This cruise was still taking place during a period of heightened pandemic precautions so there was the pre-cruise testing to get through first, but this was an absolute breeze. We drove to the testing centre to find there were barely any cars there at all – a benefit of being the only ship from the Carnival line sailing out of Southampton that day – so we were directed straight through to the marquee, got swabbed, and were on our way with hardly time to slow the car to a stop. The terminal experience was a joy too, with us walking in, being directed to a counter, and them having our medallions ready to go when we got there without even asking our names. In fact, this part was spookily good because we had, and still have, no idea how they knew it was us. Maybe they’d put tracking devices on us when we were on Regal Princess earlier in the year? Weird. But good weird.

Thus it was that by just after midday, we were on the ship. Our cabin – B737 – was an aft-facing balcony. We’d not been able to pick the room we wanted but had selected the grade and been allocated this space. The room itself was exactly what we’d come to expect from a cabin on most cruise ships, but what we very much liked about this particular room was the size of the balcony.

We do like a good balcony. The aft design of these Royal-class cruise ships includes a tapered balcony structure so there was some opportunity for other cabins to overlook us but for this deck of rooms the balcony was half-covered, meaning it could be used even in unpleasant weather (or to get some respite from the sun) or you could perform naked lunges in the open air with only the seagulls as witnesses. Not that we ever did anything like that. I swear.

The decks above and below us had no covered space at all, and that included the suites on the corners. This pattern of partly-covered and fully-exposed balconies at the ship’s rear appeared to be every other deck, so consider this if you’re booking an aft balcony on Sky Princess or one of her sister ships.

The view from our balcony while in port was, well, Southampton. Southampton is never going to win any prizes in the Most Attractive Cruise Port category of whatever ceremony chooses to dish out awards to ports (I guarantee there’s at least one; the travel industry is very big on self-congratulations and promotions). Still, if you’re looking at Southampton from a cruise ship then you know there are good times ahead, and not just because you’ll soon be leaving the city, although that is a big part of it.

Muster drills these days are mercifully easy. The days of suddenly having to grab your life jacket part-way through the afternoon and trudge into a packed venue to sit through safety instructions has been consigned to history on Princess ships. Now, thanks to the medallions tracking you, you can stick the safety video on in the room while you unpack (I mean pay attention to the important information), mark you’ve watched it, then head to your muster station so they can confirm you know where to go in an emergency, and that’s it. Leaves more time for exploring and drinking on your embarkation day. These are much more fun activities.

A good boarding experience helps to set the tone for a cruise, and, so far, our first impressions of Sky Princess were very positive. We were also seeing the medallions working in a way they hadn’t on Regal Princess, with our room unlocking from quite a distance as we approached the door, and with us being able to use the app and see that it was far more accurate in identifying where we were on the ship.

We don’t usually get on a ship as early as we had boarded Sky Princess as it’s just not that important to us. I know there are some people who simply have to get on early; even some people who will ignore when they should be boarding just to be able to get on the ship. That last lot are wankers. So, while it’s never been a thing that’s concerned us before, this early start to our week at sea did mean that we’d have a chance to get some lunch for a change, and, as we hit the central area of the ship – the Piazza – we saw that the Alfredo’s Pizzeria had plenty of seating free. Why not?

Service was admittedly sluggish, but this was embarkation day with lots of people coming and going, and likely a reduction in staff in certain areas to allow others to assist with those boarding, so we were fine with it. Besides, it’s not like we had anywhere we needed to be. The food was very good, and the wine was perfectly fine.

We’d chosen wine to go with our Italian lunch because that felt like the right thing to do, but one thing my wife likes to do very early on a Princess cruise (and then fairly frequently throughout) is have a Dirty Banana cocktail. If you’ve not had one and you are about to cruise with Princess Cruises at some point then make this something to do too. I went for something a little more grown-up, but, as you can see, fruit was included. This means it was healthy.

Southampton Sailaway

It eventually came time for the ship to cast off. We decided to order a glass of something sparkling each in order to sit on our balcony and watch the grey sight of Southampton disappear in our wake. Ordering drinks to the room is very easy on a Princess ship – you can use the phone app, or you can use the TV in the room – but it’s an area that still could use improvement for passengers on the Princess Plus package – this is the small daily charge that includes tips, really good internet access, and up to fifteen drinks per day, and yes, we always get it – because there was no way to order for both of us in one go. If there are two people in a room then each has to order separately otherwise one of the drinks gets charged. It’s, quite frankly, an unnecessary faff. A minor irritation that you get used to, but still an irritation that could easily be addressed.

Our drinks turned up ridiculously quickly. In fact, as we very soon realised on this Sky Princess cruise, ordering to the room, whether food or drink or a combination of the two, was by far the quickest way to get anything. You could easily wait over twenty minutes in a bar, whereas the same thing might be in your room in under five.

I rightly mock Southampton for its grim appearance, but that’s commercial ports for you the world over. Despite everything, I am a fan of industrial architecture designs, and you’ll be able to find many occasions on this website where I rave about brutalism to back that up, so I do enjoy the grain silos that are the last big things to see as your cruise ship starts its run down the Solent and out to sea.

All that remains to describe of this first evening aboard Sky Princess is what we ate and drank, and where we were entertained.

We actually ate in one of the main dining rooms on Sky Princess, and this felt like quite a novelty. In fact, it had been around two years since we’d last done this, with all the cruises of 2021 to date taking place in speciality dining venues: Virgin’s Scarlet Lady didn’t have the concept of normal dining rooms, and on both Regal Princess and Iona we’d booked in for something special on each night. I have to say that we really enjoyed the main dining room experience a lot, helped, I think, by there being fewer people aboard than on a normal cruise, and the concept of sharing tables having been knocked aside for the most part. We would end up in the main dining room several times on this cruise, and the only issue we had was that we found booking a table for two impossible on the app or TV; as soon as the pair of us were selected, the option to pick a time became disabled. Shakes fist at technology! We worked out, though, that we could book a table for one, so ended up doing that, and just turning up when due, on the basis that they wouldn’t try to allocate us to a tiny table facing the wall somewhere or refuse the pair of us entry. That seemed to work fine.

A venue on Sky Princess, not on other ships we’d been on prior to this, that we wanted to check out, was Take Five. Confusingly located on deck six, this was the jazz lounge. Live acts performed in the evening and there was a jazz jukebox to select tunes from during the day, but it also had a fantastic selection of cocktails that we felt obliged to sample. This would end up being our place to go most evenings. Great atmosphere, fabulous staff, lovely drinks.

So, not a lot to report on for this first day aboard Sky Princess, but in the next part of this cruising travelogue series we’ll be docking at Portland near Weymouth under clear blue skies, and there will be a wander around the ship (plenty of photos), an afternoon tea, and another sailaway video to share.

If you remember from the first post in this Sky Princess cruise travelogue series, we had an aft cabin, and the morning view that greeted us in Portland was of the Dorset coastline towards Lulworth Cove.

Once a reasonably late breakfast was out of the way we went for a wander around the top deck of the ship just to see how different this Royal-class ship was to the other ones in the Princess fleet on which we’d cruised. Our experiences aboard Royal Princess (in 2016) and Regal Princess (earlier in the year) had confirmed that, the lack of a Skywalkers aside, the upper decks of these ships was a good design, featuring plenty of pools and an especially-improved adults only pool near the front. But we also knew that the Royal-class ships had undergone some design changes with their newer vessels and wanted to see if these were improvements in our minds or not.

