If you’ve read the other post then you might notice that we had better weather and a higher tide for this walk that was primarily to see Scarlet Lady in the port.

We liked the sound of the water lapping at the end of the Pilgrim’s Trail. While all this water is what we typically describe as Portsmouth Harbour, it’s formed from a series of lakes, technically, and this bit of water above Portsmouth Port, running to the shooting range at Tipner to the north and bounded by Whale Island to the west is Brick Kiln Lake.

On our previous walk we’d wandered as far up as the Tipner Firing Range then headed under the motorway and through Stamshaw. We hadn’t realised that you could walk onto the grassy area to the south side of the firing range but a chance spotting of some people on the shoreline encouraged us to see if there was a path and this turned out to be the case. There were no flags flying so no shooting taking place, and if there had then we’d probably not have explored this new part of Portsmouth for us, but there didn’t seem to be any means to prevent public access in any event. It was very pleasant, peaceful, well away from the M275 traffic, and with some long views to the chalk cliffs of Portsdown Hill and across the water to Portchester. We even saw a Marbled White butterfly, something we don’t see in the city.

Having seen the parks at Stamshaw earlier in the week and not particularly liking them we opted to retrace our steps down the Pilgrim’s Path towards the port and Scarlet Lady again, then cut under the motorway in a location closer to home. This offered up opportunities to take some video footage on my camera for the first time, photograph some subway artwork, and grab a snap of a National Cycle Network marker. We’ve only encountered these a few times around the country but like their resemblance to whale tails.

It is no secret that when Scarlet Lady was first revealed to the world – well, to the invited hordes of the media and bloggers and influencers and beautiful people – we were far from enamoured with what we saw. That’s an understatement. The ship looked too different, had some bizarre design choices, looked like it was marketed towards a very small demographic, was too expensive, and so on. We were not looking to book a cruise on her then or, probably, ever. But then the world fell apart for a while – it’s still not back together, of course – and plans were put on hold and changed, and schedules were shifted, and all of a sudden Virgin announced they would start Scarlet Lady’s delayed maiden season with a few port-free sailings from the UK – further along the vaccinating people roadmap than the viral cesspit that is Miami – and not just anywhere in the UK, but Portsmouth. Or, as we like to call it, home. In fact, we can walk to the port from our front door in about ten minutes.

And that’s the story behind us booking three nights on a Scarlet Lady cruise. Convenience, of course, but general nosiness too to see what she’d be like with a necessarily older demographic than originally intended (based on vaccination roll-out schedules), and then there was the significant incentive of “sailor loot” that would come with different grades of rooms. We were always going to book a balcony because anything less simply isn’t us, but once we looked at some of the perks with what Virgin call their “Rock Star” (or “Rockstar“; I’ve seen it written both ways) cabins, along with the generous on board credit, we realised we could pay a little more and get a lot more. We ultimately selected the lowest grade of these cabins, what’s known as a Seriously Suite cabin, and the port side in order to enjoy the harbour views as we left Portsmouth. This would end up being an excellent decision.

Pre-Cruise Covid Testing

We were on the third of the regular maiden season cruises and there had been issues with the first of those where pre-cruise Covid-testing was concerned, but I’m happy to say that we experienced no problems at all. Arriving by car at the Park & Ride about an hour before embarkation time as instructed, we were directed immediately to the test centre on the other side of the M275 motorway, joined a short queue, got tested, got the results, were handed our wearable tech, and were sent on our way with very little delay. Back home to drop the car off, pick up the cases, then walk through to the port, check in, hop on a bus, and get onto the ship. Start-to-finish was about an hour and a quarter which meant we were in our room about fifteen minutes after our scheduled boarding time.

And what a room!

Scarlet Lady Seriously Suite 12219A

Other than requiring a balcony, we generally consider a room to be a room and aren’t typically fussed too much about what’s in there and what it looks like so long as it’s functional and not too cramped. For us, it’s usually more about placement of the room on the ship than anything else. However, forget all that, because we instantly fell in love with this Seriously Suite grade of room on Scarlet Lady. We had a wow! moment when we first experienced a balcony room on a cruise back in 2013, and we had another wow! moment when we stepped inside room 12219A.

Stylish! Well, you can tell that from the pictures immediately. Spacious! No scuttling sideways down the side or ends of the bed here! Plenty of storage space, and in proper wardrobes too, unlike lower grade rooms. And the eye-catching extras like the bar and the turntable, both of which we’d make use of.

But, utterly bizarrely, the bathroom was the star of the room. Huge, spacious, bright, and marble-covered, but that walk-in shower was jaw-droppingly fantastic. You could lay down and shower. We didn’t, but we could have. I might on the next cruise, though, now that I’ve mentioned it, because partly on the strength of this room on Scarlet Lady we’ve already booked a similar, follow-up cruise on her sister ship, Valiant Lady, for 2022, and in the same suite because we’ve checked the plans for higher grade rooms and they don’t look as good to us. There’s a room type for everyone on a cruise ship and it turns out that the Seriously Suite is our type of room.

I’ll cover things like the entertainment in the room and our playing around with the drinks and record player in the follow-up post in this travelogue series, but for now here’s a short video from inside our Seriously Suite cabin showing off the space in the bedroom and bathroom, as well as the outside space of the balcony along with its hammock that we initially considered to be a gimmick, but really rather enjoyed as well.

There was a video here, but now there isn’t.

The Seriously Suite cabin on Scarlet Lady was very nearly perfect. If I could make a couple of minor changes then they would simply be maybe a way to block off the peep window between the bathroom and bedroom and/or some form of low-level lighting in the bathroom at night. The window, while fantastic-looking and unique, means an uninterrupted night’s sleep isn’t guaranteed if your partner needs to use the toilet during it and pitch blackness isn’t possible.

Top Deck And Richard’s Rooftop

You’ve got to go exploring as soon as possible – after we’d watched the muster drill video in our room and confirmed attendance for that on the tablet – and so we headed straight up to the top to enjoy a little bit of Portsmouth in the sunshine and see for ourselves what that infamous swimming pool looked like.

We’d seen pictures of the swimming pool when Scarlet Lady had been thrown open to the PR masses, we’d heard people’s complaints about it, and we’d taken a look at the deck plans too, so we roughly knew what to expect. In truth, the pool looked okay, size-wise, for people to gather about socially thanks to the shallow lozenge of water around its main part, and it was actually a little bigger than we’d assumed. But, for us, it was not a pool we could use in any practical sense. And it was surprising, in a way, that a cruise line like Virgin Voyages would make such a big deal about health and fitness, but then provide no place where people who like to actually swim could do so. I’d love to see a lap pool – preferably one with pretty much no loungers around so that it was just for swimmers – make an appearance on later ship designs if possible, because being able to get in a pool and swim while at sea is one of those things we absolutely love.

One of those perks of being a Rock Star Sailor on a Virgin Voyages cruise ship is having access to an area called Richard’s Rooftop. A card in our room allowed us to swipe to enter a closed-off section at the front of the top deck. This brought us into a space filled with various forms of seating, hot tubs, and even trampolines. One thing to mention about Scarlet Lady is that when it comes to seating, there is no end of choice. Even though we sailed well under capacity, I’m sure you’d always be able to find a spot to sit in around the open decks even with a fully-laden ship.

We had good intentions. We had planned to scoot around the top of the ship, getting a feel for things, taking a few photos; then scoot around the main decks, get an idea where things were, take a few photos. Sadly for us, the barman at the bar in Richard’s Rooftop asked us if we wanted a drink and we ended up saying yes because it was a drink and we were us and we were on holiday. So that’s why this first day aboard Scarlet Lady and the explore before sail-away more-or-less came to a screeching halt.

Lunch And Drinks Aboard Scarlet Lady

After our cocktails on the top deck had been supplemented with a complimentary glass of fizz we reached the time when we needed to check-in in person at our muster station. With that necessary task out of the way we thought we might take more of a look around the inside of Scarlet Lady but that plan lasted just as long as it took us to reach the Dock House where another friendly barman guilted us into asking him for a drink.

You pay for drinks on Scarlet Lady, but all the food is free (with one exception, covered in the next post), and thus it was that we did something terribly sensible and had some small bites for lunch as well.

As an aside here, the food and drinks on Scarlet Lady were of extremely high quality, with a fabulous range too. The only area where things could really be improved is in perhaps catering to more of the conventional drinking tastes; some classic cocktails, staples of many cruises, simply couldn’t be made thanks to a lack of the right mixers or ingredients. This wasn’t a problem for us as we love to make our way through all the fancy and new things on a menu, but we knew some people aboard missed certain drinks they preferred and would typically expect to find on a ship. A Virgin Voyages ship is anything but typical, of course, but it would be nice to provide that option, especially with cruises of longer durations.

We had time to check out the Draught Haus Tap Room before the ship left the port, and by “check out” I mean “grab a couple of drinks”, but you knew that already. Beer on tap on ships is a wonderful thing and long may it continue.

