This post will cover our experience on the first sailing by a Princess Cruises ship out of the UK since that painful pandemic hit us all and locked down our ways of life. With this being a so-called Seacation cruise, and therefore not stopping at any ports, I’ll cover the entire trip in this single post as opposed to my usual day-by-day breakdown. I didn’t take anywhere near as many photos and videos as I might have done on a normal cruise because this wasn’t a normal cruise. Not only that, but with this cruise taking place aboard Regal Princess this was a familiar line for us, a familiar style of ship for us; this was like getting out of bed after a long time recuperating, putting on some comfortable slippers, and just saying Aaaah!

Embarkation

There was nothing normal about embarkation, and while the general process worked well enough – drive to the Covid testing centre, have your vaccination documentation checked, take a lateral flow test, drive to the terminal, wait for the test result to say you’re negative, get your Ocean Medallion, zip through security, and board the ship – that need for a pre-boarding test changed the feel of the cruise right from the start. We’re used to that terror before a cruise that comes from wondering if there will be a road closure that makes you late, or your alarm won’t go off, or your car won’t start, but once you do reach the port there are no more worries. Not the case here. Even after having your luggage taken away by the porters there’s still a chance you’ll get a notification to say nope, you’ve failed the test. That’s stress you don’t want. I get why the cruise lines are doing it – they’re trying to be super-careful in a world where every moron is looking to blame them for anything they can – but you can go to hotels, B&Bs, theme parks, gyms, stadiums, indoor events, pubs, restaurants, and more in the country without any testing at all. I’d really like to see the cruise lines drop this as quickly as possible.

Regal Princess Mini-Suite

We knew that the balconies on Regal Princess, as with all these Royal-class ships, were pretty dreadful, and there was no way to pick a specific cabin ahead of time, just the general type. As it would be just a few days at sea we opted for a Standard Balcony Cabin because there seemed no point in paying extra and not getting an improvement in the one part of the space we really liked. Prior to the cruise, though, we were notified that we’d been upgraded to a Deluxe Balcony Cabin, differing from a standard grade by the addition of a seating area. Okay, fine. But then we got a second upgrade to a Mini-Suite. This meant a larger bathroom as well; one with a bath. We didn’t use the bath on this cruise but it does make showering a lot easier and provides more room to dry wet swimming gear over.

And then the free gifts started turning up.

It began with a private message on Twitter from Princess’s UK media team asking for our room number (A336 if you’re interested) and the arrival soon after of two small bottles of sparkling wine with glasses. That was nice, and we had them on our balcony. That was followed in fairly swift order by two plates of nibbles, a bottle of white wine and a bottle of champagne, a box of chocolates, flowers, and chocolate-dipped strawberries. Wow! I know from posts on Twitter that a lot of people got gifted similar things, although they all seemed slightly different. There’s no disputing that it was a lovely gesture from the company.

Cocktails, Muster, Sailaway

First cocktails were taken by the pool area. Not our usual location for our first cocktails but the piazza area was busy and fairly noisy with people still boarding. My wife had been looking forward to a Dirty Banana for a long, long time. No comments, you. I asked the friendly face serving us at our table to recommend something for me and that’s how I ended up with a 24K Gold Margarita as my first cocktail back on board a cruise ship.

Muster was a different process, and soooo much better for it. We watched the safety video on the TV in our cabin – this registered us as having seen it – then went to our muster point (the casino), checked in there with our medallions, and received additional information from the member of staff there to complete the process. And that was that. Never change this. This is how I always want it to work.

We decided to grab a drink in Vines next. Vines was the one venue where the Ocean Medallion seemed to work best for us on this cruise (more on the Medallion later). We were simply asked what we’d like and that was that; no checking our names, no checking our cabin number; the staff simply knew. In fact, before we’d finished our glasses a member of the ship’s security staff walked straight up to our table asking if we could take our passports to reception to be scanned again as there’d been a problem with them. The ability of the staff to recognise us and know where we were was very good here. The issue with the passports was one we’d wondered about as the woman at the terminal hadn’t ever seen the new post-Brexit pieces of crap we now had to carry and seemed to take a long time to attempt to scan them, then simply resorted to typing in our details. At the front desk the man who took our passports away to photograph was similarly interested in seeing our new and less useful passports out in the wild for the first time.

Before we took the passports back to our room we wandered out onto the promenade deck for some air. It’s not a full wraparound promenade deck, but it does the job if you’re looking for some outside space. Obviously, dockside at Southampton doesn’t make for the most attractive of sights, but if it means you’re about to head off on a cruise then you don’t mind it too much.

We then made our way to our room so we could enjoy the sailaway from there. We’ve never been fond of the top deck and all its singing and dancing and waving of flags. What we did enjoy was not only being able to see the Spinnaker Tower in our home city of Portsmouth but also the next cruise ship we would be sailing on, Scarlet Lady, in Portsmouth Port, too. We hadn’t realised she was large enough to see from the Solent.

Crown Grill Speciality Dining

We’d booked dinner at the Crown Grill ahead of this Seacation cruise and it was to there that we headed on this first night back at sea. It’s always a rare filet mignon with the usual sides of mushrooms (for my wife), creamed spinach (for me), and fries (between us), with some dipping into different options for appetisers and desserts. Faultless food – Princess Cruises do this very well indeed – although the service was a bit haphazard, with our main course starting to be placed on the table before my wife had actually finished her hotter-than-the-surface-of-a-star soup. Teething issues with a lot of new staff, I’d like to think, and it didn’t spoil a lovely and recommended meal.

We finished up our evening with a bit of a chat and some drinks with Sandra and Chris of Brits On A Ship, and we shared some of our experiences (or issues) of using the Ocean Medallion aboard Regal Princess. Chris ended up with more drinks than he’d planned at one point as his first order had gone off for an explore around the ship without him. More on that at the end, though.