We started at the aft of the ship as it was close to our room, and the following photographs show the aft pool on Sky Princess as well as some of the outside fitness areas: the jogging track and court.

As we moved forward along the top deck of Sky Princess it was nice to look at some of the Portland landscape that we’d not quite reached when we’d walked along some of the South West Coast Path on our prior visit. Our legs had only taken us into part of the walled harbour area in which the cruise ship was anchored but the hill to the ship’s port side was on the Isle of Portland and we’d never quite got off the mainland.

I like a bit of art and we started encountering some sea-themed and Princess-themed pieces around this part of the ship. In keeping with the overall cruise line colours, blue and white featured a lot, and that’s nice but I think it can be bolder to go vibrant and contrasting where such pieces are concerned. At least if you were ever concerned that you couldn’t remember which hashtag to use on social media there was a handy reminder to be found.

The swimming pools are some of the biggest draws for us on a cruise ship, although for other people, being near a swimming pool, taking up space around a swimming pool, and preventing those who want to swim in the swimming pool from having anywhere to put their stuff close by is what they most want. Have I mentioned how much I hate people who lounge by pools but never use them are? Yes, yes I have. Sorry, can’t help the odd, repetitive rant.

Princess Cruises do swimming pools pretty well. There are usually plenty on their ships, and they’re usually a decent size. One difference we spotted on the main pool area on Sky Princess was an altered space between the two pools that had previously been reserved for a fountain show, now adding a couple of hot tubs. That felt like a better use of the space.

The adults-only pool on Sky Princess – the Sanctuary or Retreat pool – was quite different from Royal and Regal, and not for the better in my opinion. It’s possible that the design change was to reduce some of the more luxurious lounger areas in order to encourage more use of the additional-cost Sanctuary itself, while also providing some shelter from cross winds, which the earlier iterations of this area had been exposed to. For the latter, if that was the case then I can confirm this has not worked. This day off Weymouth was beset by a strong and rather bitter wind and our experience was that, even stationary at anchor, far from sheltering passengers in this pool area, it served to somehow funnel everything down into it. That didn’t stop us making use of the pool later in the day, but that’s when we encountered another unwelcome change; the Sanctuary pool depth was simply not deep enough for a decent swim. If you weren’t in motion then you needed to crouch down to keep as little of you above the water line and under attack from the wind as possible.

Overall, we would come to love Sky Princess during this week aboard her – handy, with us having future cruises planned on her as well – but the adults pool was a downgrade from earlier Royal-class ships.

After we’d had a swim and freshened up we decided to have a light(ish) lunch in the form of an afternoon tea. Either side of the savoury and sweet nibbles we treated ourselves to some wine, and, as we were inside the ship, took some photos of the air balloons sculpture that decorates the piazza area because that’s the law. If you see someone has been on Sky Princess and has not taken photos of these striped balloons then make sure to report them to the authorities. There’s no place on a cruise ship for people like that.

The early evening saw Sky Princess depart from Weymouth and Portland ahead of a cruise around the coastline towards Northern Ireland. While we’ve never been massively bothered with sail away events on cruises, happy to be in a bar or showering or anything else really, I had decided before this cruise, and due in part to having the aft balcony, that I’d try to video the cruises out of the ports. Thus it was that we found ourselves back in our room and ordering a drink to have on the balcony as the ship left Dorset.

The sun was starting to set as the ship left the harbour, making for some truly wonderful seascapes and skyscapes. Sunsets are best experienced at sea. That’s a fact.

I was very taken by the Portland Breakwater Fort as we cruised past it. Built a few years either side of 1870 to guard the port, the stone structure was laid down on a granite base of a ring sixty one metres in diameter on the seabed. Originally armed with cannons, then replaced with guns, the fort was in use up until the end of the second world war but was finally abandoned in 1956. A listed building to this day, it is sadly not accessible to the public, but looks like it has a huge amount of potential for an investor.

Evening aboard Sky Princess was much like any evening aboard any cruise ship: a little bit of musical entertainment around the ship, dinner (in this case in the main dining room, and very good), and drinks in various bars.

So, a quiet day on Sky Princess for us with not a lot to report, but a lovely and relaxing one, and with the promise of more to come. The next post in this UK cruise travelogue series will cover two days at sea and two evenings of speciality dining before we hit another port and, for both of us, a brand new part of the world to explore.

We relaxed, in a relaxing manner, relaxingishly. Relaxedly. Relax-like. In the manner of people relaxing, like they do.

This post, therefore, is a bit of blurb around the photographs taken on Sky Princess as she cruised from Portland (that’s the previous post in this series) around the British coastline, and up between Wales and Ireland towards Northern Ireland where a first visit to Belfast and that part of the UK awaited us. What photos did I take? Sea views? Yes, because we were at sea. Food? Yes, because we hit two speciality dining venues on these two days. Drink? Yes, of course, because, holy crap, have you read any other post I’ve ever put up?

How do you relax on a cruise? Do you wander into the atrium on the ship and find a seat to have a drink? It looks like we did. The Piazza is what Princess call their atrium area, but because they don’t have glass roofs and because someone went to Italy once and thought it sounded exotic they decided on piazza instead. It fits, especially given that most of the ships are built in Italy and this is the central hub off which you can find all those sorts of things you’d find in any Italian town square: bars, restaurants, a place to people watch, drive-by Mafia shootings, the Pope, Vespas beeping, colourful Minis careering down the stairs, and so on.

We are fond of trivia when we go cruising, and we usually do very well, winning on most cruises. That didn’t happen on Sky Princess and we’re going to blame the venue for quizzing – the Live Lounge – for that. It wasn’t that it was rammed – although it was, every day – or that there’s constant distraction because people keep passing by since it’s open plan and close to a main corridor, but it was the silly Covid restrictions they kept enforcing (or trying to enforce) here. Everywhere on the ship, if you were sitting down, you didn’t need to wear a mask, with two exceptions: the big, spacious Princess Theatre and the big, open plan Live Lounge. If you were in the lounge, sitting quietly, wanting to do a quiz, you were supposed to mask up. If you were sitting across the corridor – where the shot is taken from – and still able to do the quiz, you didn’t need to mask up. I will follow instructions unless they’re stupid. A lot of people ignored the restriction because it didn’t make any sense, and when you’re quizzing it is actually a hell of a hindrance. Leaning in to whisper an answer to a team mate, having that whisper muffled and unaided by lip-reading visual clues: “Did you say you thought the capital of Sierra Leone was Fermmermegh? That’s not a word!” Yeah, we didn’t enjoy the quizzes that much. And that’s why we didn’t win any. It wasn’t because we’re thick. Or drunk. It wasn’t just because of those reasons.

We had what we knew would be filling evening dinner plans for this first sea day so lunch was light, if you also go along with my definition that some beer and wine in Vines is a light meal. It was a good place to listen to the piano and string trio in the piazza.

We went to an art auction in the early afternoon, although you’ll have to take my untrustworthy word for it since I neglected to take any pictures. We still haven’t really forgiven Park West (the people who run these auctions on many Carnival group lines’ ships) for The Incident but we are nosey, and there’s only so much drinking and reading in a day you can do (I lie!) so we thought, why not? We didn’t buy any art at the auction. But… we were invited to the gallery afterwards and given an offer we couldn’t refuse for a sculpture and a piece that would fit our collection. Honestly, it was a stupidly good price.