Scarlet Lady Departing Portsmouth Harbour

The remainder of this first post from our Scarlet Lady cruise travelogue series covers the sail out from our home city as seen from our Seriously Suite cabin balcony.

We’ve cruised into and out of many ports during our years of cruising, but many of them, while great because of what they signify – you’re on a motherflipping cruise! -, are much of a muchness. There are exceptions, especially for those who like commanding landscapes (Ushuaia and Kotor are incredible), but if you’re a fan of history or the navy or naval history then overlook my natural bias while I say that you’ll find it hard to beat Portsmouth.

The offshore patrol vessel in the photo below (P233) and her sister ship a few photos after that (P234), both in their distinctive dazzle camouflage, are the HMS Tamar and HMS Spey, respectively. They are the first vessels to be decorated in that style since World War II. It was nice to have that connection with dazzle camouflage on Scarlet Lady, too, as she sports a restaurant called Razzle Dazzle, named for the naval style.

The ship between the two patrol vessels (D35) with the equally distinctive motif of a red dragon on her bow is the appropriately named HMS Dragon. She is a Type 45 destroyer and is the only ship in the Royal Navy with that design on her.

HMS Prince of Wales (R09) is one of two Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers in operational service of the Royal Navy. It’s always fun to hear people exclaim how large an aircraft carrier is, but then you sail past on a cruise ship and completely dwarf it.

In the photo below you’ve got two of Portsmouth’s most famous historical ships. Sadly lacking her full masts is HMS Victory on the right while to the left, hidden inside the shell of a downed flying saucer (maybe), lies the remains of The Mary Rose. Both are fabulous to see, and if you’re ever visiting Portsmouth then try to book tickets for the dockyard to have a look around the pair of them.

Scarlet Lady next cruised past two very prominent sights that you can’t fail to miss if you’re in the Gunwharf area of Portsmouth. The Spinnaker Tower, naturally, can be seen from miles around. Not quite as sky-reaching but equally gorgeous along the waterfront is the museum ship, HMS Warrior, the first armour-plated, iron-hulled, steam-powered frigate.

In the photographs below you can also see a building with a monochrome Union Flag on it. That is the Ineos Team UK building, from which Britain’s attempt to win the Americas Cup under Ben Ainslie has been based.

That brought us out of Portsmouth Harbour entrance and with it some fantastic views of the low, warm, evening sunshine lighting up parts of the old defences along the seafront. If you’d like to read a little more about the fortifications here – the Round Tower, the Square Tower, the Hot Walls – then a little bit of history is covered here: Old Portsmouth Shoreline Photowalk.

Another wonderful sight as Scarlet Lady completed her departure from Portsmouth was seeing the hovercraft to the Isle of Wight take off from Southsea as soon as we’d passed. There aren’t many great reasons to visit the Isle of Wight but if you’ve no need to take your car across on the ferry then a hovercraft ride can’t be beat for loud, fast fun.

That completes this first post of our Scarlet Lady travelogue series, covering our Seriously Suite cabin, a few drinks and photos here and there, and a gorgeous sail out from Portsmouth Port.

In the next post I’ll go through the dining during our weekender cruise as well as the bits of entertainment we caught. We could barely do one tenth of the things we wanted to do with this cruise being so short and everything about the Virgin Voyages experience being excitingly fresh and there being an abundance of choices to make. Hopefully, we’ll be able to address some of that on our next trip with the cruise line in March.

In this post I’ll cover what we got up to on our first night aboard Scarlet Lady. If you’ve read travelogues elsewhere on this site or if you’ve met us in real life or if you’ve parsed the title of this post using your expert comprehension of English then you’ve probably guessed that the words “food” and “drink” will feature heavily. You would be absolutely right.

Scarlet Lady Test Kitchen

Virgin do things a little differently from most cruise lines, and certainly a lot different to all the cruise lines with whom we’ve sailed over the years. The idea of one or more main dining rooms has been made to walk the plank and sent to a watery grave, replaced instead by smaller, more specialised restaurants. This transforms the cruise experience on Scarlet Lady into one of regular speciality dining nights, but with no additional cost for the food. Those restaurants on the cruise ship can be broadly grouped into two types: themed and experiential. Both types feature a limited menu range, although the themed restaurants will have more choices. This simplifies what the kitchens aboard need to stock and what the chefs aboard need to know how to cook, but it also means they can do this cooking very well.

Prior to the cruise we were able to make bookings for restaurants, but only the experiential ones. In order to ensure that everyone gets a chance to try the food they like you’re only allowed to book once per location initially with the possibility of more spaces becoming available once you’re aboard and a wait-list of some description comes into play. Very sensible, and we liked this approach a lot. The only experiential restaurant we wanted to try for this taster cruise was The Test Kitchen and we booked it for the first night on Scarlet Lady.

Of course, we didn’t go straight to dinner. Animals go straight to dinner without a drink first, and we’re not animals. We made our way to On The Rocks for a couple of cocktails.

How to describe the Test Kitchen as a dining experience? Well, you know those intimate, candle-lit locations, ideal for dining for two, the quiet murmur of low conversations across the table from one another? This was like not that. If you’ve got working eyeballs then you can see from the photos below anyway, but think of it as part modern laboratory, part we’ve-moved-all-the-seats-into-the-restaurant-kitchen. Bright. Very bright. Very clean. Rather noisy. Different. Different is what Virgin do a lot of.

Food options here were limited to either vegetarian or non-vegetarian, with the latter adding a further one-course option switch between beef and venison. It was always going to be venison for the pair of us. In addition, there was an option to pay for either a wine or cocktail pairing alongside each course. Not being fans of white wine and knowing how much these pairing menus love to slip those in, and since we’d been on the cocktails already, we opted for the latter. This was $35 per person and included six small cocktails.

First up was a mushroom-shaped paté. I’m not a fan of mushroom (that’s an understatement) and it’s more a texture thing than taste (although quite why anyone likes the taste of soggy cardboard left in the ground is another thing altogether), but when it comes to fancy restaurants I will tend to give the chefs the benefit of the doubt that they know what they’re doing. This was lovely. The same can’t be said for the accompanying cocktail which bore all the flavour of fizzy water, but I’m pleased to say that the cocktails did improve from this low point as the courses proceeded. As to whether the cocktails truly paired with the courses: I’m not so sure. Then again: who cares? They’re cocktails!

Arriving under a smoky cloche was the next course, called “Egg”. I think you can see why.

Seafood is something I’m not a fan of. Fish, I like, but once you hit molluscs and arthropods in the animal kingdom then it’s pretty much a big no from me. However, again, when in a speciality dining establishment, do what the speciality dining establishmentarians do. I’m assured by my wife that the scallops were lovely. I ate them.

The main course of venison then arrived with a layered potato side dish. Now we’re talking! This was all absolutely top stuff. The quality of the meat, the combination of flavours with the sauces, and the presentation were far beyond pretty much any meal we’ve had at sea, and ran some snazzy land-based restaurants close too. And, of course, potato: I’m half-Irish and you can’t go wrong with serving me potato. It triggers my happiness hormones.

From the utterly delectable to the borderline gag-inducing with the next course of blue cheese. I don’t like cheese. Again, it’s a texture thing usually, because I can handle melted cheese but nothing hard. Food with the consistency of erasers on the ends of pencils is a red flag from nature. The taste is mostly irrelevant because I’ll only ever have it with other things that actually have a flavour I like. The same cannot be said for blue cheese, though. I can tell from the look and smell of blue cheese that no, no thank you, no thank you at all is the only answer when it comes to that. The blue cheese course at the Test Kitchen was shaped like a caterpillar for some reason. The taste was indescribably bad to me. The texture was right at the limit of my coping powers. I did, however, soldier through this revolting lump of putrescence. To give balance to this review of this particular course of the meal, both my wife – a huge fan of all types of cheese – and the couple next to us – apparently also cheese people – all agreed it was not pleasant either. That’s not to say that you wouldn’t like it. You might be a complete weirdo. You’re reading this and that gets you weirdo points already.

Anyway, we all ate it. Just.

So, finally, the dessert course, and how could it be anything other than chocolate? Everyone, thankfully, loves chocolate, and this was an excellent finish to the meal, with a nice mix of textures again.

Is the Test Kitchen worth a booking on Scarlet Lady? Of course! It’s free, and there are other places to eat around the ship if you don’t like what you’re served. You’re on a cruise. You can eat pretty much non-stop, so why wouldn’t you try this? We loved the aspect of thinking “Yeah, we’re not in the main dining room of a cruise ship” here, it was great to watch the chefs preparing the courses, and the quality of the food – even if not everything suits every individual’s palate – couldn’t be faulted. You don’t know until you try, though.

To round off and make our evening at the Test Kitchen on Scarlet Lady even better was the company we had on our section of bench in the restaurant. We were lucky enough to be seated beside Lieutenant Commander Natalie and her mum, Kim. The Lieutenant Commander should have been on this weekender cruise with her husband but he’d been called up to head out to Afghanistan at short notice, much to the absolute joy of Kim who then got to take his place on this trip. The other thing that Kim enjoyed was that her daughter outranked her son-in-law. We all talked for ages, comparing how we felt about the dishes in the restaurant, talking about other cruises – well, that’s an unwritten law of all dinner conversations on cruise ships, after all -, and numerous other topics too, and talked so long that by the time we decided we ought to give the staff a chance to clean our area of the restaurant there were probably only half a dozen other people still in there. A good night at the Test Kitchen would be the conclusion here.