Trivia

The app that Princess would like you to use while on board encouraged people to book for things they’d like to do. But we don’t like to commit ourselves like that, and we weren’t sure what we’d want to do ahead of this cruise anyway, so we played the whole thing by ear on this Seacation. We hadn’t intended to go to the trivia that was taking place in the mornings in the Princess Live venue on the ship but as we’d finished breakfast in the buffet with plenty of time to spare we decided to chance being able to get in. This turned out to be no problem at all.

And then we won the trivia. We honestly thought we were doing terribly during the first part of it but we made some inspired guesses and took home a slew of prizes: a bag, a notebook, a coaster, and a wine-stopper; then a representative from the Effy store handed us a little gift bag with some small jewellery pieces and a pen. Our streak of winning at least one trivia aboard every single Princess cruise we’ve taken continues. It will come to an end one day, we know, but not this day.

Regal Princess Photographs

After dropping our prizes off in our room we decided to go for a bit of a wander around the ship. Having spent a week on her sister ship, Royal Princess, back in 2016 (see: Royal Princess, Europe 2016) there was nothing to really surprise us on Regal Princess.

On the top deck we decided to complete a circuit of it. This started off on the Skywalk viewing platform and took us past the main swimming pools towards the front of the cruise ship.

Forward of the main pools was the Retreat Pool, an adults only swimming pool in normal times, although they all were on this cruise thanks to everyone needing to be double-vaccinated. We would end up swimming in here on the final day of our time aboard Regal Princess. The pool was heated… a bit. It was more than good enough, though.

In addition to a (what we understand to be a very well-equipped) gym onboard there were also some outdoor spaces for those who like to exercise or play games: a walking and running track, some exercise frames, a court for basketball or similar sports, a miniature golf area, a golf driving net, table tennis tables, and shuffleboard areas are the ones I can recall. We don’t go in for that exercising lark, but each to their own.

Everyone loves an aft view on a cruise ship. There’s something about looking at the wake the ship is leaving on the sea’s surface that is just so calming. If I have to be critical of something then it is that the smoke being left by Regal Princess wasn’t great.

Moving inside and down many flights of staircases brought us to the heart of Regal Princess, the Piazza. Off from here, as you’ll no doubt be aware, are the shops, several bars, the International Café, and Alfredo’s Pizza. The bottom of the Piazza almost always had some form of live music, whether a pianist, violinist, or jazz trio. From this area you can also get to the casino and art gallery along with passenger services, future cruise booking, the photography studio, and the spa area.

Club 6 can be found on deck 6 and on a normal cruise it would be the late-night disco area. It’s no Skywalkers (night club on Grand-class ships). We didn’t check it out on this short Regal Princess Seacation because we were mostly bloated at the end of the evenings so disco dancing would have been a terrible idea even if they’d allowed it, but I don’t believe they did anyway.

Sabatini’s Speciality Dining

Our second day aboard Regal Princess included some more speciality dining in the evening at the Italian restaurant aboard. Knowing just how large those meals are we thought we might try to get away with no lunch at all, but after trying some interesting concoctions in the Good Spirits cocktail bar around midday we made the sensible decision to get a light bite to soak up some of that alcohol. We decided to use the Ocean Medallion app to order food to our table and I’m pleased to say it actually worked. Eventually. Well over half an hour from ordering to getting the food, and the bread of the tuna sandwich I chose was on the stale side, leading me to suspect it had been prepared too far ahead of my wife’s hot food. It served its purpose, though. We could have walked to the café which was a few metres from our seats in the bar but we wanted to test the app out. It’s something that will improve, I’ve no doubt.

A little later we discovered some chocolates delivered to our room (they’d stopped the nightly chocolates-on-pillow service for this cruise) and we hit Vines just before dinner because, well, it’s traditional, and we’re traditional people.

And so to Sabatini’s. If you like Italian food and you like getting value for money then this is one of the best bits of additional cash you can spend on a Princess Cruises cruise. Feedback I’ve provided to Princess in the past has included the recommendation that portion sizes are reduced to make the meal more special and less coma-inducing. That feedback seems to have been listened to because we found all the courses a little smaller – less bread, smaller and fewer tortelloni, improved and reduced sauces – and yet we still came away from the table absolutely stuffed to the gills.

Now, the food and service here wasn’t what we would consider Princess-standard. Most of the food was gorgeous but the dessert included a take on tiramisu that was offensive to the palate. Runny and rubbery would be two good adjectives to describe whatever that horror in the pot was. Our service from our staff member was as good as it could be but the problem was that it couldn’t be too good because he was absolutely run off his feet trying to cater for too large an area of tables on his own. He was flustered, sweating, doing his absolute best, and we could see that and account for it, but it spoke of problems with staffing levels that should have been communicated to guests. Indeed, a table near us had two guys dining on it who didn’t seem to understand that and loudly mentioned how disappointed they were by the whole experience. They didn’t receive their cutlery ahead of one course. Can you imagine how that could ruin your entire cruise? Anyway, the end result was that we decided not to ask for an end-of-meal limoncello and cocktail in order not to give our guy extra work to do, and that was possibly a good thing as we waddled away and got some fresh air on the promenade deck before working out what to do for the remainder of the evening.

After heading to the Vista Lounge for some entertainment, sitting there for ten minutes while the staff were taking orders from everywhere but where we were sitting (right near the front, in the middle), realising that because my wife had left her phone in the cabin we couldn’t actually order two drinks using the app on my phone alone without incurring additional charges (more on that later), and starting to get annoyed by the group of women near us who were getting a little too boisterous for our liking, we decided to head back to our room, risk the bottle of white wine we’d been given as a gift, and catch a movie on the TV instead.

Opening the wine involved calling our steward to come to our room with a corkscrew, have him turn up with a bottle opener instead and tell us they weren’t allowed to carry corkscrews, disappear off to take our bottle down to a bar to open, then return. Had we known then we’d have done it ourselves.