Early evening on a Princess ship is the time when the Elite Lounge opens up. On Sky Princess this took place in the Vista Lounge. For Platinum and Elite level guests only, this place offers light nibbles of the bread, cheese, and meats variety, plus some exclusive cocktails at discounted prices. Prior to the introduction of the fabulous Princess Plus package which includes up to fifteen drinks per day, this was a way to save a little bit of money on drinks, but its role these days is less exclusive. It’s still nice to go there, and it didn’t stop us trying every drink on the menu. We were on holiday, so you shut your mouth.

You’re going to think we’re weird but one thing we really like to see on cruise ships is rotating light patterns on walls and curtains. We will always pass them by and say “Now, listen to me. Listen to me.” Look, we watch a lot of movies. I’m sure you know which one I’m referring to here.

Dinner on this first sea day was in the excellent Crown Grill speciality restaurant on Sky Princess. We will almost always dine here on a cruise. Yes, it’s a little extra (but so good value for money). Yes, we don’t tend to vary what we have very much at all. It’s just that good. Hit the search on this site (you do know you can search for things off the Content submenu, right?) and look for all the other times we’ve visited the Crown Grill on Princess Cruises ships if you want more information.

If you thought we didn’t do a whole lot of much on the first sea day then just you wait for day two! Which is here now.

We spent a lot of time on our aft balcony on this day, reading and drinking. There are cruisers who absolutely love aft balconies and get all giddy with excitement at being on them, and fair play to them; we’ve all got our thing. We’re a little more ambivalent towards them, preferring to see waves go past the ship and feel more up and down motion with a tilting horizon that you get nearer the front of the ship, but the aft balconies on Sky Princess – especially on our deck (see the first post in this series to find out where that was) – were huge, partly covered, and especially nice. They made for nice sun traps and protected us from the wind which was strong and cold.

If you are a fan of wake views from the aft of a cruise ship then feast your eyes on these photos below.

The Vista Lounge was where we headed again in the evening, though not for the Elite Lounge this time, but the Captain’s Circle Party instead. Another chance for free nibbles, and free drinks as well for all attendees (and you can do very well out of this if you keep catching the eye of staff). This event is a chance for the captain and senior members of the loyalty scheme to boast about the number of people aboard, what’s happening in the fleet, new ships and destinations on the horizon, etc. It’s also a chance for the most-travelled passengers aboard to win some goodies, for everyone to win the chance of a bottle of something, and for photos with the captain for those who want it.

After the Elite Lounge we made our way to Take Five, which, as you can guess from its name, is the jazz lounge on the ship, and which, as you can’t guess from its name, is on deck six. Still annoys me. We did like Take Five a lot, though, and ended up in here pretty every night at some point. Jazz – either from a jukebox or the trio led by Larry King (not that one) on piano – and a wonderful array of cocktails on the menu. Photos and some video of the jazz are below.

And the evening meal for the second of these sea days before Belfast was at wonderful, wonderful Sabatini’s. If you were to ask me to describe Sabatini’s in one word then it would be wonderful, but I’d likely repeat it because it’s really quite wonderful. Again, as with the Crown Grill, there’s a small upcharge and you can tell we visit this venue a lot on Princess ships by making use of the search facility; and you’ll be able to find out more about the restaurant and its menu that way because I’m not repeating it now. I’m just repeating the word wonderful. Wonderful.

The only problem with Sabatini’s is that you really should opt for elective surgery prior to your cruise in order to fit in an additional, elasticated stomach. We didn’t, and tried to fool our bodies into thinking everything was okay and this was another day and please don’t explode by taking a walk onto the ship’s promenade deck for some air. We didn’t explode, but we did decide on an early night.

In the next post in this Sky Princess UK cruise travelogue series I’ll cover Belfast, a city we’d never been to before and which… we still really haven’t since we took an excursion to the north coast to look at the Giant’s Causeway instead. There will be rock formations.

“Is it Giant’s Causeway or Giants’ Causeway?”

“What?”

“Is it Giant apostrophe ess Causeway, or Giants apostrophe Causeway?”

“Is it important?”

“You know how I feel about apostrophes.”

“But is it actually important?”

“I feel it says a lot about a nation if they name something after a type of people or just a descriptive term for a single person when they could have used his or her name. If this was made by a tall fellow called Lenny then he’d probably like it if it was known as Lenny’s Causeway rather than Giant’s Causeway. The latter feels disrespectful. It would be like if they told me that some feature on the website was going to be named in my honour and they only called it Software Developer’s Just Really Horrible Bug instead of using my name.”

“I’m pretty sure Lenny the tall chap did not really build this causeway so it’s not really that important after all, is it?”

We were in Northern Ireland, the second stop on our Sky Princess cruise hitting the UK during the return to cruising following the pandemic. This wasn’t my first visit to the bit of Ireland that England stole as I’d definitely crossed the border once or twice during visits to the Emerald Isle with my family as a kid, but my memory of those events is limited to my mum turning around from the passenger seat in the car to me and my brother and saying “We’re in the crap bit of Ireland now.” I might be making that up. I don’t actually think my mum had any strong feelings about Northern Ireland, and certainly none that she’d want to share with children. Some members of my extensive Irish family did have strong feelings, by all accounts. Probably best I leave that subject where it is.

For my wife, this was her first visit to any part of Ireland. She’s been mentioning for years that she’d love to pop across and to see the bits of the country where my family live (Mayo, since you asked nicely) but I’ve been less keen. It’s not that I’d not love to see Ireland as a photo-happy adult (the last time I was there, I was maybe 19 or 20 and the primary purpose was to get drunk) or that I’d not want my wife to see Ireland; it’s just that if my family found out we were over then we’d be somewhat committed to visit my aunt and my other aunt and my other aunt and my other aunt and that other aunt and that uncle and my cousin and my other cousin and my other cousin and, well, you get the picture.

Taking a cruise to Northern Ireland allowed us to tick off a part of the British Isles that neither of us had truly visited and we’d have a decent excuse of not being near any relatives so therefore could do what we wanted guilt-free. Sky Princess docked at Belfast and we did consider exploring the capital city or taking one of the tours offered there but the lure of the UNESCO World Heritage Site of the Giant’s Causeway won us over.

Our bus drive from the port had taken place accompanied by some serious rain throughout. We expected that we would be getting wet on this trip, but just as we rolled up to the National Trust-run location on the northern coast the inclement weather ceased. That bus drive had also been accompanied by our local guide telling us a bit about Northern Ireland in her strong, Northern Irish accent. We waited eagerly for any mention of a “fillum” but it wasn’t to be. We did, however, get some strong indications that she was pro-Brexit and already blaming the EU for perceived (yet not described) issues she felt were entirely the result of the foreigners who’d stuck by the letter of the stupid agreement the stupid British government had signed. So, that was lovely.

This was the sort of cruise excursion where you’re left to your own devices. There’s the road to the Giant’s Causeway. Go down. Take a look. Take some photos. Try not to kill yourself on the rocks. Meet back at the bus at this time. We did all those things.

