don’t see us hopping on Carnival at any time soon; although, to be fair, I did say the same about Virgin Voyages – and only then does the ship potentially play a part, with us preferring to try ships that we haven’t over those that we have.

Hence, in September 2022 we boarded Island Princess. This would be a cruise visiting three new ports including one new country (that’s the itinerary part checked off), with Princess Cruises (and we know we like them), on Island Princess (a ship we’d not cruised on before). The price per person per night (which is how we determine value) was at the high end of our typical spend but we decided to go for it anyway. Naturally, we opted for the drinks package, knowing we’d get our money’s worth there, and hunted around for big balconies, because we are fond of a nice big balcony.

A very easy embarkation process had us aboard Island Princess at Southampton in no time where we discovered our balcony was enormous. As you can tell below. Newer ships are just terrible in this respect. However, newer ships do tend to have somewhat larger shower units. The shower on Island was a tight fit. And yes, the oft-talked-about clingy shower curtain was there.

The photographs below of the room and balcony are for cabin C317.

It wasn’t just our balcony that surprised us with its space. In fact, we’d find out on this cruise very quickly that far from feeling small and cramped, Island Princess often felt cavernous. The venues were larger and laid out in a way to be longer along the ship’s length given its narrower profile. Additionally, entertainments lounges were located on two decks rather than the one more typical on Princess ships, further spreading out passengers. Finally, add in the slightly older demographic attracted to a smaller, older ship – the overwhelming majority of passengers were Americans who’d come across to see jolly old Europe – and you ended up with a quieter, emptier-feeling ship for this cruise, although not in a bad way.

Embarkation day activities on a cruise ship are fairly limited and the ship can be a little chaotic as people are boarding throughout the day so we went for a small wander to orient ourselves, enjoying the differences in familiar locations such as the Wheelhouse snug areas with lots of old P&O memorabilia.

We grabbed a drink in Crooners – starting with a not-a-cocktail each because it was fairly early (I know; that’s a terrible reason; I feel bad even admitting it and writing it) – above the Piazza stretched strangely over four decks on this class of ship, and waited until close to sail away to see what it was like from the top deck for once.

It was grey and drizzly and there was nobody about so we headed back to our cabin instead to see Island Princess leave Southampton behind and start her European cruise. We’ve had far more pleasant sail aways but let’s be honest: who actually cares what the sail away is like? The important point is that you’re sailing away and you’re about to begin a cruise.

To finish up the barebones account of our first day aboard Island Princess here are some photos of more drinks in Crooners and food in the main dining room. You might notice that there’s nothing from general entertainment venues; no dancing, late-night music, that sort of thing. What we would discover on this cruise is that entertainment was rather poor, finishing far earlier than we were used to. It wasn’t a big deal for us and it was likely limited to the type of cruise, high proportion of older Americans aboard, and perhaps just the cruise director at the time.

While our embarkation day experience for Island Princess had been fine but grey and damp and cool, the following day at sea before the first of our port stops took place with gorgeous weather to accompany us. The North Sea often conjures up images of rolling grey waves, views of oil rigs, lots of container ships and car ferries, but it was warm and bright and calm enough to have been somewhere in the Pacific.

We spent the day doing very little indeed. Trivia was undertaken, unsuccessfully, and there was a little bit of a wander around. We would have had a swim if the pool had been filled but it wasn’t for reasons not shared with us. So, instead, once our room had been freshened up by the steward we returned to it and made use of that large balcony, reading, enjoying the sunshine and sea views, and ordering the odd drink and snacks just because we could.

We booked speciality dining for the evening. One thing we had been keen to try was the Bayou Café, one of the additional charge restaurants on Island Princess, and not something we’d seen on any other Princess Cruises ship on any of our travels.

It’s been a very minor gripe of ours with cruising over the years that there are often overlooked opportunities to make ships stand out in the fleet, and perhaps encourage people to try different vessels and itineraries. If you’ve cruised a lot with Princess – and we have – then you know that the two main speciality dining venues they have on board are the Crown Grill and Sabatini’s, catering for steak fans and Italian food fans respectively. They’re very good, and yes, it is nice to have something familiar, to look forward to treating yourself with something you know is good. But we’ve often talked about maybe mixing it up a bit and putting something else in place, perhaps specific to an itinerary or a ship based on its name, just to add a little variety. I know that ships will theme offerings in the buffet, but that’s the buffet.