Late Night On Scarlet Lady

The good thing about the meal we’d just had, with its many but perfectly-sized courses, followed by the long conversation with people we’d just met, was that when we left we weren’t bloated. We’re used to speciality dining on cruises ensuring you feel like you’ve had value for money, and because cruising is a very American-oriented thing “value for money” is typically synonymous with “quantity, quantity, quantity”. We’d much prefer fine dining that feels like it’s special and that’s what we experienced on Scarlet Lady throughout this cruise.

So, we weren’t full, and we were on a fancy ship, and it was late, and we’d been drinking cocktails since the early afternoon. What are a couple to do? Head to a bar. A quick stroll brought us to the Sip Lounge and we picked a couple of drinks from the menu there while watching the odd person or two wander through. In truth, it was a bit quieter than we’d expected, even allowing for the reduced capacity cruise numbers. We’d anticipated more people up and about into the early hours.

Seeking something more engaging, we headed off towards the aft of the ship and stumbled into the Arcade. This was heaven. For people of a certain age – and we’re people of a certain age – this was noisy neon nostalgia. We were here ages, playing most of the games, playing them really badly, listening to loads of 1980s pop music, and having a fabulous time.

Finally sated of video arcade entertainment for this first night, we continued aft, through the Dock House (where we grabbed ourselves another cocktail each; maritime law, and all that) and then outside to drink under the stars. And not just under the stars, as we spotted a couple of Perseid meteors burning up in the night sky too.

By the time we headed back inside we found the bars had closed, but we knew that Scarlet Lady’s nightclub, The Manor, was still an option. We negotiated the mirrored walk to the interior and survived about ten minutes before the type of music being played persuaded us that there was a better option if we wanted a nightcap. Thus it was – after missing the exit and ending up on the upper level of the club initially; seriously, those mirrors and late-night drinking are not a great combination – that we made our way back to our room and its free bar, there to enjoy a bourbon on the balcony before bed.

In the third part of this Scarlet Lady cruise travelogue series I’ll cover the next day at sea on this Virgin Voyages ship. It would be a day recovering from a hangover (for some reason), one that includes dining at the Italian restaurant on the ship, and concluding with the line’s signature Scarlet Night.

For some inexplicable reason, despite not heading to bed until the third hour after midnight, we were up bright and early. To clarify: the weather was bright. We were not bright. We were somewhat zombie-like. We decided not to go for brains, but had some breakfast anyway then thought a bit of a walk on the open decks and some sea air might do us the world of good. Or kill us.

The early hour lent Scarlet Lady a little bit of a ghost ship feel. We are not nature’s early risers on cruises – there’s usually something so soothing about the gentle rocking motion and the odd creak of metal as ships cut through the waves gently overnight that we’re quickly pushed into pleasing comas – so witnessing a ship with so few people around until bright sunshine was unusual. The only time that typically happens for us is when we cruise in Asia and our body clock is so out of sync with the local time zone. Cruising off the coast of England? Unheard of! Maybe we were still buzzing with excitement at how this ship was making us feel. Maybe it’s just another symptom of old age.

You’ll see from some of the photos here the wide variety of and large number of seating options on Scarlet Lady. While everything seemed a little lower than we’d really have liked – we’ve got knees to think about – we can overlook that a little as we realise we’re not precisely Virgin’s target demographic. The range and number of seats, though, we loved. Even though it was sailing at nowhere near capacity on this cruise we generally thought that you’d not struggle to find somewhere to sit or lie down even if it was.

But, while we may not be as young (or wealthy, or healthy-minded) as Virgin seem to aim at, we do still have a streak of the young-at-heart about us, and so, even with raging hangovers, we tried out the swing chairs and the see-saws and played table football. And really enjoyed it all. We’re pretty introverted normally so that lack of anyone else around probably helped here too.

One thing I didn’t enjoy as much – and given how much we like art in general, and love modern and abstract works – was the artwork that Virgin selected to showcase on their ship. You could see examples of this outside the elevators where a wall was decorated in the same style with a single piece accented to indicate the floor, but there were some pieces on the top deck too, one of which is shown below. I like minimalism, I like modernism, I like the bubbly feel of late 1960s and early 1970s art, and so there’s no reason I shouldn’t like this. But I don’t. It’s pretty dull, really. For a generally flashy, highly stylish ship as Scarlet Lady, this felt basic and cartoonish. But it’s art. And we all react differently to it. I don’t doubt that there will be some people who “absolutely love” it, and perhaps genuinely so and not just because they want to come across as super-positive for reviews. Oh me! I’m such a cynic.

We weren’t the only people awake, of course. You’ll always find those achingly desperate to stake out their spots around the swimming pool (or XL-size bathtub on Scarlet Lady) even when they’ve got absolutely no intention of using it (the selfish bastards) and those utterly bizarre folk who have to start a day with a jog on a treadmill.

The mid-morning and early-afternoon parts of this sea day aboard Scarlet Lady were a blur of quiet moaning – it helps the body process alcohol – and reading and relaxing on our balcony, and perhaps an hour’s snooze, but we reached a point where we thought we might risk a hair-of-the-dog so made our way to the Draught Haus for a beer each. This didn’t go down as well as we’d hoped, and resulted in us nursing our pints for the best part of ninety minutes.

However, what was nice was that we got to experience some of Virgin’s pop-up entertainment that we’d heard about. This was in the form of some close-up magic from Andy, one of the many entertainment staff aboard whose remit is broader and more individualistic than you’d typically find on another cruise line where everything is managed by one cruise director. The tricks were good, we couldn’t see the sleight-of-hand nor work out how all the backs of the cards changed pattern, and Andy was nice enough to create a fancy fan-shape and pose for a photo too. You can also see from this photo just how casual the general look of the crew on Scarlet Lady was, although it’s worth noting that there was never any problem with identifying one from a fellow passenger.

Another lovely element to the close-up magic was that it reminded us of our very first cruise – and we chatted to Andy about this after his tricks – when we’d also seen some close-up magic. That had been on Diamond Princess, off China, in the atrium, with my wife and I sat with the magician under the watchful gaze of tens of dozens of people on the staircases and levels looking down. We liked this quiet, more personal approach more (that introverted thing again), and we loved that we got to reminisce about that first cruise. There were a number of times on this weekender cruise that we felt like that. Virgin did a spectacular job of making everything feel fresh and exciting.

We’d struggled with our beers so we hit our balcony again for the rest of the afternoon, and we decided to drink water. Water. Us. Anyway, sunshine, drinks, books, the sight and sounds of the sea, and the best company: it’s what cruising is all about.

Scarlet Lady’s Extra Virgin Restaurant

Scarlet Lady may have some fancier dining establishments but it also caters to some more general and widespread tastes, and Extra Virgin is her take on an Italian restaurant, the place we’d booked for this evening’s meal. We’re big fans of Italian food. It’s often our first choice if we’re holidaying in the UK, and we’ll nearly always book into the Italian speciality restaurant, Sabatini’s, if we’re on a Princess ship, so we felt it made sense to see how it compared.

The first thing to mention, of course, is that there’s no cost for the food; like almost all the food on a Virgin cruise ship, it’s included in the price. The restaurant had its own character and was stylish, modern, but not typically Italian in appearance. No problem there, though. The quality of the food in Extra Virgin couldn’t be faulted, and for our tastes there were probably more options in food choices that we could pick from when compared to Princess, but I think we both felt that we still preferred Princess – not by much – over Virgin here. One element we really did enjoy, though, was the build-your-own approach to the affogato; we had a lot of fun interacting with our server to choose the precise types of ice cream and accompaniments to that. We would be extremely happy to eat at Extra Virgin again.

My wife went for the Braised Mini Meatballs followed by the Oxtail Agnolotti, while I picked Smoked Chicken Liver Mousse with Potato Gnocchi as the main course.

At the conclusion of our lovely meal in Extra Virgin we headed to the hub of the ship and discovered, for the first time, that the vinyl store was open. This gave me a chance to peruse and pick up something. Upon returning it to our cabin we discovered that we’d also been left with a gift of a couple of Virgin bags. We’re used to getting these on Princess cruises so it was nice to see them appear on Scarlet Lady too, and they were very nice, very good quality too.

As the sun was dipping towards the horizon and we had a perfect view of it from our balcony we thought we’d enjoy some of it with another drink from the bar. How terribly civilised.