The road down to the Giant’s Causeway was not as steep as we feared, nor even quite as long as we’d worried about. The walk was easy enough even though we set off at a decent pace to maximise time at the historic landmark (and because we were concerned that walking back up would take longer) and the views out to sea and of the shoreline rocks and hilly formations afforded plenty of chances for snapping away.

Audio guides are available and there are spots along the walk where the signs indicate what you should be listening to. This might be some geological information or just a bit of storytelling. I didn’t take an audio guide because it would have got tangled up in my camera straps and I’d have required resuscitation following accidental strangulation. It’s a constant fear of mine.

You’ll know that you’ve reached the Giant’s Causeway when you see a large mass of brightly-coloured tourists standing with arms stretched out or looking back coyly over their shoulders so that other people can take Instagram-worthy photos. The mostly hexagonal columns of basalt are another sure sign you’re in the right spot.

How was the Giant’s Causeway formed? Well, there are two answers to this: the fable and the truth. The truth is that, like basalt columns the world over, they were formed following volcanic activity and rapid cooling that caused cracks to create the shapes you see today. The hexagon is a naturally-occurring form as its edges form the shortest lengths between horizontal layers where weaknesses are offset vertically. You’ll see it in drying mud and in overlapping soap bubble formations and in the storm at Saturn’s north pole. Similar basalt rock formations exist on the coastline of Scotland, and we visited some on the south coast of Iceland at Reynisfjara in 2018.

The fable that lends the Giant’s Causeway its name is that Fionn mac Cumhaill (or Finn MacCool if you can’t pronounce Gaelic (and nobody can)) built the causeway from Ireland to Scotland in order to fight a giant there, Benandonner. Fionn, having built the causeway, is therefore a giant himself in this tale (hence the important apostrophe), although historically he’s supposed to have been a human warrior-hunter. While Fionn supposedly had a magic thumb of knowledge (early form of Smartphone) this didn’t bestow him with supersize powers so the giant size of him in this story is one we’ll just have to credit to authors employing retcons, although there is a suggestion that an older Irish mythology of the Fomorians – who were supposedly giants – got mixed up here somehow. Regardless, in one version of the Giant’s Causeway legend, and the version that our tour guide told us, Fionn realised that Benandonner was larger than he was so rather than fight him he dressed as a baby and got his wife Sadhbh to tell Benandonner that Fionn was actually Fionn’s son. Benandonner then assumed Fionn would be too huge to fight so destroyed the causeway between the countries. Using brain to defeat brawn.

My wife didn’t venture too far onto the 50 million years old rock formations because she’s got a history of falling over things. I did better than her, wandering about a bit but still not so far out as many people there. That rain that had fallen, plus spray from the breaking waves on the coast, coupled with the value of the photographic equipment I was carrying lent me a certain caution lacking in others.

We’d had more than enough time to see what we wanted to see and to experience this natural wonder on this excursion stop, so decided to head back up the inclined road towards the Giant’s Causeway visitor centre ahead of most of those in our tour group. We knew we’d be a bit slower heading up than down, we’d have a chance to use the toilets without that crowd of people who’d fled there immediately upon disembarking the bus, and we’d be able to see if we could find any souvenirs before it was time to set off. And, of course, loads more photos, some of them even of different things than I’d shot on the way down.

A few purchases in the gift shop and some brightening weather concluded our trip to see the Giant’s Causeway. We spent a little time by the bus, waiting for everyone to arrive and admiring the views across the Antrim countryside. We enjoyed noticing that the paving stones were hexagonal; an appropriate choice for this location. The remainder of this excursion would see us hit a few photo stops before returning to Sky Princess as Belfast and that will be covered in the next part of this cruise travelogue series: County Antrim Coastline.

The remainder of our time ashore while the ship awaited us back in Belfast would include a drive-by test of tedium and two photo stops.

“Does everyone here like golf?” asked our excursion guide from the front of the bus. We were near the back so may have missed some positive excitement from nearer where she was sitting, but to our ears it sounded like this question was met with silence.

“Who here has heard of the Open Golf Championship?” Yes, we’d heard of it, having not lived our lives to this point in oubliettes, but didn’t feel in any mood to encourage someone who sounded like she was a closet cheerleader for a sport we rank as only marginally less a crime against humanity than Formula 1 and basketball.

“We’re so proud to have hosted the Open!” she positively squealed, as our bus took us past Royal Portrush Golf Club on one side and a static caravan park on the other. “That’s where the TV crews were set up!” she continued, possibly expecting an ooh or an aah. She then mentioned some players’ names, I think, or maybe she described what a hole was. It was golf stuff. The memories of this period on this cruise excursion have slipped from my mind, I’m terribly, terribly sorry to say.

A quick turnaround by the bus had us soon retracing our route to Portrush from the Giant’s Causeway back to a place along the road where we could all get out and take a look at and photograph Dunluce Castle from a distance. It was a nice-looking ruin, and possibly would have looked more foreboding with stormier skies, but the views to it and across the grassland out to sea were very nice and not in any way golf-related which probably disappointed our guide who likely would’ve killed to be able to tell us all how many yards there were to the wall and that we’d probably need a Number 5 Sand-Niblick from here.

Dunluce Castle has existed in some form since the thirteenth century, although the ruins of what you can see these days were additions made in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when first the Clan MacDonnell seized Antrim and set about improving the defences and living quarters, and then La Girona of the Spanish Armada was wrecked ashore nearby with great loss of life, a salvageable and sizeable amount of cannons that could be used, and treasures that could be sold to pay for extra work on the structure.

Our final photo stop of the day would be to the Portaneevy Car Park. A car park!? They are spoiling us on this tour! But wait, it’s not the car park that’s the thing to take photos of here, it’s the views from it, and they were definitely worth seeing if you get as giddy as a goat when someone says the magic word “islands” to you.

Looking northwest we could see Carrick-a-Rede, a small island just off the coast of County Antrim, connected to the mainland by a rope bridge. For centuries the gap between the island and the land was a route for salmon to swim through and so local fishermen would rig up netting to catch hundreds per day. By 2002 this was down to a couple of hundred across an entire season thanks to overfishing, nearby pollution, or the salmon finally catching on that they could swim on the other side of the island and not end up on someone’s plate by the end of the day.

To the northeast we could see another island, though one considerably farther away. This was Rathlin Island and it’s the most northerly point of Northern Ireland. Our guide pointed out that the wind and currents in this area often made landing on the island, or even passing through the strait, a very dangerous endeavour. Its small size also belies the fact that it’s been host to some interesting historical events:

• the first Viking raid on Ireland landed on Rathlin;
• Robert the Bruce sought refuge on the island;
• Sir Francis Drake was instrumental in massacring Scottish and Irish refugees in 1575;
• during the first world war, German U-boats struck a naval vessel and a passenger cargo ship off the coast of Rathlin with survivors ending up on the island.

Beyond Rathlin we could see more land on the horizon, and that land turned out to be Scotland. In fact, what we were looking at, and what you’re seeing in the photo below, is the Mull of Kintyre, immortalised or brutalised (opinions differ) by Paul McCartney and Wings in 1977. We’ve had to add this experience to our list of countries we’ve seen from other countries. Us travellers: we’ve got lists of everything.

This concludes the excursion we took through Princess Cruises for our day in Northern Ireland. In the next post in this series I’ll cover the sailaway and evening’s activities on board Sky Princess ahead of our arrival in Liverpool, the final port on this short cruise.