The movie we watched was Wonder Woman 1984 and my advice to you if you’ve not seen it is to continue to not see it for as long as you live.

Final Sea Day

Our morning on the final sea day aboard Regal Princess saw us return to the trivia in the Princess Live lounge after breakfast and win it again. We declined the offered prize as we’d won pretty much everything they had to give away the day before. The important thing was that we’d won.

We were distracted by dolphins for a bit from our balcony before taking the plunge and going for a swim in the lightly-heated Retreat Pool. It had been about two years since my wife had last had a swim – not so long for me as I solely braved the pool in Kos the year before – and it was lovely to get back in the water and spend half an hour swimming laps.

After our swim we entered full relaxation mode on our balcony with our books. There was enough sun at times to send us scurrying for sun cream. The balconies on Regal Princess, as mentioned, are not great. The depth of the balcony means you have to sit upright if you’re facing outwards to the sea, while the round table took up so much space that squeezing past it was annoying, and if you’d wanted to turn your chair sideways to use the foot stool then you could only do so by blocking off the doorway to the room. Despite that, we enjoyed being out on the balcony; we always do.

As the afternoon rolled around we headed towards the Piazza area for a drink first – in Bellini’s, where we had some fabulous service – and a bit of people-watching while we read, then walked the few metres across to Alfredo’s for some freshly-made pizza. Service here again was superb, and the food was just amazing, and especially so when you consider it’s included at no additional cost. We had a great seat by the window and followed up our fantastic pizzas with some proper tiramisu to try to take away the memory of the previous night.

A bit more reading and one more cocktail in Bellini’s finished up our afternoon.

Alfredo’s was very filling so we decided not to bother with any dinner, figuring if we needed to snack on something there’d be plenty of chances to do so. We took in some final sea views from our balcony before getting ready for some final evening drinking.

Crooners ended up being our pick for a last bit of fancy cocktails. Service here was all over the place, ranging from woefully inept (forty minutes for our first drink, with the first twenty just to be spotted by a member of staff) to absolutely perfect. We ended up finding out where Chris and Sandra were hiding and joined them for a couple more drinks right at the end too, before heading back to our room and placing an order for food and drink via the TVs while watching a bit of The Princess Bride for the gazillionth time.

Disembarkation And Cruise Conclusion

And so we returned to Southampton with some bright blue skies to greet us, had breakfast, and walked straight off the ship at our designated time of eight o’clock. Three quarters of an hour later we were home.

This cruise was just what we needed. It was great to be back at sea. It was fabulous to have some fine food and fancy cocktails. Having our first cruise back be with Princess Cruises, allowing us to reacquaint ourselves with the familiar rather than dive right in to something completely new, was a good call on our part.

But I have to make note of…

Ocean Medallion Issues On Regal Princess

The combination of technology and software limitations in the Ocean Medallion app created numerous problems and we ended up having to order most drinks with staff directly and telling them our cabin number. That defeated the point of the much-vaunted tech. And ordering with the staff wasn’t without issues either. We’re aware of rumours that the staff was short-handed in terms of experienced, trained members because of issues getting them into the UK, but those are just rumours and some honest communication from Princess if that was the case would have been useful in setting expectations.

The technology was problematic because the sensors that locate people weren’t accurate enough. Sometimes hilariously, badly so. We would have situations where the pair of us were sat at a table with one registered as in that bar (maybe) while the other was detected in a shop or, in one case, someone else’s cabin. Because you could only order food or drink to where the app on your phone thought you were or your cabin, this made ordering drinks impossible. Food could have been done because there was no charge but, despite a drinks package, there was a limit to ordering just one drink per person at a time otherwise you’d be charged. So, with my wife and I in a bar she ordered drinks for the pair of us and we got billed for one of them. When we tried to order drinks separately only one of us was registered in that bar so we couldn’t do that either. That failure to allow a person to order drinks for other people in their group also means that if Princess want people to use this tech then they also want everyone to carry their phone with them at all times. Not great for the evenings if you’re female and lacking trouser pockets, not wanting to carry a handbag, etc. as we discovered.

The app software also just listed the core drinks available, but individual bars would have their own menus that could be viewed by scanning a QR code. Viewed, yes, but ordered using the tech, no. This might be a design choice, to use the tech when somewhere else while relying on staff when in an actual bar, but that wasn’t the impression I got from all the promotional blurb.

The app itself was also horribly bloated, slow, and power-draining for phones, thanks to the animations for the daily planner in particular.

On the plus side, the door-unlocking as you approached your room worked well every time, even if the purported benefit of not needing to use your hands is a lie since the door handle still needs to be pushed down in order to enter your room.

I expect things are better in terms of location-tracking on the newer Princess ships as they have better sensor technology built-in rather than retro-fitted, but the apps needs work.

I have some app recommendations:

• Option to disable animations, or an expert mode to simply list planner activities without the fancy and slow overhead.
• Ability to pull up the menus of the bars through the app without having to use a QR code scanner. If the QR code on the table was supposed to be for health reasons and stop people touching menus then it didn’t work because the angle of the QR code made scanning without lifting up the Perspex block and tilting it tricky at best.
• Ability to set the delivery location without relying on where the app thinks you are. This is vitally important.
• Ability to order multiple drinks at once if there is more than one of you with the drinks package travelling together, and not be charged for it if you’re not over your daily allowance. This applies to ordering on the TV too. We had to order room service on two TVs at the same time in our room because of this. That’s a silly limitation.

I think those software changes aren’t difficult, and will go a long way to offsetting the technology constraints on ships built prior to the Medallion technology being fitted.

But those gripes aside, we had a lovely time back cruising, even if far too briefly, and we didn’t want to get off the ship.

We therefore never considered a cruise to British ports until very recently but in May 2024 we headed down to Southampton and embarked Regal Princess for the start of twelve nights visiting Ireland, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and France. For me there would be no new countries to tick off the list but my wife had never been to Ireland before and she was keen to do so.