A Splash Of Scarlet Night

This was the night that Virgin called their Splash of Scarlet night. There had been some encouragement for people to add some red to their clothing for the evening and I’d donned a rather appallingly bright Hawaiian-style shirt for our meal – and got an “Oh, that looks lovely” from one of the crew that might even have been genuine and not patronising in the slightest – but decided to ditch it in favour of something that felt more comfortable after we’d returned to the room, mostly because there were hardly any other people doing so. However, just because not that many passengers were in red, the same couldn’t be said for the ship which attracted some mood lighting for the occasion in various locations. We soon found ourselves in the Dock House where we had the chance to sample a few more of our favourite cocktail there, the Fig Sour, and do a bit of people-watching.

And for the second time that day we were treated to some more pop-up entertainment. This time it came in the form of a couple performing folk songs and shanties, later to be followed along by a high-energy dance quartet who reminded us that there would be a pool party on the top deck later in the evening. We had already known about the pool party but those sorts of things don’t appeal to us as much as they do to others so we contented ourselves with something a little more relaxed, even if it meant we’d miss the giant octopus and light show. Maybe we’ll see what it’s like on our next Virgin cruise.

We ended up spending the rest of the evening back in the Draught Haus once more after wandering through to see if there was anything else to see entertainments-wise, spotting some cruise-blogging friends, and joining them for some drinks. We also spotted some existing (and made some new) cruise-blogging enemies, but I don’t want to spoil the overall positive feel of this post so perhaps that’s a tale for another time. You can tell we were still feeling the after-effects of the evening before because we decided to try the bar’s “Shot Tails” in order to keep the volume of alcohol down to a sensible limit.

The evening finished up back in our room (always the best place to find yourself) and one more treat from this Splash of Scarlet night on Scarlet Lady as we discovered that the balconies were also all lit up in red. Coupled with the thick fog we were cruising through this made for a uniquely atmospheric experience. We had a quick drink on the balcony with the door open, listening to the Jurassic 5 album I’d bought earlier. A very nice way to end off a very relaxing day.

In the next post in this Scarlet Lady weekender cruise travelogue series I’ll cover the final full day aboard Scarlet Lady. Another dining venue to try out, some afternoon tea as well, and a lot of video footage taken for a change.

• That Day We Had Afternoon Tea On Scarlet Lady
• Scarlet Lady Cruise: Memories Of When I Didn’t Take Many Photos
• Scarlet Lady Day 3: The Third Day

… and the responses were not positive.

The lack of potentially compelling titles is an artefact of us not really doing anything that different on this day at sea. You might think that with such a long lay-off from cruising due to the pandemic we’d be keen to do everything going. You might think that this would especially be the case on such a different ship as Scarlet Lady. Perhaps, with hindsight, we should have been a bit more outgoing, adventurous, seeing what was going on, but that’s not really who we are or why we generally cruise. We’ve always been about the destination and exploring ports, with the luxury and convenience and sense of motion that comes from being on a cruise ship very much secondary benefits; albeit great ones that make us favour holidays at sea over those on land. These “seacation” cruises coming out of lockdown took away that main driver for us and we slipped easily into the “inbetween ports” mode of travel once more, content to mostly read, drink, eat, and just relax. Just relaxing is great for your physical and mental wellbeing, but facilitating the generation of snappy post titles about cruises on luxury ships… not so much.

We intend to try out a few more things when we cruise again with Virgin in 2022 on Valiant Lady, now that we have more of an idea about what the cruise line does and what it offers. Perhaps there will be more interesting posts after we’ve done that. I wouldn’t count on it because I know me and I know what bores my readers to tears.

So, if we didn’t do much, then what exactly did we do on this final day of the cruise, en route to Portsmouth? Well, the one thing that we did do that wasn’t eating and drinking was have a proper walk around Scarlet Lady, taking lots of video as we went.

Now, I’m not a video person normally. I know that when it comes to documenting cruises people broadly fall into the bloggers or vloggers camp. The personable, attractive, or egotistic people prefer to use video. I like the first of those sorts of people – well, the clue’s in their adjective – and seethe jealously at the second group while avoiding like the plague the third bunch. I also don’t fit into any category there which is why the written form and photography are the realms in which I inhabit. But when it comes to finding out about things – cruise ships, for instance – people also fall broadly into those who prefer to read and those who would rather watch moving images. To simply ignore one group of people trying to get information goes against what I’ve always asserted the internet should be about and so I have begun to consider embracing – after a series of microscopic baby-steps – video a little more. Maybe my voice will appear on a video in 2029. Perhaps a split-second reflection of my ears around 2036. Anything could happen.

I took a lot of video. The raw clips you don’t want to see, trust me. However, I have edited together several minutes of venues inside and outside taken across this Scarlet Lady cruise. If you’re the sort of person who prefers a seven-minute video to a four-minute read then you’re in for a treat (temporarily removed).

All the video for this cruise was taken on my phone. I had to stop to move files off my phone and onto a portable SSD a couple of times because I was running out of space. I’ll probably use more of a hybrid solution of phone and camera video in the future because my camera deals with low light so well and allows me to really play around with depth of field while my phone has better opportunities for stabilisation through using the gimbal. Gosh! Who cares about any of that!?

Video bits done in the morning, we decided it was time for just some general relaxing, and since it was around lunch time we thought we’d get a bite to eat. An aborted attempt to hit the pizza place – no available seats inside and it wasn’t really the weather for eating on the promenade deck – was followed by us walking by the Lick Me Till… Ice Cream spot and deciding to try some out. We’re really annoyed that we didn’t try some before this last day because they were fabulous. Different flavoured cones and different scoops of flavoured ice cream added up to a ridiculous number of combinations possible and we only managed two of them between us.

Ice cream is not a lunch, though, and we’d intended to find something a little more substantial when we wandered past the Sip Lounge and spotted some stands containing what looked suspiciously like an afternoon tea on them. We’d not seen them mentioned in any pre-cruise blurb, we’d not heard anyone talk about them, we’d not seen it promoted anywhere, but we sat down and asked a passing member of staff. Yes, apparently, there it was, tucked away on one page of the lounge’s menu: afternoon tea. A choice of teas and an option for some fizz as well, and of course we went for the fizz as well. It should be noted here that this was one of the few exceptions to the rule on Scarlet Lady in that this food cost extra. It should also be noted here that this was absolutely wonderful. I mean, you can tell that just from looking. Proper green tea in a proper ball tea infuser. Proper cream. Proper way too much food. Perhaps we should have ordered one afternoon tea between us, but that feels like cheating.

Criticisms of the afternoon tea on Scarlet Lady were simply that it wasn’t advertised well enough and that I could have done without the blue cheese thing. Did Virgin buy a job lot of blue cheese before sailing? It seemed to appear quite frequently in dishes.

Stuffed, we headed back to our room – you know our room; that Seriously Suite cabin – to rest with some sea views, something from the complimentary bar, and put some music on the turntable.

The final evening on Scarlet Lady started with dinner that we’d booked at the Wake restaurant. The dining venue did not disappoint in terms of its view, and the menu offered was very good indeed. There were plenty of options and you could easily come back night after night and choose something different. I decided to try the bone marrow as starters which wasn’t to my liking but hey-ho! You don’t know until you try, do you? The main course and dessert were perfectly good, though. My wife’s filet mignon main course was very good, it’s true, but it wasn’t quite to the same standard as on a Princess ship in the Crown Grill. That’s fine; everyone’s got their specialities and you can’t be the best at everything. Where Virgin excelled in this dinner was the bread. Oh my! That was incredibly good. They should just have a bread place on board that makes those. My half-Irish blood bubbled with joy eating that bread. I’m quite fond of the bread is the gist of what I’m saying here.

Just the last night to get through then, and, after a quick wander onto the aft deck to get some fresh air following dinner, we made our way back inside for some drinks to conclude this cruise. It was more crowded in most places than it had been on the previous nights but understandably so given the drop in temperature and increased wind velocity along with no pool parties to persuade the masses up on top. However, finding seats was never an issue on Scarlet Lady as she always seemed to have plenty around, and a quick message from friends saw us meeting up with them at the Roundabout area. Live music nearby, plenty of chatting, and sampling of some different alcoholic beverages once more rounded off the day nicely.

That concludes this travelogue series on our UK Scarlet Lady cruise, short simply because the cruise was short, and not in any way comprehensive because there was far more to do than we reasonably could have done and because we didn’t know what to expect so didn’t approach this trip with any firm plans. Things will be different on the next cruise. There are shows we’d like to see, cocktail evenings we’d like to attend, activities we might be interested in now that we know a little more about them.

We’d been unsure about Virgin Voyages and Scarlet Lady from the first PR releases, and we’d been convinced that what they were planning to do was unsustainable given the sort of people who cruise and the itineraries and durations proposed. She’d not been a ship we thought we’d be interested in, but pandemics and home-porting down the road from us have a way of changing people, and perhaps the delay had a way of altering Virgin’s original plans a little and tempering them towards the existing cruise fanbase a little more instead of trying to start from a clean slate. I don’t know for sure, but the result was a thoroughly, thoroughly fantastic experience. The ship’s not perfect – I really missed a proper pool to swim in and sometimes it felt she was trying too hard to be a little too different with food and drink offerings – but she’s bloody close, and none of the gimmicks felt gimmicky; they felt right. We’d talked to plenty of people on this ship and nobody had a bad word to say about her. We even talked to a retired couple who almost exclusively cruised with Cunard and they were talking about booking more cruises on Scarlet Lady. That’s quite the recommendation to try her.