Often, when we’re returning to a cruise ship in port we’ll look out for our cabin so that we can point at it and say “There’s our cabin.” If you cruise then you’ll probably do it too. It’s like spotting a cow in a field and saying “Look! A cow!” It’s just one of those things you end up doing when you cruise; file it there alongside waving at people from your balcony as one of those activities that you don’t feel compelled to do when you’re flying or taking a bus somewhere. Cruising is a different way to travel.

Anyway, we couldn’t see our cabin because we had an aft balcony, so we were able to board without any pointing-at-things delays.

Cruise ports are generally not very attractive places, and particularly so when they’re simply additions to more traditional commercial docks dealing with huge amounts of cargo and ferries. We’ve seen worse, but Belfast certainly counts as one of those ports only a mother port could love. Puddle-covered tarmac, silos, cranes, a general feeling of isolation and despair.

Now, where Belfast cruise port does excel is in its wildlife. You’ll always see birds at ports – mostly gulls, of course – because birds are nature’s natural lovers of cruise ships. They just love the effortless way in which ships glide over the oceans and seek out interesting sights or new experiences. It’s far less common to see seals, though, but we got lucky after we’d returned to our room to freshen up a bit and have a drink on our balcony ahead of departure time. We ended up watching at least two seals swimming, floating around a bit, and sometimes going on extended dives for the best part of half an hour. A little bit of research indicates that these were harbour seals which, quite frankly, was a waste of researching time and I really could have guessed it if I’d given it a little more thought.

After Sky Princess started to move away from Belfast cruise port – and after the Love Boat theme blasted out across the deserted, industrial landscape – she made a 180 degree turn as she had been facing westwards and needed to head east. This brought into view the P&O cruise ship Azura which was in the docks undergoing maintenance ahead of her own post-pandemic cruising restart. Azura, to us, will always be known as “the poo ship” thanks to the – at time of writing – two short cruises we’ve had on her six months apart and the presence of a persistent odour both times near one of the lounges. It’s the sort of thing that could put someone off ever cruising on a particular ship again, but we like to give ships time to change, and perhaps one of the many refits and refurbs she’s had in the intervening years has addressed the problem, so – again, at time of writing – we are due to give Azura another chance to impress us in 2023 when we’ve booked a week in the Mediterranean hitting Italy and Croatia on her.

The sun was behind the hills around Belfast as we pulled out into the main channel away from Northern Ireland and towards Liverpool across the Irish Sea. Belfast cruise port may not have been pretty, but the sunset and dusk views back towards it as we left certainly were.

And so to the evening aboard Sky Princess. It won’t surprise anyone to discover that this followed the pattern of most evenings aboard cruise ships for us. There would be drinking, and there would be food. First up was a pre-dinner cocktail in Take Five. We were too early for the band but the venue was still a relaxed, quiet place to just take the weight off your feet and try some of the fabulous cocktails there. When the band aren’t playing there’s also a jazz jukebox you can select tunes from, although each time I tried it on this cruise we ended up leaving the lounge before the tracks I’d picked came up.

Our evening meal was our first chance to try out Bistro Sur La Mer, a new eatery on some of the more recent Princess Cruises ships. My wife enjoyed everything she had but I wasn’t so lucky with my choices; the paté en croute in particular was just this side of revolting, with a questionable texture conjuring up impressions of pencil erasers embedded in corned beef gelatine that came close to triggering my gag reflex. I also wasn’t enamoured with the location of this speciality restaurant with it being right off the piazza and subject to a lot of ambient noise. Still, there are more food options to choose from so we’ll definitely give this place another go.

Just because we fancied somewhere different to have some evening drinks after dinner we tried first the Crown Grill Bar, then the Vista Lounge. The first location was quiet, peaceful, and offered interesting cocktail options; the latter was more vibrant, with music playing, people dancing, lots of people-watching opportunities, but a more limited drinking range to select from, it being mostly limited to the core drinks you can typically get through the app.

In the next post in this Sky Princess UK cruise travelogue series we’ll hit Liverpool, the city in which I went to university more years ago than I like to be reminded of.

A cruise port stop with no booked excursion! For some people it’s what they do most of the time, whether it’s to save some money, or because they prefer shopping to history and culture, or because they’ve done it all so many times before, or because they’re the sorts of people who just don’t find many things or experiences interesting in general. I’m not judging. Much. We do tend to do excursions because we try to visit different places instead of just returning to the same ones year after year and we want to learn some things or see some different things. I can’t update my Travel Achievements page if we never achieve anything interesting while travelling.

But no, not this time. For us on this short cruise it would be a relaxed wake-up, a leisurely breakfast, then a wander into the city. The view from our aft balcony was of the city’s Liver Building with the Albert Dock beyond that. The sky was overcast to start and the weather forecast was for a mix of sun and showers during the day.

Now, although I said we hadn’t booked any excursions we did have something booked anyway. Knowing we’d be in Liverpool and close to the Albert Dock I’d done a little bit of research into things going on in the area to see what might excite our brains. This was still in the Just Kinda Coming Out Of The Pandemic Sorta phase of life in late 2021 so you could walk into shops freely but don’t you dare think about coming to a museum or art gallery without choosing an arrival slot ahead of time! Okay, museums and art galleries maybe have a higher age demographic that is more vulnerable to airborne viruses and they want to protect their patrons more than Shelly and Grant who are popping into the newsagents for a packet of Rolos and a four-pack of local brand cider, but still an irritation that strongly discouraged casual visiting. Still, we took a chance that Sky Princess really would dock at Liverpool on the day it was supposed to and at the time it was supposed to, and I booked a visit to Tate Liverpool in Albert Dock. We’d end up seeing quite a bit of art along the Liverpool waterfront.

The exhibitions in the Tate were reasonable. I won’t say that it was fantastic because what was on at the time wasn’t quite aligned with our art interests, but it was very good to see some pieces by Picasso, Matisse, and Moore. The highlight for us, though, and the main reason we booked tickets, was to see the Louise Bourgeois exhibition. She’s a sculptor most famous for her spider-related works. I don’t like spiders and my wife is positively arachnophobic but we both enjoy these fabulous sculptures. Tate Liverpool hosted a number of Louise’s pieces but it was the 1995 artwork, Spider I, that stole the show for us. We’d previously seen Maman in Bilbao and her Eyes in New York City and we’d love to see more artwork from Louise Bourgeois when we travel in the future. If you’re into feminist art then she’s certainly someone you should learn more about.

It was raining lightly when we’d finished at the gallery so we decided to find a pub. Look, it’s what we do.

We made use of as much cover afforded by the walkway around the Albert Dock and found our way to the Turncoat Bar which caught our eye thanks to the board outside indicating it did craft beers, of which I’m very fond. Down the stairs we headed into a spacious cavern-like venue that we discovered also did its own gin and cooked pizzas on the premises too. The pizzas were popular as we saw several families arrive and order some while we were there, but we stuck to the liquids, having a couple of pints each and even picking up a bottle of gin to take home with us.

