This first post will look at the first two days on MSC Virtuosa as that takes in the embarkation and the first sea day, and as your eyeballs will have already transmitted details of the title of this post to your brain you’ll already ascertain that we were heading towards France.

Wanting to avoid the worst of the crowds that seem to think that if they’re not on the ship as soon as it’s possible for the first person to board then they’re being ripped off by the cruise line somehow, we left it until later than we needed to head over to Southampton, park up, and get onto Virtuosa. This meant we barely stopped moving through an empty departure hall and security screening before stepping on the ship. Lovely.

The LED ceiling on Virtuosa is actually quite a fun little feature but we’re not really fans of the UK flag these days as its meaning has been adopted and abused by a minority of angry, penis-free racists. Given our one previous weekender cruise on Virtuosa where some right-wing, gammon-flavoured ex-squaddie threatened to punch me once he realised we didn’t share his opinions on, well, anything, the imagery of the national flags of the UK and England are now rather unsavoury in general, and unpleasant to us in particular on this ship.

Getting aboard later than necessary meant that our room was already accessible to us so we headed there to drop off and unpack our hand luggage and have a quick freshen-up before exploring. We’d booked a cabin with a larger balcony than normal for this class of ship because we are fond of large balconies. The cabin was a nice space, although the bed being so close to the wardrobe was a pain at times.

Our cabin location was close to our muster station so when the time came around for everyone to watch the safety video in their room, dial the number to say they’d done so, then head to the muster station to scan their cards, we were first to do so. The thought of fighting through the crowds back to our room to wait until the bars would open again – about 45 minutes – was not one we wanted to entertain so we found a space in the champagne bar to kill time. While perusing the menu, we realised that glasses of champagne were within the allowed price range of our premium drinks package (at the time; this may have changed now). Champagne would become our go-to drink on this MSC cruise.

MSC Cruises do fixed dining, and our experience a year before had been, I suppose, entertaining, as the couple of women sharing with us were absolutely shit-faced during dinner, one even trying to eat her hair with her fork at one point. We were on a table for eight this time, which initially filled us with dread, but it turned out to be just fine with good waiting staff and good company across the week aboard.

The champagne bar was too busy for us to find a seat so we returned to L’Atelier, a spot we’d enjoyed before, to see if the cocktails were as good as we remembered. They were, but the location and ambience of the venue didn’t feel quite so enjoyable for some reason. After a few drinks and watching the LED screen show we ended up spending a lot of time in the The Attic, Virtuosa’s late-night club, only deciding to head to bed at some unearthly hour when the woman next to us projectile-vomited all over the deck.

Our previous cruise on MSC Virtuosa had been a party cruise, filled with party people (or drunkards, if you prefer), and not really the sort of thing that encouraged me to wander around with my camera. The different dynamic of this cruise and a sea day to start this week aboard meant that I could get back to taking a few photos. The MSC ships do have some very visually appealing sights on them with a lot of bling on show, although, perversely, some of the interior locations, despite being covered with mirrors and crystals and lights on every surface, could also feel a little dark and claustrophobic in areas. Adding crowds to the mix wouldn’t help there, of course, although we never really thought that the ship was unbearably full.

Virtuosa has water slides for the water sliders out there, although the rain had started to fall as we were wandering around them so it was as wet outside the tubes as within. We are not water sliders.

The indoor pool did get quite busy during the day and was popular with families. We’d thought we’d been clever in booking this cruise a couple of weeks before term time in England had finished, reasoning that there wouldn’t be any kids aboard and taking advantage of the cruise being somewhat cheaper than waiting a fortnight. This had been the whole basis for us booking this cruise at all as we’d vowed not to get aboard this ship out of the UK again following the year before’s experience, but a bargain is a bargain. Scottish and Irish schools had broken up a week or two earlier than their counterparts in England, though, and families there had made the same determination as us. In truth, the kids aboard were well-behaved and not overly noisy. It did mean I was a bit more cautious about where I pointed my camera, though.

The decks on musically-named Virtuosa are named for composers, appropriately enough, and each floor featured artwork accordingly.

Reading, drinking, and relaxing took up most of the rest of the day, and the evening followed a very typical pattern for us on a cruise ship. This started with dinner, and it was another very nice one.

We’d tried to head straight to the champagne bar again after dinner but there were no seats to be had so we hunted around for alternatives. Virtuosa has a robot bar which is a nice gimmick but not for us. The drinks are expensive, even if you get to keep the glass, but that just means that after one drink you’ve got to take the glass back to your room if you don’t want to carry it around with you for the rest of the evening and hope you don’t forget it somewhere.

We tried L’Atelier again but it just didn’t feel as good there as we’d remembered so we chanced the champagne bar once more. The only seats we could find were at the bar. We don’t really like sitting at the bar because the seats are never that comfortable and you’re often in the way of people trying to place orders so there’s a risk that people are standing over your shoulder, leaning over you, reaching past you, talking through you, etc. However, our seats were tucked around one side of the bar so that issue wasn’t one. In fact, this turned out to be the place to sit and we’d start coming for these seats on purpose as the cruise progressed. The reason was two-fold: firstly, we’d already taken advantage of MSC’s status-match policy on our first cruise with them, matching our existing Elite Princess loyalty level to get us up to Diamond with MSC; secondly, we’d paid for the premium drinks package. This combination of factors – black cards signifying (wrongly) that we were long-time, loyal MSC people, plus an indicator that we were on the top tier package for drinks – was enough to make us stand out amongst most other people. The staff got to quickly realise we liked champagne and they didn’t need to ask or even put us in a queue of other drinkers when making rounds. We were just seen to. I won’t lie: it felt great. There’s something wonderful about seeing a group of people having their orders taken down on tablets by staff, then those staff turning to start making those drinks, glance over at us, raise their eyebrows, get a nod, then pour us glasses before everyone else.

The next post in this series finds us at our first port of call, La Rochelle, a lovely French city we’d visited unexpectedly a few years earlier, and we’d start with a walk around until a museum we wanted to take a look at opened.