This is the first part of a short series of travelogues aboard Valiant Lady on her so-called Mermaiden Cruise that would see us depart Portsmouth on a Friday, arrive in Zeebrugge, Belgium on the Saturday, stay overnight, then cruise back on the Sunday for arrival back in England on the Monday morning. Not a stunning itinerary, but for cruises this short you don’t get a lot of options, and unlike longer cruises where the destination is the thing, for a cruise with Virgin Voyages it becomes far more about the shipboard experience.

Cruising And COVID

We live in The Time Of Coronavirus as I write this, and when we cruised with Valiant Lady, so let’s start with what we needed to do in order to get aboard this cruise ship and sail as safely as possible. While the UK’s government was firmly pretending that the pandemic was over (because getting money from sick people into party donors’ hands is far more important than having poor people live) the cruise lines were still operating from a base position of “Dead people can’t spend money on cruising” and were insisting on some precautions. As with the year before’s cruise on Scarlet Lady, all passengers and crew needed to be fully vaccinated. Slightly differently from the year before was the pre-boarding testing procedure, however. On Scarlet this had been done near the port on the day of departure and, for too many people, had proven to be a long-winded, queue-inducing, moan-producing process that Virgin were keen to avoid. Certifiable, at-home testing kits, sent out and taken up to 3 days before boarding was the solution this time around, and while the initial information, email delays, and postal worries about kits arriving in time could have been handled better there’s no doubting that this worked well as a system. That day-of-the-cruise stress of not knowing if you’d pass a test and had wasted your journey to the port was a thing of the past.

Virgin Voyages VIP Treatment

We’d been seriously impressed with our Seriously Suite grade of Rock Star cabin when we’d boarded Scarlet Lady in 2021, and booked not just the same type of room this time around, but also the same room itself. My wife has issues with directions so this made sense, a bit. Being a Rock Star means you get some perks for that extra cash you’re splashing, and that started right at the cruise port terminal we’d walked down the road to. A doorway marked “VIPs and Rock Stars” allowed us to bypass the queue in a nearby tented area, walk straight into the port, straight up to a desk, get everything checked in a couple of minutes, get our bands, get walked across to the security screening area, and through that onto the shuttle bus that left within another couple of minutes for the short transit to the ship. From arrival at the port to stepping on Valiant Lady was just over ten minutes and most of that was the shuttle bus wait and drive.

We’d expected to just head to our room to drop off our carry-on luggage, but were instead directed to the Manor venue where glasses of champagne were being handed out and, after a short delay, we were introduced to our Rock Star Agent to make sure everything was working on the app (more on that later) and if we needed any help. We only needed to book a show for the final night of the cruise – something that wasn’t appearing on the app for some reason – and this was quickly sorted for us. Then it was off to the room.

Our Seriously Suite cabin on Valiant Lady was identical to that on her sister ship. We knew that the more basic cabins had been upgraded with some warmer accents following feedback of the rooms being too spartan, but you couldn’t accuse the suites of being the same and there was no need to change what was already fabulous. If you’d like to see more of the room in video form then hit the Scarlet travelogues for that, but a quick note about the ever-so-minor differences: the alcohol in the included mini-bar lacked gin (we know that many people enquired about that) but also included some wines and beers, so that was good; a better vinyl effort this time around with some Sex Pistols instead of bloody Drake and Santana, but they had maiden voyage teething issues and it turned out that everyone with a turntable got the same album; the black soap was no more in the bathroom; there were no sex toys in the cupboard.

As this was the Mermaiden cruise we also received some Virgin cups. I don’t know how much use we’ll get out of them, but a freebie is a freebie.

We unpacked while watching the safety drill video in the room. It’s better than attending in person but it would be nice to have an “Actually, I’ve cruised before so can we have the 2-minute refresher, highlight video option, please?” option as it got a bit tedious.

“Where shall we go first?” asked my wife. “Do you want to wander around and take some photos?”

I didn’t, for a number of reasons. The ship was clearly not going to be vastly different in appearance, to start with, and we’d boarded early, which meant there were hours of people still boarding to contend with. People with wheeled luggage and phones taking selfies every three steps didn’t feel like the ideal backdrop against which to wander around with a camera and a wife who would clearly only be barely tolerating the boredom. I gazed into her eyes and read her innermost thoughts. She wants a drink, I thought.

“It’s nice and clear, so let’s do what we did last time and head to Richard’s Rooftop.”

This was the area at the front, on the top of the ship, that in a warmer climate would be a great place to chill out and relax, reserved only for the Rock Stars. For these Portsmouth-departing cruises, more a gimmick, but one we were still entitled to check out. A change to Scarlet Lady was that our cruise bracelets opened the gate to this area instead of a card. Made more sense. We headed in and treated ourselves to a drink from the limited selection they had available.

Although we’d watched the safety video in our room there was still a second part to the muster process that required brief attendance at our muster station – for us that would be the Manor – in order to make sure we could see how to put a life jacket on. But we still had time ahead of that point so we followed up our Rooftop visit with a trip to the Dock so that at least one Fig Sour could be purchased. It was our favourite drink on Scarlet Lady, and it didn’t disappoint on Valiant Lady either.

On our way to the muster station we spotted one difference between this ship and her sister: the Instagram-friendly spot between the Social Club and the Roundabout was more vibrant, replacing the non-swinging swings with mirrors and a sea-based mural. We would discover that the artwork on the ship was pretty much the only difference between Scarlet and Valiant, and that Valiant was overall more colourful and warm.

Valiant Lady Departing Portsmouth

We met up with some friends for a bit of a chat but headed back to our room ahead of Valiant Lady departing Portsmouth on her Mermaiden cruise. Our room on the port side of the ship gave us the best views of Portsmouth as we left but we’d not taken into account that this cruise was taking place five months earlier in the year than the last time we’d sailed out of our home city. The anticipated views of the dockyard and naval and historical ships wasn’t possible because it was already dark, but what we did get to see this time around was the Spinnaker Tower all lit up, and since it was a Virgin Voyages cruise ship leaving, we got treated to the iconic structure illuminated in red for the occasion. Sailing past The Hard and the Round Tower was great as we could hear chants of “Play up Pompey!” echoing across the still, quiet water of the Solent.

Once Valiant Lady was away from the city, the Spinnaker Tower reverted to the yellow and blue colour scheme it had been lit up in to show support for the people of Ukraine in the truly barbaric war launched by Russia.

Razzle Dazzle

You probably know by now that Virgin does dining a little differently too, using more specialised restaurants rather than a generalised main dining room that you might find on other lines. What this means for Virgin is that they can perfect a limited menu and present the illusion of a far more varied offering, and that likely works for shorter cruises but I do wonder how longer sailings or repeat cruisers might feel about it. For us it meant we’d have a chance to swap out one of the restaurants we’d been to on Scarlet – The Test Kitchen, given that its set menu was identical – with one we hadn’t – Razzle Dazzle – while keeping the two venues we’d liked enough to try again for subsequent nights.

We had a mixed experience at Razzle Dazzle. My food was generally fine because I’ve got a wider tolerance for certain foodstuffs, but for my wife there was the underlying issue that the way that many places try to make vegetables taste nice is to mix them up with things that cause pain. Enough. With. The. Fucking. Chili. People. Not everybody wants their lips to swell up or to sweat from their eyes or – and this is really crucial – the just plain, godawful taste of chili peppers. They’re not nice. It’s not big to say you’ve eaten something that was both revolting and made your tongue sting. What the hell is wrong with just making a vegetarian dish with nice flavours?

One of the ways that my wife tried to reduce how much painful crap she was going to be served was by taking advantage of the Secret Menu. Should I even be telling you about the Secret Menu? I’m going to because I know how many people visit this site and therefore am pretty sure it will mostly remain secret. The Secret Menu gives you access to a specially-prepared steak option. Let’s say that it was a better option for my wife, but that we wouldn’t rush to recommend it. It wasn’t bad, but if you like steak then there are far better steaks to be had on cruise ships. To be fair, you can’t expect the best steak in the world from a primarily vegetarian restaurant. I went for a plant-based burger, which was decent enough. We did enjoy the cocktails a lot.

Valiant Lady Red Room Dance Party

After dinner we caught up with some friends for some late-night drinking, listening to music, drinking, chatting, laughing, and drinking. This mostly took place in the Draught Haus (or Beer Haus, or Brew Haus, because we frequently forgot its name) which allowed the music being performed in the Roundabout Atrium to filter up without drowning out conversation.

Our conversation mostly revolved around how much trouble everyone was having with the app. Everyone but me, that is. Nobody else could log in while mine was behaving perfectly fine. This issue with the app would not escape me completely, and an awful lot of people on Valiant Lady experienced problems with it that would not be resolved until well into the following day, but there will be more on that in the next episode of this cruise travelogue series. Suffice to say, it’s all very well being a technology-first company in a bid to cut down on paper waste, but you’ve got to have backup plans in place for failures to get information to people, and it simply seemed like Virgin weren’t prepared for this at all.