The rain had vanished when we emerged into daylight once more but we couldn’t really come up with anything else we wanted to see so just figured we’d take a slow walk back to the ship. “If we spot anything that looks interesting then we’ll take a look at it, but otherwise…”

Just north of Albert Dock on the Mersey is Canning Dock, and the views all around this part of Liverpool’s waterfront was a mix of iconic buildings, nods to the city’s mercantile past, and thoroughly modern structures. What instantly attracted our attention was the Pump House. It’s hard not to notice a red brick tower, and we could tell this was late Victorian in function and appearance; it was built in 1878 and used to provide steam power to the hydraulic cranes then coming into use around the docks.

We couldn’t tell that it was definitely a pub but it certainly looked like it had been turned into one from a distance so we felt it only right and proper to give it a closer look and, if it wasn’t a pub, I could always take a few photos from different angles around the building.

But it was a pub (Pump House)! So we decided to stop for a drink. Of course we did. We sat outside because it was bright and sunny, if not exactly warm, but mostly because it was rammed inside. The woman serving us told us there was football on so it was busier than normal. Drinks range was good, but we only stayed for one, admiring the views across the dock, trying arty photos with our drinks and the tower or the items we’d bought at the gallery and previous pub, and counting how many times the gulls smashed empty glasses off tables while trying to find leftover food on abandoned plates.

No more pub stops in Liverpool, I promise, but there will be public art sculptures because it would turn out that there were a fair few on our walking route back to Liverpool Cruise Port from Albert Dock.

The first bit of art we saw was Liverpool Mountain, a series of coloured rocks balanced on one another, created by Ugo Rondinone. In close proximity to that and to each other were the Billy Fury statue, the Metal and Stone sculpture, and The Crossing statue. The latter commemorates the migration from Liverpool to America by Mormon families.

Another point of interest in this spot on the Liverpool waterfront, especially for anyone carrying a padlock around with them looking to dispose of it in a manner that also creates a rusty eyesore, is the area appropriated for so-called love locks. I bet nobody ever returns to remove a lock when their relationship breaks down.

As fans of cruising it’s a dead certainty that as soon as we saw what was clearly a ship’s propeller mounted as a sculpture we’d need to head over and take a nose at it. This turned out to be the port-side propeller of the Cunard ocean liner, RMS Lusitania, sunk by the Germans in 1915 with the loss of nearly 1200 lives. The propeller and nose cone were salvaged in 1982 and weigh 22.5 tons.

Very close to the Lusitania propeller monument was Waiting, or the Working Horse monument, dedicated to the tens of thousands of horses that were used to transport goods between the dock warehouses and railway stations.

The most fun set of public art pieces was next to be seen on our walk back along the waterfront. We were immediately reminded of the time we visited Helsinki and saw brightly-decorated seal sculptures but unlike that time we couldn’t instantly work out what these were.

“What are they supposed to be?”

“They look like calves at the front, but the back is curved over like a scorpion’s tail. If I had to guess then I’d say that these were monuments to the scorpion-calves, chimeras created by Scouse farmers incensed by members of the public taking shortcuts through their fields when there were perfectly good walking trails around them. Scorpion-calves – and their adult forms, the scorpion-cows and scorpion-bulls – were effective at stopping trespassing but problems arose when the farmers tried to capitalise on their ungodly monsters. Many families lost members during slaughter season and the milk was 7% venom which affected the taste of tea. The army was called in. You don’t mess with a nation’s tea.”

“And if you didn’t have to guess?”

These were some of the Go Superlambananas! exhibition featuring 124 miniature replicas of the original Superlambanana created by Taro Chiezo in 1998 and representing the common cargoes of sheep and bananas combined with an ironic warning about genetic manipulation.

Beside the Mersey and the Navy Memorial was the statue of an interesting and heroic figure of the Second World War. Captain Frederic John “Johnnie” Walker had trained in anti-submarine warfare in Portland during the interwar years and was on the verge of early retirement when war broke out again. His unconventional approach when given command of escort groups of taking the attack to the enemy instead of merely protecting them led to numerous U-boat sinkings and was soon adopted fleetwide. In one patrol in early 1944 Walker’s group sunk 6 U-boats but had one ship hit during this. They towed the ship back home but it sank before reaching Liverpool, although all the crew were saved. They were met by cheering crowds and Walker received a promotion to captain. His final actions in World War II were protecting the vessels making the D-Day landings and ensuring not one U-boat made it past his group. After a fortnight of this he returned home where he suddenly died of a cerebral thrombosis attributed to exhaustion. His funeral was attended by 1000 people and his coffin was paraded through the streets of Liverpool to the HMS Hesperus for a burial at sea.

The three, very different buildings along the Liverpool waterfront are known as the Three Graces. From right-to-left as we passed them they were:

• Port of Liverpool Building – an Edwardian Baroque design,
• Cunard Building – an Italian Renaissance design,
• Royal Liver Building – an Anyone’s Guess design.

The lattermost is the most iconic of Liverpool’s buildings. The Liver Birds (cormorants with seaweed in their beaks) that sit atop the two towers face in different directions; Bella looks out to sea, while Bertie looks toward land.

What we noticed as we headed back towards Sky Princess was that the clocks on the Liver Building also told different times. Our supposition was that this was make everyone across the Mersey checking the time through binoculars always early for things. Those wacky Liverpudlians!

Just two more statues interrupted our waterfront walk back to the cruise ship. The first was the one we spent most time at, not because it was particularly good, and not because we had any interest in the group, but because I had to time a split-second shot where there was nobody standing in front hugging one of the group for a photo or pulling a ridiculous pose in front of it. It was the Beatles Pier Head Statue, of course.

The final monument we passed was that of a bronze on granite representation of King Edward VII on horseback. There are apparently more equestrian statues of Edward VII outside the UK than within it. The exposed location of this artwork means it needs regular attention and has in the past been given coats of paint to do so, though they’ve been sensibly removed in more recent cleaning operations.

And that brought our day ashore in Liverpool to an end. We didn’t spend an awful lot of time here but, again, we’ve been before. However, we managed to get some culture in with our art gallery visit and some statue and monument-spotting along the city’s waterfront, and we managed to try some local ale and purchase some local gin too. That was enough.

Our walk through the Cruise Liverpool port building saw us encounter one more Superlambanana. For one of our fellow passengers on Sky Princess it was all too much and she fell down the ramp leading from the dock to the quay. There was blood, but she seemed okay.

In the next post in this Sky Princess cruise travelogue series I’ll cover the rest of the day spent aboard the cruise ship along with our departure from Liverpool. Since I’d been taking time lapse videos of the departures at the other ports on this cruise you can expect another one in that post too.

We’d spent our day in Liverpool, the final port on this short Sky Princess UK cruise, doing not a great deal, if truth be told, although we’d spent money ashore in an art gallery and some pubs, and we’d experienced culture in the form of public artworks and monuments along the Liverpool waterfront. That simply left waiting for the sail away from the Merseyside city, then dinner and drinks aboard, ahead of some time at sea before returning home.

This post, therefore, will consist almost entirely of pictures taken of the Liverpool skyline along the Mersey, passing between Bootle and Wallasey on her way out across the north of Wales to the Irish Sea. A few videos too, just because I took some, and some mentions of buildings of interest (to me) along the way completes the content here.

We were quite taken with Liverpool’s Dazzle Ferry, Snowdrop, operating from just aft of Sky Princess so therefore in a perfect spot to see her from our balcony. Who couldn’t love that explosion of patterns of colours? The unique design is by the pop artist, Sir Peter Blake, and if the name sounds familiar then it’s because he was the man who designed the Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover for The Beatles.