Embarkation was perfectly simple, the muster process was a breeze, it was nice to see new Princess Cruises tote bags in our room (we have quite the collection now), and the most important task of the first hour aboard was to head up onto the top deck and grab ourselves a 24K Margarita and a Dirty Banana. The staff are usually so busy delivering luggage or cleaning or dealing with confused passengers on embarkation day that it’s far easier to head to a bar rather than take advantage of the excellent room service through the Ocean Medallion system.

As Regal Princess left Southampton in the afternoon we saw a few very familiar sights. Hardly surprising given how often we do this.

First up was Steamship Shieldhall. We had a lovely time sailing on this 1950s vessel past all the cruise ships in port in Southampton back in 2022.

Further down the Solent and we got to admire the hovercraft on its Ryde to Portsmouth flight. That’s right, they’re called flights when you’re on a hovercraft. The ultimately useless, nineteenth century forts are also always a nice sight on these cruises out of our home county.

We don’t tend to do much on cruise ships – for us they’re for reading, listening to music, drinking, enjoying the sea views, and taking us in the most relaxing way possible to see sights around the world – so to conclude this first day aboard Regal Princess here are some photos of the food we had in the main dining room in case that’s of any interest, and some pictures of the Double Down Bar next to the casino, and the place where we’d end up most nights for the disco and cocktails. It was quiet there this first night but it did have its popular nights and with it being on the walking route from the theatre to the piazza – a stupid design decision – it did get briefly crowded whenever the shows finished and you’d have no chance getting a drink for about fifteen minutes.

The first full day on Regal Princess was a sea day, and one of only three on this cruise, and since it was so bright and sunny it was the perfect day to take a few photos around the upper decks after lunch. We had cruised on Regal Princess in 2021 just as we were coming out of the heaviest of the pandemic restrictions so photos of the ship had been taken before but that’s no reason not to take more.

Regal Princess is a Royal-class ship. Regal and her sister ship Royal Princess were the first two in this class and on this particular design their adults only pool has more exposed sides to the sea offering lovely views, little cabanas by the pool, and a far better pool design and depth than that of the later variants of the class. We ended up swimming in the pool and chatting with other cruisers for ages on this first sea day and my wife ended up sunburnt.

A perk of being Elite level with Princess Cruises, other than telling other people at every opportunity that you’re Elite level with Princess Cruises, is that you get a free wine-tasting on a sea day on cruises and that happened on this first day. These wine-tastings are pretty terrible but they’re entertainingly terrible if you’re sharing a table with other people who share your sense of humour and similar thoughts regarding what makes a wine nice and what causes you to screw up your face in horror, and that’s what happened.

We had noticed a few women aboard Regal Princess on embarkation day wearing red hats with other clothing in purple but hadn’t quite realised what the reasoning for this was nor quite how many of them were aboard until the afternoon on this sea day when, with it being formal night, a whole swathe of them (well over a hundred) suddenly swarmed the piazza where we were sitting down with a glass of decent wine now. They were all in 1920s themed clothing and had turned up for lots of group photos, and they looked fabulous. This was the Red Hat Society, as it turned out (not that unsurprisingly), and they’d prove to be entertaining both on the ship and off during this cruise.

Before the cruise we’d pre-booked some speciality dining and it was Sabatini’s, the Italian trattoria on the ship, that we dined at on this evening. We will almost always dine here at least once on any Princess cruise because the food is always fantastic and you never feel like you’re not getting value for money from the experience.

In the next post in this Regal Princess British Isles cruise travelogue series we’ll arrive at the first of two ports in Ireland, Cobh.

Regal Princess was docked at Cobh itself, meaning we could simply get off and walk into the town, but that’s not always the case if you’re on a cruise ship that claims this as the port on the itinerary. From our balcony in the morning we could see across the water to the island of Haulbowline and beyond that to the right of it was Ringaskiddy where some ships dock instead. As there’s stuff all to see in Ringaskiddy you’re at the mercy of shuttle buses and tour trips to get you to anything interesting if that’s your port, so we were very pleased with our docking location.

Cobh is listed as the port for Cork and the ship was offering excursions to it although you could simply hop on the train right by the ship if you wanted to. The issue we had with excursions on this cruise as a whole was that they were extremely overpriced – we suspect that the captive audience of largely American cruisers visiting quaint old Europe played a role here – so we took a lot fewer of them than we otherwise might have given that we were visiting new ports. There was also the sense that with these cruise ports being technically not that far from us in England we could always return to any that appealed and see them in more detail and for less money. I mean, we won’t because we spend all our free time cruising, but we could, and that’s the important thing. All this is to say that for this, our first time cruising to Ireland and our first time in the port of Cobh, we decided to explore the town rather than head anywhere else.

As it would turn out, our time ashore would end up being a lot shorter than we’d planned because I started to feel unwell during our walk around so this post will contain a lot less than we were hoping to do. We’d intended to visit a museum and possibly find a pub but the combination of putting off both of those until later in the day, only finding one pub open and that claiming that their card machine wasn’t working at the moment and that everyone needed to pay cash (the sign looked like it had been written a long time ago and suggested something dodgy to us), me not feeling well, and this being a Sunday so feck all else was open anyway meant we had to adjust accordingly.

We headed off along the coastline, heading past Kennedy Park, and getting our first look at some of the colourful buildings that Cobh has become famous for.

It was interesting to see a statue in honour of Cobh-born athlete Sonia O’Sullivan simply because on the last cruise we’d been on before this we’d also happened upon another statue of a local athlete, that being Fanny Blankers-Koen in Rotterdam. Perhaps we’ll have to try to find statues of athletes everywhere we travel from now on.