Late in the evening, two of the people we were with – Paul and Carole – mentioned that there was a dance party taking place in the Red Room. This was a location we’d not visited (other than to take a photo) when we’d cruised with Virgin before, but in which we’d be able to see a show later in the cruise, so I was interested in tagging along with them to see what this was like. We left my wife with the other couple we’d been spending the evening with – Sandra and Chris – and went to see what a Virgin Voyages dance party looked like.

“What was that all about?”

Shrug.

“It was good, though, wasn’t it!?”

“Yeah. I think it was.”

And that’s a decent enough summing-up conversation about cruising with Virgin Voyages as you’re likely to get.

We had some more drinks back at the Draught Haus before calling it a night. In the next post in this Valiant Lady cruise travelogue series I’ll cover our day in Belgium and the excursion we took in Bruges that turned out to be very different to what we were expecting and incredibly entertaining. So very Virgin.

But first, a word from our sponsor, Technology Drama.

It was a time of chaos and panic. A time of mayhem. Confusion reigned, and for the valiant people of this state-of-the-art, ocean-crossing vessel the unmistakable sound of hundreds of sets of gnashing teeth rose to drown out everything. The app wasn’t working. Drama! With the technology!

In times like this a hero will step forward; a champion of the downtrodden masses, offering aid to strangers and friends alike. His only need? You had to be using an Android phone, because fuck knows how anything works on Apple.

That hero’s name was Mark. Technology Drama is his story.

Yeah, you came for a cruise travelogue and the promise of tales of Belgian breweries but you’re going to have to skip over the next few paragraphs if you don’t want to hear about the exciting world of mobile phone app settings.

So, on the morning of our visit to the port of Zeebrugge the app wasn’t working on Valiant Lady for an awful lot of people. The app simply explained that access was denied and the only thing that could be seen were the titles of any messages. Pretty much most people who had newer phones were affected, and that included us, and the titles of two of the messages gave us cause for concern since we had booked a shore excursion for later in the day. One message said “Sorry, your excursion has been cancelled” and the other said “Here is the ashore time for your excursion” but both had the same timestamp so we didn’t know whether one superseded another; whether our excursion had really been cancelled or whether our excursion had simply been moved to another time. We needed to get into those message details to read further but access was denied.

Our Bruges shore excursion wouldn’t have been until mid-afternoon and we saw no reason to assume that if there was a rescheduling of our excursion it would be vastly different time-wise so figured we’d have breakfast then hunt down a member of the crew to see if someone could at least get us access to our messages or confirm whether and when the tour was going ahead. However, I’m a fast eater, which gave me some sitting about time while my wife was sullenly finishing up her breakfast (they’d got her order wrong) so I started playing about with my phone, looking at the various options for the app, then the connection settings to the ship’s Wi-Fi. And that’s when I noticed a setting I’d not seen before that increased privacy when connecting to public Wi-Fi by randomising the phone’s apparent MAC address.

Hmm, I thought. What if they’re using the MAC address to identify users rather than a generated token for the login credentials? Wouldn’t that cause problems if the address kept changing? I pondered. What if I disable that for the Virgin connection?

You know that bit in Die Hard where the power is cut to Nakatomi Plaza and the electromagnetic seal protecting the vault collapses? In my mind that’s exactly what played out as my app sprung to life. A minute later and I’d got both my phone and my wife’s working with Valiant Lady’s intranet again and we could see the messages.

The messages didn’t help clear anything up in the slightest so we still had to head off in search of some crew but in the meantime I tweeted the solution for Android users in case anyone was in the same situation, which helped some people. At the first helpdesk area we found there was one man having his phone looked at by two technicians and two others sitting waiting. We stood there for a moment until I asked if they were having app problems. Everyone nodded. I explained the solution about the dynamic MAC setting on the connection. While this didn’t help the guy first in the queue because Apple do things differently, I saw the two other people suddenly pull out their phones, fiddle around, then leave. I think I helped them. Sadly, the helpdesk crew couldn’t tell us about the excursions and sent us to the other helpdesk area. After a wrong turning that saw us finding our way into an apparent crew area accidentally (more signs with arrows please, Virgin) we reached the other helpdesk area. There were more crew there because there were a lot more people waiting to have things checked. I overheard some people moaning about not being able to access the app and again provided my solution but Apple users were everywhere. Following a short wait we got to a member of the crew who confirmed that the excursion we were booked on was still going ahead and it had been moved an hour earlier in the day. Phew. What a saga.

One other bone of contention we overheard here was a confusion regarding the timing of activities. Ship time and shore time were one hour apart, and ship-organised trips were running at ship time but shore-organised trips (which the ship was also organising just to add to the confusion) were running at shore time, and there was no indication which were which. We talked to one couple in the queue here who’d gone ashore to meet their bus for their trip only to find it had left an hour earlier.

Later that day, Virgin would resolve the issue with denied access for everyone. I suspect they disabled the use of the MAC address verification.

Bruges Brewery Tour Shore Excursion

Our tour was going ahead, a little earlier than originally planned, and, importantly, this meant we didn’t have to come up with another plan for the day that might have involved taking a walk into nearby Blankenberge or taking public transport to not-so-nearby Bruges.

We didn’t do a whole lot while waiting around for our tour time to approach, limiting ourselves to a quick nose around on the aft deck (very cold wind out there), then some reading in the extremely quiet ship. The most comfortable (for height), most practical (for light) seats for reading in were around the Draught Haus area. Virgin’s seating theme on Valiant Lady is often wild and wacky, but this does tend towards the soft and low and therefore liable to make you look like a right tit when trying to stand up if you’ve got dodgy knees or are just plain getting on in years.

Knowing we’d be drinking once ashore we made certain to grab a small bite to eat in the Galley. This turned out to be some superb garlic or rosemary bread and a selection of small, pretty, sickeningly-sweet, lovely, filling cakes.

The time of our Virgin shore excursion arrived.

Valiant Lady’s Bruges tour didn’t involve any meeting ahead of time in a dedicated venue, nor did it involve wearing stickers. In keeping with Virgin’s philosophy of a more laid-back, figure-it-out-for-yourself approach to organisation we simply knew we had to be dockside at the departure time. We were dockside ten minutes before because we don’t like to hold anyone up, and from there it was a case of looking at one long queue waiting to board a single-decker bus, and a couple of people hanging around outside a minibus. After asking a question of someone with a clipboard we headed off to the smaller of the two, were assured that this was the correct bus, and boarded.

In total, nineteen people were on the tour bus, including us, and we quickly surmised that most of them knew each other based on comments and shouts and laughing. As the bus set off and our guide started talking about the area and the plan for the tour it was explained that we were actually two groups in one, with four people just getting dropped off and having time to spend in the Belgian city on their own. So, just the fifteen of us from the entire ship had opted to pay for this shore excursion.

We’d been to Bruges a few times before – and you can click on that link to read about those occasions and what we learnt or saw then – so anticipated that we wouldn’t really pick up any new knowledge on the first part of the tour, the walk to the brewery. However, that wasn’t the case, with us walking a route we hadn’t done before on the way from the bus drop-off point and having several new things pointed out to us, including Ten Wijngaerde. The Princely Beguinage Ten Wijngaerd (to give it its full name) presently serves as a convent for Benedictine nuns, but prior to 1927 it was a beguinage (no, me neither, but I’ll explain in a second) and is the only preserved beguinage in Bruges. A beguinage – see, I said I’d explain – can be thought of as a convent for lay religious women who haven’t taken vows, and in countries such as Belgium from around the thirteenth century they took the form of buildings such as a church, boarding rooms, infirmaries, bakeries, etc. arranged around a central courtyard. The area might be protected by walls and gates but these were left open during the day so that people inside and out could come and go as they pleased.

With just fifteen people on a tour you might think this would be an easy experience for the local guide. You would be wrong. Our walking tour took the form of us closely following the guide as he reached something he wanted to point out, him turning around to talk about it, him looking past us down the street we’d just walked, and him looking at us and asking where everyone was. We didn’t know, but they would all eventually drift up, or a few would who would then tell the guide “No, don’t worry about the others, they know where to go.” It was strange, it was chaotic, and it felt rude at first to our experienced-cruise-excursion-taker selves, but it was all good-humoured.

At one point we suddenly twigged that one woman who’d been doing a better job at keeping up than the others was a member of the Virgin Voyages crew as she started asking us questions about how we were finding things. It’s typical to have one or two crew on tours to keep an eye on passengers. We mentioned that we felt sorry for the guide and she smiled and said that most of the others had been to Bruges before so they didn’t need to hear the tour explanations so much. Okay, but that was true of us as well and it still felt a little disrespectful, and when, on occasion, all the group were together to hear about some building or other – near the Gruuthusemuseum and Church of Our Lady Bruges, for instance, where a connecting passageway had been built between the structures – there were plenty of very good questions asked by clearly interested tourists.