Another vessel that proved to be very interesting was the catamaran car ferry that operates between the Isle of Man and Liverpool. To start with it was mainly because she appeared to be a “clown car of the seas” after docking to our rear. We watched as cars left… and more cars left… and more… and more… and more… and it started to really amuse us just how many vehicles had been packed inside the boat. Every now and then it would seem like all the cars had left, only for another long stream of cars to start emerging… and then more… and more. According to Wikipedia, HSC Manannan can hold 200 vehicles, but it felt like double that were aboard as we waited to leave Liverpool, or that those leaving were secretly driving down some tunnel connecting to the vessel’s lower deck once out of sight and coming back out again for comedy value.

The further interesting point about this high-speed catamaran is her history, which includes an initial period of commercial service between Australia and New Zealand before conversion for military purposes and use by the US military. I guess that military conversion included the specification “to deliver an unfeasibly large number of vehicles ashore” and it was clearly successfully implemented.

Two churches for the price of one! Dead centre in the photo below is the very identifiable roof of the Liverpool Metropolitan Church. As I’d studied at Liverpool University in the 1990s this was a building that held a special place in my memory, situated right outside the doors to the students’ union. In the foreground is the Liverpool Parish Church. While this particular church is post-World War II, a church has stood on this location since the thirteenth century.

You can probably guess the approximate age of the building below and its original purpose without looking it up. This is Waterloo Dock, and it dates back to the 1830s, and the main building, the Waterloo Warehouse, was the world’s first automated grain warehouse, constructed when the dock chiefs gambled that the repeal of the Corn Laws would likely see the USA becoming the main source of additional grain to feed Britain, and that Liverpool’s existing ship route links to America made it the ideal place to import that foodstuff.

Either side of the Mersey by Waterloo Dock are towers like the one below. These are the ventilation towers for the Kingsway road tunnel that runs beneath the river. A nice bit of brutalism, but if I’m being honest, not a patch on those on the North Sea Canal.

Looking far older than its 1920 age thanks to the Neoclassical architecture, across the river we could see Wallasey Town Hall. In fact, the building is technically a little older than 1920, but its earlier usage was as a hospital for soldiers in World War I before being converted into its intended form. The foundation stone of the building was laid by King George V.

Opposite the town hall we passed Victoria Tower, a mid-nineteenth century clock tower constructed to allow sailors on ships departing for the Irish Sea to set the time correctly. A bell on the tower also gave warnings of fog.

The rest of the evening, you can probably guess. There were cocktails. There was food in the main dining room. We were more than satisfied with all of it.

We spent a reasonable amount of time in the Take Five jazz lounge, as we had on numerous other nights during this cruise. The Larry King Trio were great, and if you’re ever on a Princess Cruises ship and they’re performing then ask about their Love Boat theme rendition; it’s absolutely superb.

Just one more post remains in this Sky Princess cruise travelogue series, and that will cover the remaining time at sea aboard the ship and some thoughts about her.

I left my wife at the Crown Grill Bar on Deck 7 with her Kindle and the prospect of a frothy coffee on the way if the app was to be believed.

Heading forward takes you past Princess Live!, the location for a number of failed attempts to win trivia on this cruise for us, and then onto the Piazza.

The starboard side of the top level of the Piazza is where you can find Alfredo’s for complimentary pizza (edit: at time of writing; no longer true) most of the day. If the ship is travelling southwards and it’s not overcast then this is a lovely spot to head for dinner instead of one of the main dining rooms as you’ll get a lovely view of the sunset from here.

The Ocean Terrace bar is also on the top level of the Piazza and it serves sushi. I’m not sure we ever saw anyone eat there and it feels like a spot that could be better used in our opinion.

For ecological reasons they no longer have balloon drops on Princess ships but you can still find some on Sky Princess. The glass balloons are popular with people holding cameras.

Opposite Alfredo’s is Bistro Sur La Mer; a bistro by night, and a spot to order coffee during the day, but another area that’s perhaps not utilised optimally and that’s perhaps too large for its intended purpose. This top level of the piazza really needs a rethink. Like the pizza place, though, with this being on the port side of the ship then it might be a nice location for dinner on a clear evening if the ship is heading northwards, but unlike the pizza place, you’ll have to pay for the privilege here.

Continuing forward takes you past a number of shops. Perfumes, bags, watches, shirts, that sort of thing. Also a snazzy-looking Princess onesie.

Every landing on the stairwells has artwork to admire and, by the end of the cruise if you use the same stairs over and over again, use as a way of identifying which deck of the ship you’re on.

Deck 6 is where you’ll find the Casino. As they no longer have the machine where you drop coins in and hope they’ll knock more out or some notes or gifts this wasn’t a place we ever went to. This is one of the only places on the ship indoors where you’re permitted to smoke and it’s a terrible, terrible place because of it. Your health on a cruise ship is very important… but not as important as fleecing money from people with addictive personalities.

Good Spirits At Sea (cocktail bar) and the Take Five jazz lounge are also on Deck 6 off the piazza. There will be more on the former later in this post, and the latter has been covered in other accounts of this cruise as it’s where we ended up spending most evenings.

The lower part of the Piazza is on Deck 5 and it’s here that you’ll Bellini’s, the International Café, Vines, and Gelato.

Moving forward again on the lowest Piazza deck takes you through the Guest Services area (often a good spot for looking at queues of people if that’s your thing), off which you can also reach Sabatini’s and the Lotus Spa.

Because this short walk around Sky Princess’s interior took place during The Pandemic Era I had to wear a mask when not seated so took the opportunity to head out onto the Promenade on Deck 7 before returning to my wife in order to get some air. The promenade area on these Royal-class ships isn’t terribly good, it has to be said.

Arriving back at the Crown Grill Bar to tell my wife I was tired and done with photographing things I took the opportunity to duck into the Crown Grill itself for a few final pictures.

We decided that lunch for our final day on Sky Princess would be in Alfredo’s and, since that was right next to the Good Spirits bar we also decided that some cocktails might be in order. At the time of this cruise we were on the Princess Plus drinks package and were only paying the difference above the $12 threshold for these drinks. Since this time Princess have changed the terms of the packages and you would now pay the full price for drinks over $12 in this bar unless they were under the $18 limit and you have the new Princess Premier drinks package. I don’t think this is a sensible move and could lead to far fewer people trying drinks from the Good Spirits bar but time will tell.

I’ll finish this post with some photos from our aft balcony of the sea and the ship’s wake, some evidence that we didn’t solely drink alcohol on this cruise, our dinner on the final night, and the last couple of cocktails from Take Five before calling it a night.

Southampton greeted us the following morning, as it often does when we cruise.

Sky Princess Cruise Conclusions

That brings this travelogue series to an end for our first cruise aboard Sky Princess. What did we think?

Sky Princess was the third Royal-class ship we’d cruised on at this point, with the other two being Royal Princess in 2016 and Regal Princess earlier in the year in 2021. Sky Princess felt like an improvement over those ships generally. The Princess Live! change from a TV studio to a more normal entertainments lounge was a welcome one and we liked the addition of the jazz lounge even though we still miss a small, cheesy disco environment such as Skywalkers on the Grand-class vessels. The adults pool, however, was not as nice on Sky Princess as on Royal or Regal; it wasn’t bad, but there was no opportunity to look out to sea, it felt a little claustrophobic, it didn’t make any difference to how much wind was blowing in, and it was too shallow. Certainly, for this cruise, the technology was a big improvement over our experience on Regal (it didn’t exist for Royal at that time) and that can be attributed to it being built in during construction rather than retrofitted later. Food was very good, and particularly in the main dining room.