[IMPORTANT UPDATE! Since writing this, it’s come to our attention that Princess have decided to turn the Bayou on Island Princess into a generic steakhouse experience instead now. Hugely disappointing to see, but a likely sign of cost-cutting to simplify things across the fleet and satisfy both shareholders and the old traditionalists who can’t bear to embrace the differences. Ho hum.]

So, we were looking forward to what we’d eat in Bayou Café because it did exactly what we’d always wanted: provide something close to unique amongst the ships in the fleet. We had some pre-dinner drinks for that is the law of the sea, then headed to the restaurant to be greeted by a small queue of people. It transpired that we all had bookings for around the same time and there weren’t seats available according to someone ahead of us. This isn’t good, we thought. We were all ushered into the small music and bar area next to the restaurant to wait, and our expectation given the number of people apparently in the same situation as us was that this would take a while. Not a great start. However, we’d been there barely a minute before we were called to our table. Why did we jump ahead of everyone else? Who knows? Perhaps they all turned up stupidly early whereas we were there pretty much on the dot of our booked table. Perhaps we just had those don’t-mess-with-them faces. Perhaps both.

What was the food like in the Bayou Café on Island Princess? That’s a tricky one to answer. It might have been excellent and it might have been terrible and it might have been just okay. We had nothing to compare it against because we don’t eat Cajun-spiced food. We wanted to try something in that style to see if we liked it, and it was okay, but ultimately not to either of our tastes. Was it cooked the right way? Haven’t a clue. Was it too spicy or not spicy enough? How would we know? What we did like was that it was different, and new experiences are always good. But we’d have to see if the menu changed significantly before we’d visit again, I suspect. [EDIT: Given that it’s now a generic steakhouse with nothing to distinguish it from any other in the Princess fleet, we probably wouldn’t bother.]

We finished off the evening with a slow walk around the wonderfully wide promenade deck of Island Princess.

In the next post in this cruise travelogue series we’ll be docking at Hamburg, a first time in this port for either of us and also the first time in Germany for either of us.

The first stop on our Island Princess Western Europe cruise was the port of Hamburg. When we visit countries and ports for the first time we almost always book an excursion to get a feel for the place, check off some obvious highlights, or, to mix it up, look for something a little out of the ordinary so that we’re not simply doing the same old tourist things that other cruisers and general travellers do. For Hamburg our options were of the city tour variety or the very long travel to Berlin variety. The latter didn’t appeal for this first German visit, and with the amount of time we had in port and the proximity of the port to the centre of the city we figured we’d be able to explore on foot just as easily. That also meant we didn’t have to set a stupidly early alarm call, and we like not having to do that.

The views of Hamburg from our balcony and from the top of Island Princess weren’t particularly lovely or even mildly interesting, but working port areas in cities often aren’t. Our docking location in the city was at the Altona terminal.

Our original plan was to walk towards the city centre from the port, which we estimated would take a little over an hour when allowing for photo stops, but Princess Cruises had laid on a free shuttle bus service into the town hall square. On a previous cruise with Princess the buses had not been complimentary so we’d not factored this into our reckoning, but now realised that while this might mean we’d miss a few sights on the walk, by taking the bus we could be certain where it was located should we decide that might be the best way to return to the ship later in the day. This would prove to be sensible thinking.

The town hall (well, city hall really, but whatever) is a late nineteenth century building leaning heavily on the considerably earlier Italian renaissance design. The extravagant look was the result of wealth and prestige celebrating the defeat of France by Prussia and the formation of the German empire. The copper roofing, popular at the time as you’ll find in lots of places around Europe when you travel, has now turned green with oxidisation.

The square in front of the hall was largely empty, but the decorations around the bases of the flag poles and the Heinrich Heine Monument by Waldemar Otto attracted a moment’s attention from me.

Our plan to start the day in Hamburg was to head broadly south-southwest from the town hall square towards the former Hanseatic Trade Centre in Speicherstadt, the largest warehouse district in the world built on timber-pile foundations, and a UNESCO World Heritage Site as a result. Our fairly short walk took us to some of the waterways that cross the city of Hamburg and facilitated a lot of the trade for which the warehouses and associated businesses were needed.

The red brick buildings of Speicherstadt were very impressive if you like bold displays of industrialisation. We do.

We crossed over the final canal – Zollkanal (or Customs Canal) which formed the customs barrier of the city and its freeport until 2003 – via the Brooksbrücke Bridge. You’ll never have to look for long if you’re looking for a bridge in Hamburg as it has the highest number of bridges in Europe (around two and a half thousand, if you want to visit them all). Brooksbrücke in its current form was completed in 1887, although a bridge had crossed the water here for centuries before, and one feature of its arched steel framework worth noting is the four different statues at the end of each span; two on the northern side, and two on the southern. Sadly, these are recent replacements for ones that had been present prior to World War II, but they’re still interesting, representing the historical figures of Frederick Barbarossa, Hammonia (or Hamburg), Europe, and St Ansgar.