We then reached a point where the guide explained where he would take us for the next part of the tour but that was shot down by another couple of our group. “No, I think that’s enough. Let’s have a break for some shopping. We can all meet up somewhere just before the brewery.” My wife and I were starting to suspect there were more than just one or two members of crew with us, and when we mentioned this to the woman we’d talked to before she said that she and a number of others had been to Bruges a week or so before on a fact-finding mission.

A little bit of shopping suited us as we wanted to stock up on some soap from Bubbles At Home. Some people hit Bruges for the chocolate but for us it’s this place and its absolutely fantastic soap that we’ll always hit to take goodies back home.

We didn’t have time to give any of the smaller museums a worthwhile look around but took in the views for a while in the market square opposite the belfry while a group of Spanish tourists demonstrated that they had not learnt the concept of personal space while climbing all over the walls behind where we were sitting so that someone could take their photos. We steadfastly refused to move despite the horror of appearing in some strangers’ memories of a visit to somewhere because we’ve long ago passed that point into grumpy old age.

As we headed down to our meeting point with the tour group on the Nepomucenusbrug we popped into 2be, a small but well-stocked shop for souvenirs, outside which, in an alley alongside it, was the Beer Wall. We’d heard of this but never seen it before and can confirm it was both a wall and contained beer.

Once most of the group had arrived at the designated place at or rather just after the designated time (microscopic sigh) we were led to the brewery: Bourgogne des Flandres. We gathered in a small courtyard area while our guide went back to see if the others were going to turn up and once everyone finally had we were introduced to the brewery tour guide and a glass of beer was given out to everyone to start. It would be fair to describe the brewery guide’s style of presentation as manic. A lot of fun, in other words.

We were taken through numerous, often cramped rooms, up stairs, down stairs, onto a rooftop section looking north towards the belfry over the rooftops of the Bruges buildings, shown old equipment, modern equipment, had fermentation styles explained to us, saw vats fermenting beer, shown a video describing how the brewery had changed over the centuries, and shown different sorts of hops with explanations about why Belgian beer and British beer are different (it’s to do with hop sex, as I’m sure you knew already). At one point our guide made a reference to people getting high and singled out the female member of crew with whom we’d talked. Being Latina she loudly proclaimed “I think I’ve just been stereotypically racially-profiled” but it was said in a light-hearted manner.

The tour ended with a combination tasting and blending in a side room in the main public area of the brewery. Sat on two long benches we were given some lambic beer and some brown beer with guidance on how to taste them. Most people seemed to favour the lambic (spontaneous fermentation) but it’s a little too sour for my personal taste; for me, the maltier, brown ale (top fermentation) was nicer. We were then encouraged to blend the two beers to try to get the best taste. Mixtures and results were all over the place but it was a lot of fun to hear the comments from everyone around as they were mostly disappointed with whatever concoction they’d come up with. Snacks were present in the form of pretzels, meat balls, cold meats, and cheese, and it’s fair to say that they were met with universal approval. We then finished up our time in the brewery with a glass of the proper blend of lambic and brown in the red ale that’s produced and sold by Bourgogne des Flandres.

During the tasting and blending session I had a short chat with Billy, a guy sitting opposite me who looked rich as all hell: immaculately presented, camel overcoat, Hermès Birkin bag with handle wrapped in a scarf to prevent oils from his hands damaging it, jewellery you could see from outer space. Yeah, turned out he was another member of the crew as well. During our talk I asked him just how many people on this tour were crew. After a quick glance around the room he said eleven.

“So, just four of us passengers actually booked to come on this tour!?”

“Yes! We were amazed when we heard you were coming!”

It was quite a shock, though perhaps indicative of the sort of people who’d choose to go on a maiden cruise and a weekend one to a very nearby country at that. It certainly explained why the group as a whole had been more boisterous than we were used to, more chatty, more prone to altering the parameters of the excursion on the fly.

It was nice to listen in to some of the crew talking, though; especially in regards to the tour guides. “We have got to get [the brewery guide] on the ship at some point. He’s a scream!” and “Why isn’t [the general tour guide] drinking and eating with us? We need to make this more inclusive.” Good to hear that sort of adjusting of the experiences being discussed.

When it came time to leave we were directed back into the main bar area and were handed a bag each to take on our way. Each person ended up with two 70cl bottles of the red ale to take with them. Everyone was surprised and everyone was happy, even if it meant we were all clanking our way back through the now-dark streets of Bruges towards the bus. There were photo stops along the way because cats just don’t like being herded.

If you can remember that far back, there had been another four people on our bus originally who were being dropped off to explore Bruges on their own. We were supposed to meet them just on the outskirts of the city but when we arrived (somehow at the correct time) there was no sign of them. A bit of standing around in the cold ensued with some phone calls being made by the guide and some of the crew. An attempt at a group photo took place without us featuring in it despite much cajoling. It was then suggested that perhaps the others had made their way back to the bus already so half the group went off to check while half remained behind. We opted to remain behind to keep the guide company as much as anything else and about ten minutes later one of our half of the group got a call from the other half of the group to say that no, the others weren’t on the bus, but that they’d been told that they were all making their own way back to the ship. As Valiant Lady was staying overnight in Belgium that wouldn’t be a huge issue.

The bus ride from Bruges to Zeebrugge was entertainingly loud and full of amusing comments about the tour. It had been entertaining on the way out, but now we’d all had some beers too. At one point we spotted the moon starting to rise. You’ve seen the moon rise before, I’m sure. It’s more orange than white, and it always appears larger closer to the horizon.

“It’s so big. Are we closer to the moon here in Belgium?” asked one of the American crew. Well, we laughed.

Evening Aboard Valiant Lady

We bumped into another cruise blogger as we boarded Valiant Lady. She’d been booked on another tour that should have included drinks in Belgium but this had been simply cancelled, possibly due to lack of interest. When we mentioned how few actual passengers were on our tour she rightly wondered why she and anyone else who had booked the same as her weren’t at least offered the brewery tour instead.

We’d arrived back on the ship an hour earlier than we’d initially expected because our tour had started an hour earlier which meant we now had some extra time before our dinner reservation. We decided to fill in some of this time with a sit down at the diner and some alcoholic milkshakes from the Social Club. Bloody gorgeous.

Our evening meal in The Wake was a mixed affair. The food was lovely and venue is fabulous, but the service in a restaurant for which we had the last possible sitting and which was at best 40% full was glacial. As I stared out of the aft-facing windows into the blackness of the port at night I imagined continents raising from the sea bed through tectonic activity, erosion fashioning out landscapes, cycles of evolution populating and depopulating this world, before cataclysms erased all evidence of it ever existing between courses.

The later-than-we-expected late night for us was spent in the company of friends, first at On The Rocks where a very good blues band were performing (and where we were treated to an impromptu (maybe) tap dance show from one of the crew), then at the Draught Haus into the early hours where it was easier to actually talk and be heard.

Virgin Voyages Excursion Thoughts

That’s the end of the second day on Valiant Lady – the next day and next travelogue in this series will see the ship leave Zeebrugge for a sea day heading home to Portsmouth – but some concluding thoughts about this brewery tasting tour arranged by Virgin are demanded by the blogging demons.

Whenever you’re talking about a Virgin experience with regards to cruising you’re probably going to be using the phrase “Well, that was different” and this is no exception. Yes, there were some points during the tour early on when we felt that some of the people were being inconsiderate by not keeping up with the guide or in dictating that the tour needed to have its guided bit cut down, but that was when we thought they were a group of passengers like us. Once we realised that, realistically, we were being treated to tagging along with a ship’s crew outing, and that this was as much a bonding and learning experience for them as it was an unexpected behind-the-scenes look at how the crew operate on these ships for us then the feel of the whole thing changed.

There was more smiling, more laughter, more chatting with the guide, and more chatting with fellow tourists (even if they, strictly speaking, weren’t) than we’ve had on any other excursion. Alcohol always helps, of course, but there was plenty going on before we even had a drop. The tour of the brewery itself was also excellent in its own right and can be recommended highly, with a great mix of information about the hows and the whys of the brewing process at the start plus the fun tasting and blending part at the end. Our guides were very different people, and neither could be faulted, the company we had was great with every member of the crew we spoke to being perfect representatives of Virgin as a whole, and this will go down as one of our most favourite shore excursions we’ve taken to date.

As you probably know (okay, possibly know (okay, quite likely didn’t have a clue about because you’ve never visited this site before)), we were travel-hungry enough to recently spend a short weekend aboard the second cruise ship built for and operated by Virgin Voyages, Valiant Lady. At the time of writing this very paragraph your eyeballs are whizzing over right now, the write-ups from that cruise which sailed from Portsmouth to Zeebrugge and back are yet to be completed, but I thought I’d grab a few of the pictures taken from our final sea day aboard the vessel and publish them separately, giving you a chance to test your code-breaking skills or, alternatively, if you’ve spent a lifetime at sea, dredge up and make use of your knowledge of international maritime signal flags. You would be amazed at just how many pirates visit this site leaving comments like “Yarr! Buy these knock-off drugs for a stronger erection!” and “Shiver me timbers! Wenches in your area are looking for hook-ups!” and “Can you wear your bathrobe to formal night, me hearties?”