Cobh has a natural harbour that was the reason for it becoming an important port for both naval vessels and, later, for commercial interests, including tourism and emigration. Cobh was the final port of call before the Titanic made her ill-fated trip in 1912, and Cobh was where those rescued from the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915 were brought, and you can find numerous plaques, memorials, statues, or references to this sad history associated with the town wherever you walk.

Cobh, in fact, turned out to be very keen to commemorate any person, group, or event, and it was almost impossible to go a couple of minutes without some artwork, sculpture, or marker stone. If you like reading then come to Cobh and walk the streets.

I’ve mentioned already that Cobh is well-known for its colourful houses but when people think of them they’re most likely thinking of the “Deck of Cards” houses which we would see a bit later on. However, along the shoreline part of Cobh to the east of the main part of town we passed Father Corbett Terrace, the owners of which have clearly decided to invest in a job lot of vibrant exterior house paint too. Against the greenery of the hilly backdrop and the blue patches of sky above this looked absolutely beautiful during our time there.

Our destination on this slow walk was the Titanic Memorial Garden and it was a peaceful, pleasant space, but perhaps shouldn’t be the only thing you go to visit if you’re in Cobh because there’s not a whole lot to see there. The garden and views out to the water were nice enough, of course. For us, though, it was nearly the only thing we saw because I was feeling pretty awful at this point and had already decided that plans involving pubs or museums were now thoroughly shelved.

Continuing with the theme of the people of Cobh really invested in having you read things while you’re in their town it was lovely to see a little library near the garden entrance.

I think my wife would have been happy enough to just head back to the ship on the same route we’d come but I tried to eke out a little more from our day in Cobh by heading up the steeper-than-expected road past St Colman’s Cathedral on a slightly more circular route to the port. This is a twentieth century church in the French Gothic style and I would have liked to have popped in for a nose and some photographs but this was a Sunday and Ireland is a religious country so that was never going to happen.

We spotted the “Deck of Cards” houses from here and I figured I could soldier on for just a little longer and head around for some views from different angles. As we started to walk up the road there came the sound of bagpipes playing so we waited while a piper followed by a column of older men with military decorations marched down the road and towards the church. Interesting to experience this sort of thing but when I think of men marching to the sounds of bagpipes in the British Isles I can’t help but get a little twitchy as we’ve a history of groups doing this mainly to wave their dicks around a bit and piss off other groups with differing political views. Admittedly, that’s more a Northern Irish or Scottish thing so likely wasn’t the reason for this display but it’s still a thing I’d like to see stopped altogether. My wife’s views are similar but she’d also like to see bagpipes banned internationally.

The “Deck of Cards” houses were exactly as expected. On a sloping road each building is raised above its neighbour slightly and coloured brightly and differently from those adjoining, and certain views of this were better than others. The cars along the fronts of the houses didn’t help from a tourist photo perspective, but I imagine the owners of the houses consider that secondary to being able to park outside their homes. Although it then makes you wonder why they bothered painting their houses in such a way as to attract people there in the first place then.

Our very truncated visit ashore in Cobh came to an end with a walk past the Cobh Museum (not open on Sundays, naturally, otherwise we’d have stretched our time out a little longer) then a quick look around the Cobh Heritage Centre for some souvenirs before getting back on Regal Princess.

I had a few hours to try to start feeling better before sail away and, thankfully, by the time that came around I was a lot perkier.

The day of arrival in any port can be very important as to your experience there. I’m glad we’d already decided to forego trips further inland given my crappy health on the day but Sunday is definitely not the day to be visiting a country that is still highly religious and largely closed. However, we enjoyed what we saw of Cobh and would love to give it another visit at some point. Cork would be of interest too, but large cities sometimes feel a bit ubiquitous compared to these smaller places with their individual charm.

In the next post in this series it’s time to sail away from Cobh and take a look at the evening’s meal aboard the ship ahead of the second of our Irish ports, its capital, Dublin.

There wasn’t a whole lot to see on the cruise out to the open sea and the general scenery took on a grey tone with splashes of muted colours. Before we moved away from the town, though, we were entranced by the single crewman taking a lot of time to pull in the warning sign that had been hung from the side of the cruise ship while Regal Princess had been docked. The sign indicated that for security reasons other vessels must remain fifty metres away from the ship, although quite what the ship could really do about it in the absence of (obvious) weaponry or a fifty metre prodding pole is another thing entirely.

The photo below doesn’t quite encompass the entirety of our walk along the front of Cobh so despite my unwell state earlier in the day I don’t think we did too bad in at least getting a decent amount of gentle exercise. Although the walk up to the cathedral was perhaps not as gentle as either my wife or I would have liked.

Much of what we could see from our starboard side balcony was off in the distance and often difficult to make out with the weak evening sun in our eyes even from behind thin veils of cloud. However, we did get close enough to Camden Fort Meagher as we passed Ram’s Head to like what we saw. Fortifications of some form or another have existed at this point since the middle of the sixteenth century. The fear of Napoleon led to a large upgrade towards the end of the eighteenth century and in the late nineteenth century the fort had some slipways added to test an early guided torpedo system. By the 1980s the fort was no longer needed militarily and was handed over to the county council who left it to rot, but in 2010 locals started to restore the place for tourism. It certainly looked and sounded interesting enough to warrant a visit should we ever find ourselves back this way in the future.

The main interest on our sail out from Cobh proved to be spotting a group of dolphins not far from the pilot boat that had been shadowing our transit out of the port and waiting to pick up its pilot from the ship. No photos of the dolphins as they were quite some way off, but we enjoyed watching them for several minutes until they seemingly lost interest with all the activity in the harbour.

Some quizzing took place but it was a quiet and fairly early night for us aboard Regal Princess. All that remains in this short post is to show off the dinner in the main dining room on this evening because traditions must be upheld.

I was feeling well enough to try a cocktail or two before bed.