This brought us to the first place we wanted to visit in the city, and in the next post in this cruise travelogue series we’ll start to look around one of the absolute best things to do in Hamburg (in my opinion), and a place we ended up spending way more time in than we’d expected (and that still wasn’t enough), Miniatur Wunderland.

Rain was due, and if we opted for the museum we were interested in then we would be fairly isolated after that, nowhere really close to the bar we really had our eyes set on, and a decent distance from Island Princess too, meaning we’d potentially be soaked by the time we got back aboard. However, the bar was not open yet and in the opposite direction to the ship. Our plan became: head towards the bar anyway, wandering the streets around the area for anything interesting architecturally, hoping the rain would hold off, then make for the town hall square to get a free shuttle bus back to the ship instead of walking.

This plan lasted just long enough to pass a little bit of Hamburg street art.

The rain started to come down and we needed to re-evaluate quickly so out came the phones and a look at maps. We needed somewhere inside, open, close by, quick, and that led us to a small pub called Vielharmonie. It was a place on a street corner with a few tables and a bar lined with locals; definitely not a tourist’s spot. However, super friendly. We ended up staying for two drinks because there was a bit of chat between the locals and us, and between the barmaid and us. So, yes, if someone asked me if I’d recommend this pub – and I don’t usually like recommending things because personal experiences and expectations come into play – then I’d say yes…

…with a couple of caveats.

Firstly, pretty much everyone at the bar was smoking. This is such an odd thing to see indoors in Europe these days and for us as non-smokers the smell is really off-putting, even before the associated health implications. I mean, we were there drinking beer in the afternoon so I can’t push too much on the health implications but you know there’s still a difference between something that only affects you and something that affects everyone around you. Okay, enough of being on that high horse.

Secondly, cash only. Now, this was something we’d read about before we travelled to Germany so we were half-expecting it but it still took us by surprise. Apparently, allegedly, whatever, Germans haven’t really embraced contactless or even card payments with quite the zeal of the rest of Europe because of a general paranoid fear of government tracking or something, with a large chunk of the country sticking to cash either primarily or, as in this pub at this time, exclusively. We might have stayed for another drink as it was friendly there but the two rounds wiped out the limited amount of Euros we’d brought with us and we ended up stopping at an ATM after this pub visit to get some more in case we’d need it in the next bar.

By this time the bar we’d really wanted to visit was now open so we headed the relatively short distance to Bar Oorlam. We are keen craft ale drinkers so we’d already researched this place and knew it would give us a good opportunity to have some local ales.

Bar Oorlam couldn’t have been more different from the pub we’d just vacated, with a bright, modern feel in pastel colours (which I personally find a little cold and not as welcoming, but then I’m old), a large range of drinks to try, and actual card payments. We were the first people in there, very shortly after it opened, and had a quick chat with the barman before settling in to enjoy some drinks in odd, modern glassware. The look and feel of the place reminded us a fair bit of Microbar Reykjavík from our cruise earlier in the year to Iceland.

We ended up staying for four over the space of a few hours as the bar slowly started to fill up with locals, before deciding we had better head through the streets of Hamburg for our shuttle bus back to the ship.

Back on Island Princess then, and after showering and changing we headed to the dining room for dinner, and it was very good, as usual, and did a decent job at soaking up some of the alcohol content from our day ashore in Germany.

Of course, there was more drinking in the evening, and we enjoyed a little bit of the sail away along the Elbe from our balcony late in the evening, but only a little bit as that rain was still there.

In the next post in this series we’ll enjoy a day at sea on Island Princess with a look around the ship and a first chance to swim in the indoor pool on the ship.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh boy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

However, unlike when we’d visited Hamburg and taken the shuttle bus out of convenience but not because we’d planned to, with this cruise port stop at Gothenburg the shuttle bus for some free time exploration was a necessity as the actual port for ships was nearly nine kilometres away from the city centre as the crow flies, and considerably more by road.

The morning view from our balcony in the morning was a cool, overcast, but dry one.

Our shuttle bus for this visit to Gothenburg dropped us off at Gustav Adolfs Torg, a town square distinguished by a statue to Gustavus Adolphus, king of Sweden between 1611 and 1632. Gustavus became highly respected for his military leadership during the Thirty Years War, allying Sweden with the Protestants trying to defend themselves from Catholic forces looking to expand the Holy Roman Empire into the Baltic. His use of deploying well-trained mobile and infantry units to complement one another helped win decisive victories and the tactics were soon copied by other armies. Gustavus is credited with turning Sweden into a major European power during this period and for centuries after.