In terms of the destinations, for both Portland and Liverpool these were places we were familiar with so there was nothing outstanding to report there. However, getting to visit the Giant’s Causeway while also ticking off a trip to Northern Ireland for the first time was excellent, and about the best we could do during this period that was only just seeing cruising find its sea legs again after the numerous global lockdowns

What did we think? We thought it was a fabulous cruise, and the first of those in 2021 that really felt close to being a proper cruise again.

However, unlike many of the other cruise travelogues on this site – and there are many; if you’ve landed here from searching online and managing to wade through all the useless paid-for listings and optimised crap laden with keywords just so you can add to someone’s advertising income then, truly, congratulations are in order, and please feel free to hit the site’s menu for more travel write-ups than you can shake a stick at – this one is mostly going to skip over the cruise ship itself. The reasons for this number two.

The first of those reasons is that we are and always have been cruisers and travellers who consider the destination, the ports, and the experiences within, the primary goal. True, sometimes we just want to get away and we’re a little less bothered about where we go, but then it’s mostly a matter of time and economics. What I mean by all this is that the ship itself isn’t very important. Yes, the line can be, because there are some things we want (good service) and some things we don’t (kids), but the ship: nah, not so much.

The second of those reasons is more important. This cruise on Sky Princess took place about half a year after our first cruise on Sky Princess. You can read about that cruise here – Sky Princess cruise around the UK – and, indeed, if you want more of a look at the venues aboard Sky Princess, the room, the pros and cons compared to other ships, then that’s the place to start. In addition, a month after this cruise we boarded Sky Princess again and that will be the next cruise travelogue series to begin on this site. Basically, I’m not going to waste time covering the same bits of the ship over and over again when we’ll have been on her three times in under a year. Any changes? They’ll be mentioned. But this and the next series will be more diary-like covers of where we went and what we did there with far less about the vessel.

Right then (phrase used under licence, copyright Paul and Carole), let’s start with the first couple of days aboard, and another quick warning: we did mostly nothing of interest on these two days. The first day was boarding; the second day was relaxing at sea. From the next post onwards there will be trips to cover – and we had some good ones – but for this post it’s going to be pictures of Southampton, some food, and some drinks. It’s how cruises start from the UK for us, and for many people I imagine.

Pictures of the cruise port area of Southampton from our room kick this off. The Upside-Down Silver Pudding Bowl is a fond and familiar sight. Its purpose? Nobody knows. Nobody even questions. It just is. There are rumours, sure, but I won’t spread any of them here. Aliens.

But another very popular sight for us when we visit Southampton is the Great Big Pile Of Crap. Sometimes when you’re cruising out of Southampton you’ll leave from a dock too far away to experience one of Southampton’s best tourist attractions, but sometimes you’ll get lucky. Marvel at the undulations, almost mountain-like and natural, yet formed from rusting garbage. Is it a metaphor for the wastefulness of life and a message to cruisers to make the most of your time at sea? Is it a criticism of the ruination of the planet by corporate and political short-sightedness? Is it a sleeping giant under a blanket of metal? That’s for you to decide. It’s art. Glory in its artistic beauty.

I’ve skipped over the muster drill bits and the departure bits – again, you can read them in the other travelogue series; they weren’t any different – but will pause briefly to mention our room. We always book a certain type of room in a certain type of location, and the important thing for us is a big balcony. Well, we were out of luck because the room we had booked with the big balcony was taken away from us (we think to allocate those rooms for Covid passengers if any magically appeared) and replaced with another room a deck up. As you can see from the photo below, that’s a standard balcony on Sky Princess and, well, it’s frankly not good enough. That said, it also wasn’t terrible for a week’s cruise. What we did get as part of our unwanted move was an upgrade to a mini-suite. In terms of what that means on a Princess ship then it meant a second TV, a sofa, and a bath. We wouldn’t normally pay extra for those things because they aren’t that important to us, but the sofa and the bath instead of the small shower space are actually good things to have and we ended up missing them on the cruise after this.

Obviously, first thing to do when you get aboard a cruise ship is get some alcohol inside you, and we did.

Ahead of the sail away from Southampton we decided to hang around by the adults pool. It provided shelter from any wind, formed a nice sun trap, and had its own bar.

We had known, prior to boarding, that some other cruise blogging people would be aboard. One, we’d never met before, and amazingly managed to not spot her at all for the entire week nor find a way to get in touch thanks to the ship’s abysmal internet coverage. The other couple we had met before, we’d been out drinking with before, and we’d subsequently been assigned to a pile to be ignored for reasons unknown. Did we do something wrong? I don’t think so. Did we say something wrong? Well, we can be honest when people don’t want it. Are we the sort of people that some people just don’t like? Almost certainly. But I suspect it wasn’t any of that. Is it more likely that the two people realised we wouldn’t help them out with ostracising other people in the cruising community they didn’t like and/or furthering their goals to get recognition and freebies from cruise companies? Well, I couldn’t possibly comment. But I could wink and make a gun sign with a hand aimed at you and click the thumb down as if it’s just fired. Anyway, all that is to say that any thought that maybe we’d bump into them and ask them if we’d done something to offend their precious sensibilities got thrown overboard while still in port as they turned up at the pool, sat in front of us, absolutely saw us, and blanked us. One of them would go out of his way to look away as we walked down a corridor past them on another day on the cruise too. To say we were amused that so-called adults behaved this way would be a gross understatement. On the plus side, it had did confirm a feeling we’d had that forasmuch as we’d got on okay with them before this trip there had been that certain something murmuring at the back of the subconscious, muttering things like “I don’t completely trust these two.” Oh, perhaps they heard it!

One thing we did do for this first night on Sky Princess was book ourselves into Sabatini’s for Italian speciality dining. This is our kind of food, and it didn’t disappoint. If you’d like to read about more of our experiences of Sabatini’s on Princess Cruises ships (including how it’s changed over the years and how it compares with other lines) then the search system on this site is absolutely just about adequate for that purpose. Here: I’ll provide a link for you as I’m in a good mood right now: Sabatini’s.

Day two on Sky Princess was spent at sea and, yeah, not a lot to report here. Below you’ll see the programme for the day and a photo from the trivia we attended. Popular, as you can tell.

Sea days are the most likely candidates for formal nights on Princess ships and that was the case here. We don’t mind them, but we don’t really enjoy them that much either. A lot of effort to get dressed in uncomfortable clothing for little reward. We went super-casual instead, filling up at Alfredo’s for a late lunch then hitting the buffet and spending the evening in our room watching movies from our mini-suite’s sofa.

So, I wasn’t lying when I said we did very little on Sky Princess to start with. Honest Mark; that’s what they call me. In the next post in this travelogue series, though, we’ll be stopping in at Kristiansand, Norway, and there may be things of actual interest to an interested traveller like yourself. It would be a first time in Kristiansand for us, and a short excursion followed by time to explore the city on foot afterwards would be the order of the day. We’ll be starting with a quick look at the fishing village of Høllen.