In the next post we arrive at Ireland’s capital, Dublin, where we had an organised tour and some free time arranged and where we were hoping for a more successful day ashore with more to do and see as it wouldn’t be a Sunday. However…

The Falkirk Wheel is a boat lift connecting the Union Canal with the Forth and Clyde Canal, transferring boats between the two stretches of water using a rotating mechanism that is unique in the world. Not only does it look fabulous but it’s highly efficient, managing to shift a combined weight of 500 tons twenty four metres up and down for about the energy of eight kettles boiling. Physics at work right there!

After a short wait for our slot to come up a large capacity tourist boat came alongside and took all of us on this cruise excursion as well as other groups of visitors for the ride we’d come to try out. Our boat made its way into the lower gondola where a watertight seal was locked into place. Above us a similar thing would have been happening for any transport coming down, all of this managed by a control room. With each gondola containing effectively water to a certain level, some of that displaced by a boat, and Archimedes’ principles of water displacement holding true, each gondola was evenly-balanced regardless of whether it was occupied or not. Physics again! Is there anything it can’t explain!?

As the lift rotates it’s necessary to also rotate the contents of each gondola – water and boat – because otherwise you’d end up upside down at the other end and, generally, that’s considered not desirable. Geared sections keep everything level with the result being that the action of being lifted or lowered is incredibly smooth, incredibly quiet, and you may not even notice you’re moving at all to start with. We certainly didn’t.

At the top we waited for the watertight seal to be unlocked and our boat made its way out along a raised section of canal with some lovely views out across the Scottish landscape. Part of this short trip involved passing through the Roughcastle Tunnel which itself runs beneath the Antonine Wall, a more northerly fortified line built by the Romans but one which has survived less well due to it being constructed from wood and turf rather than stones.

At the end of the tunnel there was a basin area wide enough for our boat to turn around, head back through, then re-enter the Falkirk Wheel at the top for the descent back to the visitor centre.

It wasn’t a long experience, but it was one that you can only do here in Scotland and we are very much into experiential travel, with the rarer ones being the ones we seek out most often. We enjoyed the excursion as a whole even though it involved a fair bit of travelling to get there and back to Greenock and if we were to return to this part of the world on another cruise then we’d like to check out Glasgow next time.

Back aboard Regal Princess for the evening we followed our usual routine of enjoying some drinks on the balcony and admiring the views while it was dry and not too cold. Even under dull grey sky the distant hills and fields had a charm that we imagine a lot of the Americans aboard in particular found delightful.

We’d booked the Crown Grill for dining on this night of the British Isles cruise as it’s something we generally enjoy when we cruise with Princess Cruises. We are somewhat set in our ways with what we pick from the menu and it was all as excellent as it always is. Nobody has beaten Princess for their filet mignon on a cruise ship, yet. That said, with recent price increases we’ve seen (at time of writing this, early 2026) it’s now something we probably won’t be doing every cruise moving forward.

In the next post in this cruise travelogue series we’ll make our first visit to the Shetland Islands where a very foggy Lerwick and local tour group problems see our plans for the day torn up and thrown away before we even set foot ashore.

But the night before we were due to arrive at Lerwick we received an email from the local company. Their boat had developed engine trouble so they couldn’t go ahead and were refunding our money. I won’t lie: our first thought was “Huh, I wonder if Princess offered them more to put on another boat for their passengers last-minute and they took the money?” but that’s just because I’m a cynical old swine. Anyway, booked plans scuppered we fell back to deciding we’d just have to take a walk around, knowing that there was an iron age ruin, a castle, some museums, and pubs that would likely more than satisfy us.

We awoke to thick fog around Lerwick. This was such a joy for us. Had the boat not developed a fault then we’d likely have been out on the cold water for several hours with visibility in the tens of metres. Instead, we were greeted by some atmospheric views of the town before we needed to tender ashore.

If the weather is nice then the first people to board a tender boat from a ship like to sit up top (if that’s an option). When it’s cold and damp then this isn’t the case, but there are still two good arguments for getting to the exposed part of the boat: firstly, you get fresh air and views without being shoulder-to-shoulder with strangers on decidedly uncomfortable benches with, if you’re lucky, a misted-up, water-splattered porthole to look out; secondly, you get off the tender boat first when it arrives at its destination. While my wife opted to sit inside for both trips between Lerwick and Regal Princess, I went for the chilly option.

Being first off the tender boat I had time to hang around and snap some shots by the pier at Lerwick until my wife emerged from her shelter. An interesting sculpture caught my eye – they often do – and this turned out to be the Diana Fountain. No, thankfully, not a memorial to the late princess, but rather one erected in 1890 for the whaling ship Diana which became trapped in Arctic ice for six months in 1866 leading to many deaths. The original water fountain was replaced by the overflowing metal chalice sculpture in 2000 by local artist Alan Hart.

Another sculpture stood out as we started to head off to where we first wanted to explore. This was Da Lightsome Buoy by Jo Chapman, a fairly new and fairly humorous piece of art near the water. If you visit then take a minute or two to read the various inscriptions on it out loud.

You can get a better feel for the fog levels in Lerwick during our visit there with this look back across the water to Regal Princess. Once again, some serendipity that our boat trip had been cancelled.

The first place we wanted to visit in Lerwick was the iron age ruins on the shore of Clickimin Loch, only about one and a half kilometres from the port area. This started out with a little more uphill-traipsing than we’d expected and neither of us are exactly fit.

We reached a convenient pausing point. Taking photos is a great way to force a rest on the pair of us when we’re out and about, especially for my wife whose old leg-related injuries can cause her some grief that she tries too hard to power through sometimes. This was St Columba’s Church of Scotland, a typically neoclassical piece of architecture dating from the early to mid nineteenth century. It is the largest church building in Shetland and its 1871 organ was only the second one to be installed in a Church of Scotland building following the end of a rule prohibiting them.