We’d come to Gothenburg on Island Princess with a couple of places we’d decided might be worth walking to, so headed off in the direction of the first, eastwards. This took us over the main canal of the city, then through Brunnsparken, a small spot where trams passed by frequently, a fountain flowed, and people sat at the bars and cafés dotted around.

A brief introduction to Gothenburg, this. In the next post in this 2022 Island Princess cruise travelogue series we’ll be looking around a nineteenth century park, the Garden Society of Gothenburg and the Palm House in it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Again, we’d been drinking.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Princess offered excursions to Amsterdam for those who wanted to see what they were missing there but we had no intention of taking advantage of that. And, of course, Princess laid on entertainment of varying degrees for those intent on staying on board Island Princess. If you were thinking of cruising to Rotterdam aboard a Princess Cruises ship but staying aboard when there, then here’s the sort of activities you could enjoy instead of the city.

We had overcast weather conditions for our visit to Rotterdam. From our balcony on the ship docked at the cruise terminal we could see across the Nieuwe Maas shipping canal to the southern part of the central area of the city.

To the left, just peeking out from behind a tower block, was the Euromast which is a popular destination for some tourists. We wouldn’t be visiting it on this day in Rotterdam but we would be heading in that general direction during the day.

To the right we could see the Erasmus Bridge (Erasmusbrug) which we’d need to cross in order to reach central Rotterdam. The bridge took ten years to complete, opening to the public in 1996, and it’s known locally as “The Swan” (although in Dutch, obviously). The initial design needed tweaking to include additional back stay strengthening on its single pylon support as engineering tests concluded it would not adequately support the weight when trucks rolled over it. After it opened additional changes were made to add stronger shock absorbers as the bridge swayed too much when the wind hit it side-on.

I’ve said before that we can be contrarians when we travel and Rotterdam is a good example of how this can manifest itself. Take a look at anyone else – particularly cruise bloggers – who visits Rotterdam and posts some content on social media or their own site and you will see Cube Houses and the Markthal. Maybe the Euromast occasionally. Perhaps the SS Rotterdam to break the things up. But always the Cube Houses. Always the Markthal. Take a look at where people who make repeat trips to Rotterdam go and you’ll see them hit the Markthal again. And again.

We decided that we would go elsewhere mainly to be different, and in the first part of this series of accounts of our day visiting Rotterdam I’ll cover a few of the sights as we headed to the first of those places. Don’t get me wrong, though: the Cube Houses do appeal to us and a later visit to this city will no doubt include them, but we felt that we wanted to experience a sense of finding something new and not simply walking in the footsteps of everyone who’d come before us.

Out of the cruise terminal we went, and headed across the Erasmus Bridge, braving the quite cold wind whistling down the canal and across us. We had some early chances to admire some of the architecture of Rotterdam as we walked. What I really liked was that architects and designers seem to have been given more-or-less free rein to throw up whatever they like. It means imaginations can run wild and there’s less of that conformity that can sometimes sterilise a place.

Reaching the far side of the Nieuwe Maas canal we took a left towards a large park we could see on the map. This brought us first, though, to a small area called Veerhaven with a nice view of boats and barges docked alongside the water as well as five busts of men.

The men sculpted in bronze were significant figures in Rotterdam’s shipping quarter history.

• Antony van Hoboken (1756-1852) – Worked himself up from warehouse operator to owning the largest sailing fleet in the Netherlands.
• D.G. Van Beuningen (1877-1955) – Competed with British exporters of coal by importing from Germany using the canal system, leading to many changes in mechanical handling of transported goods.
• Elie van Rijckevorsel (1845-1928) – Coming from a wealthy family he decided not to follow in the family’s business endeavours and embraced many scientific fields, collecting specimens of glassware, porcelain, and rock from Indonesia and Brazil.
• Marten Mees (1828-1917) – A steady investment banker who was involved in setting up public housing among other deeds considered beneficial to the people of Rotterdam.
• Louis Jamin (1881-1953) – A son of Cornelis Jamin who’d founded sweet stores in the Netherlands that still bear his name, Louis oversaw the expansion from fifty outlets to well over five hundred by his death.

After a short check of the map to make absolutely sure we were heading in the right direction we carried on.

In the next post in this cruise travelogue series we’ll wander through Het Park in Rotterdam.