As the door appeared to be open we popped our heads inside and were greeted by the minister or a helper who ushered us in, had a bit of a chat with us, offered to get us some drinks (probably due to how flushed we looked from the steep walk in the chilly air), and was just generally really lovely. We’re not religious but it seemed to be a very welcoming place.

Suitably recovered we headed on our way, now hugging the coastline in a westerly direction. The views were moody and the going was far more level now making for a far more pleasant stroll. This coastline is known as Da Sletts.

One final piece of functional artwork to spot before we made our way inland towards the loch were the shelters installed by NHS Scotland using brightly-coloured upright boat hulls. These were erected in 2023 to be used by the nearby staff and patients of the Lerwick health centre as well as tourists walking the path. And we did, even though it wasn’t raining, just because we could.

In the next post in this cruise travelogue series we’ll take a look around the impressive Broch of Clickimin.

We made our way to Fort Charlotte. This would have been more prominent on the shoreline when it was built in 1781 (and named for Queen Charlotte) but land reclamation has since pushed it back to a less imposing position. In its current incarnation the fort never saw any action but previous fortifications on the same spot were involved in battles during the Anglo-Dutch wars of the seventeenth century.

The final bit of culture we took a look at in Lerwick was the Shetland Museum. As you’d probably expect this wasn’t a huge museum by any means but it was a nice building with some interesting things on display and it was lovely to get out of the cold for a short while.

That mostly covered the places of interest within walking distance around Lerwick so we filled the rest of our time ashore by doing some shopping – loads of locally-made soaps were purchased because we have a fondness for soaps – and we checked out a couple of pubs – the Douglas Arms and the Lounge Bar – so that we could try some of the ales produced by the local brewery on the island.

In the next post in this British Isles cruise travelogue series we’ll head back to the ship and start some southward cruising down the east coast of Britain where we’ll be treated to some aurora action.

• We could have booked an excursion with Princess, but these were horribly expensive for what they were offering.
• We could have booked an excursion with a private company, but there weren’t many options here and the addition of a tender port into the mix adds a timing complication to consider as Princess will prioritise getting its own excursion passengers off first. Although, we’re Elite level so we could have jumped the queue. It’s a perk!
• We could have tried to get a taxi from the port but we suspected they would be somewhat inundated with similar requests so this might be tricky.
• We could have run the fifteen or so kilometres from the dock to the city but not in this universe.
• We could have taken the train to Edinburgh. Cheap, quick, looked simple enough.

We’d decided that we were going to do the lattermost thing of tendering ashore, walking to the train station, then spending the few pounds that it would have cost to head into Edinburgh.

And then we changed our minds in the morning over breakfast. We’re like that.

We enjoyed the views of the Forth Bridges from our balcony when we woke up and there were already tender boats shuttling across the water for those with early and probably long excursions planned for the day. As I started to peruse the local area on my phone’s map to confirm train times I saw that there were a couple of local boat tour operators in South Queensferry. Since we’d had a planned boat tour cancelled on us at the last minute when we visited Lerwick we decided that we’d see if there was the possibility of booking a trip once we were on land. If not then we could still always head into Edinburgh but at the back of our minds was the thought that it probably felt like a city that could do with longer time visiting to really appreciate it.

We jumped on the next tender boat ashore – that Elite perk I mentioned – and a short trip that included passing under one of the three Forth Bridges took place before we stepped ashore at Hawes Pier. This was the spot from which the ferry service used to cross the water until the bridges were constructed. Queensferry gets its name from the ferry service being established in the eleventh century by Queen Margaret.

We had a lovely view of Regal Princess at anchor in the Firth of Forth between two of the supports of the Forth Rail Bridge under which we’d just travelled. At the time of its opening in the late nineteenth century it was the longest single cantilever span bridge in the world although it’s now in second place.

We found a tour boat operator and made some enquiries but were told the place we needed to go to in order to buy tickets was about one and a half kilometres to the west of where we were, located in the marina. We had plenty of time before any trips would be setting off so we casually headed off in that direction and enjoyed the pleasant weather and some of the charms that earned South Queensferry an award of prettiest Scottish town in early 2025.

A seal sculpture represents the sort of wildlife you can see on Inchcolm Island and that would be the place we would end up taking our boat trip to later in the day. Spoiler.

There were plenty of photos taken along the shoreline walk whenever any of the three bridges made for an interesting or just pleasing composition.

You could be forgiven for thinking that the tiled sculpture of a sea serpent in South Queensferry is the Loch Ness Monster but this is actually the Guardian of the Forth and was designed by schoolchildren.

At the western end of the main street of the town there were a couple of points of interest very close to one another. A stone drinking fountain had been erected in honour of John Reid, provost for Queensferry for the last decade and a half of the nineteenth century. The small garden around it was very nice and we particularly liked the modern bird sculpture mounted on the railings nearby.

Next to the garden was the unmissable sight of the Jubilee Clock Tower atop Rosebery Hall. The hall was formerly the town’s tollbooth dating to around the start of the seventeenth century and in addition to collecting taxes it served as a court and small jail too. A steeple and clock was added to the building in the eighteenth century but a new one replaced it to mark Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee in 1887.

Not long after this, after walking beneath the Forth Road Bridge, we reached the marina. More photos of the three bridges were taken because the moment demanded it, and we had a clear view of the newest Queensferry Crossing Bridge too now.

At the marina we found the boat tour company’s office and bought tickets for the next sailing. We still had some time to kill so ended up seeing what Scotts Bar was like. Unfriendly, confusing, a bit up itself, but convenient for us.

In the next post we hop on a boat tour to Inchcolm Island to look at the abbey ruins, encounter angry birds in real life, and only slightly panic when our boat ends up being very late coming back for us.

Our embarkation point was at the marina situated between the Forth Road Bridge and the Queensferry Crossing, and with us travelling eastwards out of the Firth of Forth this meant we’d sail under the Forth Road Bridge and the Forth Rail Bridge.

The first point of interest on this boat tour if you exclude passing under the bridges – although passing under bridges is always cool; ask any cruiser, or troll for that matter – was Inchgarvie, one of several small islands in this area of water. This particular island’s location made it a useful stopping point for boats between both sides of the water before the bridges were constructed and, like some of the other islands, it had housed fortifications at numerous points in its history due to the strategic defensive location.

It wasn’t long before we passed Regal Princess at anchor. Look! I can see our cabin from here!

Hound Point is an oil export terminal. Oil, processed and stored on the southern shore, is pumped to the terminal to then be loaded onto carriers. I like the industrial beauty of these monsters even if, like sane people, I long for the move away from fossil fuels and preferably ahead of them simply being exhausted for short-term and selfishly short-sighted gains for the already super-rich.

We now approached Inchcolm, and from the southern side there was a lovely view of the abbey that we’d be exploring in a little while.

Our boat docked around the northern side of the island just beside the amusingly-named Inchgnome upon which numerous gnomes stood.

We were now free to explore the island for an hour and a half on our own. Our guides on the boat had given us some history of the place, indication of where we couldn’t go – there was a private property just beyond the abbey ruins – and warnings about the gulls. They were nesting during our arrival and would be numerous, noisy, and potentially aggressive. We were told to keep our distance and if the gulls didn’t want us near them then they’d make it clear and we should back away if we didn’t want to risk losing an eye.

There are a few tales about when a religious building was first constructed with dates in the twelfth century mentioned, but it wasn’t until 1235 that Augustinian brothers and priests started using it as a proper abbey. Inchcolm Abbey was eventually abandoned in 1560 as a result of the Scottish Reformation and it had suffered numerous attacks in the intervening centuries. Nevertheless, it is the most complete example of monastic ruins in Scotland.

At the back of the abbey we started to head off up a grassy area and got just a little way up it when the gulls gave us cause to reconsider. A combination of not wanting to cause the birds stress and not wanting to be known as “those people with the bleeding heads” on the journey back sent us into the abbey ruins once more instead.

Inchcolm Abbey just had a great feeling about it. The sense of isolation helped, and maybe the winged threat all around added to the atmosphere, but the completeness of some of the areas such as the cloisters and refectory really made it easy to find yourself immersed in the place.

We headed back closer to the area where we’d been dropped off on Inchcolm Island. At certain times of the year puffins will nest around the island and had there been a chance of seeing them then I might have been able to persuade my wife to join me as I then headed up the hill for a look around. My wife has a thing for puffins, but because this wasn’t Puffin Time she was happy to hang around near the bottom while I clambered up for some views around and to check out some of the defensive structures placed on the island during both of the twentieth century’s world wars.

Something struck me while I was up the hill – figuratively, not literally, despite the gulls – and that was that I had a very clear view all around the island and along the Forth, and the boat was due back in the next five minutes or so. Only, there was no sign of the boat. I headed down to where everyone on our tour was gathering.

“No sign of the boat,” I told my wife, nervously. She did not look happy.

We weren’t the only people to notice no boat but we were the only people there with a time pressure on us as we were the only people who’d arrived in the area aboard Regal Princess. An announcement was made that confirmed, yes, the boat was late but that it was on its way. So we waited. And waited. And wandered around a little to see if there were any sightings of the boat. And waited.

The boat arrived around half an hour late and I’d like to say that it motored its way back to the port to make up for it but it actually slowed several times to see if it could spot any seals on rocks in the area much to our continuing mild panic. However, I did have a nice chat with one of the guides and learnt that part of the problem had been that one of their boats had been damaged while assisting in tendering operations for our cruise ship. This at least gave me some hope that I might have a good case for blaming Princess if the ship was held up waiting for us to get back. Assuming it waited at all.

We sailed back under two of the three bridges, docked at the marina, and set off at a brisk pace back through Queensferry and to Hawes Pier to catch a tender boat back to the ship. Not only were we back in plenty of time before the last boat was due to leave, we had to wait quite a while as several busloads of cruise passengers arrived back just before us. We were rather relieved.

Minor trauma at the end aside, this was a fabulous way to spend a few hours at this cruise port, especially as it had been a Sunday so the main draw of Edinburgh wasn’t quite as appealing due to how many things of interest there might have been closed. The island and abbey were gorgeous and the mix of wildlife-spotting and immersion in history was perfect.

In the next post in this series it’s the penultimate day of this British Isles cruise and the last sea day on Regal Princess.

On the evening that we departed Scotland our meal in the main dining room was as below:

We caught a little bit of some entertainment, although I can’t remember what it was exactly, only that it was amusing. Afterwards, though, we headed to Crooners and decided to splash some of our onboard spend on the special, double-size cocktails that include the glasses to take home as souvenirs. We still use them occasionally, but due to their size it’s only ever with something that has a lot of mixer in it. We like to drink, but you’ve got to be sensible sometimes.

We’d not had many sea days on this cruise and this was the last of them, heading south on the North Sea down the east coast of England. The weather had mostly been good on this cruise and that remained the case on this day.

The Red Hat Society were out in force and gathered in the piazza of Regal Princess for some last group photos because it was the final formal night on the ship too. They added a lovely burst of colour to the cruise.

We’re fond of trivia when we cruise but the port-heavy itinerary meant we’d not taken part as much as we’d normally have liked. However, the sea day presented several chances to give our brains some exercise and we pretty much cleaned up.

Because it was formal night we decided to hit the Elite Lounge for some pre-dinner nibbles and drinks in relative quiet, entertained by the house band.

Passing back through the piazza area on the way to dinner a little later we had to run the gauntlet of photographers but having my own camera to hand meant I was able to turn the tables on one of them. I do this quite often on ships.

So, finally, here’s the menu and photos of the food we ate for this gala night on Regal Princess.

In the next post in this series we hit the final port of the cruise and the only one that’s outside the British Isles: Le Havre, France.