On each deck of Valiant Lady, at the elevator banks, there is a colourful array of flags. This compares well with Scarlet Lady, a ship on which we’d cruised the year before (and which you can read about on this site if only you knew how to work the miraculous menu system in place), which opted for plain, white, modern art, that was, to be frank, a little uninspiring. The bright colours and patterns on Valiant Lady was a noticeable improvement over her sister ship.

The flags on the ship spelled out a message, and each deck had its own message, and if you were inclined to do so, and were able to avoid any other passengers looking at you like you’d grown tentacles as you stood outside the elevator doors, staring at the wall, and moving your lips, then you could give your brain a small work-out translating the flags.

Below, you’ll find pictures of the flags on each deck at one elevator shaft array (this was the one closest to our suite so they may have been different at the other end of the ship; there’s only so much exploring I was prepared to do). Can you work out what the messages are? Can you actually be bothered? Will you smile at some and shake your head disappointedly at others?

Our final day on Valiant Lady, therefore, was one that saw us open up the curtains to a view of a somewhat overcast, dreary-looking port, and because we’d stayed up perhaps a smidge later than we might normally do, we woke up late enough to skip breakfast and get to the point where the cruise ship was getting ready to leave Continental Europe. Doesn’t that make it sound glamorous? Doesn’t that completely not fit the photos below?

Departing from Zeebrugge was mostly only interesting in respect of the view afforded from our balcony of the local dock workers removing the gangway from the ship. A crane operator was lifting and swinging the metal walkway around while a man and woman were trying to line up the unwieldy mass onto the back of a truck’s flatbed. It took forever. It was almost comical. This group made The Chuckle Brothers or Laurel and Hardy look like professionals. The amusement was only tempered by the occasional ducking under of the swinging frame by the female worker to the rear which caused my inner Health and Safety Demon to start screaming maniacally. I kept expecting to see her head get hit, to hear the sound of steel on skull, and to see a scarlet river spread out across the concrete.

Anyway, she survived, and Valiant Lady headed slowly out to sea, observed by and waved off by nobody that I could see.

Razzle Dazzle Brunch

We missed breakfast, as I’ve mentioned, but food is almost always available on cruise ships, and there were plenty of options available for brunch. We checked our app and saw that it would be possible to get into Razzle Dazzle, so booked up. When we’d sailed on Scarlet Lady the year earlier, Razzle Dazzle was one of the dining venues we didn’t get around to trying, but we had visited this spot on our first night aboard for dinner for this cruise – you can read that here if you’ve not done so: Valiant Lady Mermaiden – and figured we’d give it another try since the experience had been… just okay. That’s down to my wife’s very low tolerance for chefs thinking that extreme heat and inducing sweat and numbing the sensations of the lips is the exact same thing as seasoning things and making them taste nice.

Our Razzle Dazzle brunch was pretty similar. I tolerated without massively enjoying what I had, and my wife spent a while interrogating our server for any food option without chili sauce or peppers in it, was assured that one choice would be fine, and cursed constantly when this turned out not to be the case. We both tried the Unicorn Toast, which was incredibly sweet and incredibly messy to eat. I don’t know that I’d try that again, and I don’t know that I would be able to persuade my wife to visit Razzle Dazzle again; we gave it a fair go, but it’s just not to our taste.

Therein lies a small problem with Virgin Voyages as a whole, and their approach to dining: across two cruises now we’ve tried most of the restaurants, and have now eliminated two from likely trying again (the other being the Test Kitchen); Razzle Dazzle isn’t for us, and the Test Kitchen offers nothing new once you’ve done it one time. The lack of a venue with a more traditional Main Dining Room-style of daily, changing dishes limits the long-term appeal of Virgin to us. We don’t want to be stuck in the buffet (I know it’s not called that, but…) or alternating between the two places we kinda like with their static menus, and certainly not on a cruise of more than about three or four nights.

Always remember, though: for every person who says “I have some concerns about this thing” there will always be one who will counter with a “Well, I thought everything was amazing!” Your experience is yours, and yours alone.

Valiant Lady Cruise Ship Photographs

Guess what this next section is going to feature! Go on! Guess!

Brunch over with, we headed out onto The Dock, Valiant Lady’s lower aft seating area, because we wanted to give our room steward a chance to clean our suite in peace. The Dock is a pleasant spot if the sky isn’t grey and the wind isn’t occasionally gusting across your arms and face. Actually, it’s quite pleasant at any time. We liked this location, although it wasn’t warm enough to stay there long, admiring the ship’s wake and the various plant arrangements.

Now, on the basis that I’m not going to promote this post on social media, as a calculated reward for being one of the microscopically small number of people reading this far or skimming past the pretty pictures until this paragraph, I’m going to let you in on a little secret. We don’t appear in photos or videos by choice. It’s because we’re hideously ugly and we care about you, or it’s because we know what we look like and don’t need to see ourselves in every shot, or it’s because we’re both very introverted. I can never remember which. Maybe it’s a bit of all three. Anyway, the problem with cruising with other people is that you just can’t help getting caught on camera sometimes despite your best efforts to avoid it. Look at the first photo from The Dock area above; the one looking up to the netting on the top of the ship. There’s somebody on the netting, but ignore them. Look two balconies down and you can make out an arm. That’s one limb of one half of David and Graham (Cruise Show UK), and if you take a look at their Sweet Aft Suite Review you can see that not only did we catch a glimpse of them, but they caught some footage of us too. Don’t tell anyone.

We spent a bit of time inside, playing in the games arcade before figuring it was safe to return to our room. From there we grabbed our books (okay, Kindle in my wife’s case; she’s embraced modernity while I’m still old school when it comes to reading) and found a quiet spot with relatively comfortable seats to just relax and read for a bit. That lasted as long as it took me to realise that outside sight of Belgium we’d encountered what can only be described as “a bit of blue sky.” That’s photographing weather.

My wife’s accompanied me on more cruise ship photography walkabouts than I care to remember, and with Valiant Lady being as near to identical to Scarlet Lady as makes no difference she decided to stay put while I headed off with camera in hand.

The melted sculptures by Dan Lam were a welcome improvement over the artwork that had been on Scarlet Lady; those I’d found rather plain and unexciting, unbefitting a ship with Virgin’s branding behind it. The touch of colour in these pieces of artwork was the bright and fun sort of the thing the ship needed. It’s a shame that they spelt the artist’s name wrong, though.

As I approached Richard’s Rooftop – the private area at the front and top of the ship for VIP and Rock Star Suite owners only – I spotted a guy peering over the glass partitions with a look that said “So that’s where the other half relax, eh?”

“Do you want to take a look inside?” I asked him, because I’m friendly like that.

“Can I actually get in there?” he asked.

“I can,” I replied, waving my Rock Star bracelet thingy at him.

And that’s how I let one of the riff-raff into the VIP area. And how I let his wife in when she suddenly spotted him having a nose around the spot too. I gave the pair of them a bit of a tour, reported that I wasn’t the ship’s official photographer, explained about the suite perks, and showed them photos of our suite. They said they were planning on booking another cruise with Virgin and that they’d choose a suite next time. And maybe they will.

Inside the ship, on the hunt for my wife who’d moved from where I’d left her, I could see indications of preparations for the final night aboard Valiant Lady’s festivities.

Making A Scene

Access to the VIP rooftop area isn’t the only perk that comes with choosing to cruise with Virgin Voyages as a Rock Star. Very close to what Virgin refer to as their swimming pool is a private room – not large, but with plenty of low, soft seating and some floor-to-ceiling windows offering views out to sea – called The Scene. The Scene is reserved for VIPs and Rock Stars and it’s a place where champagne can be drunk and you can chat with your agent about any issues you have, or just to talk.

“Oh, it’ll be just like the Elite Lounge on a Princess ship,” we thought.

It’s nothing like the Elite Lounge on a Princess ship.

You get complimentary champagne. Complimentary Moët & Chandon, as it turns out. And as much of it as you can manage or that they have. We might have only stayed for a few glasses and made our excuses except it turned out that we were sitting next to David and Graham (I mentioned them earlier) and we got to having a natter about cruises, ships we’ve been on, ships we’ve mutually disliked (Iona, I’m talking about you), gossiping about bloggers (no names mentioned), etc. All the usual stuff. And every time our glasses got nearly empty there would magically appear a member of staff with a bottle in hand to top us up. And top us up. And top us up.

“Oh, Marie, I’ve drank so very much champagne,” said David, grabbing hold of my wife’s arm for support as we left. Yeah. I think we each polished off a couple of bottles there.

Duel Reality

We had a booking to see the Duel Reality show immediately after our champagne session and were planning to meet a couple of friends there, but it turned out that David and Graham were also booked for that so the six of us ended up watching it together, with four of us ever-so-slightly the worse for wear.

Duel Reality is an acrobatic take on the West Side Story-style reimagining of Romeo and Juliet. Two gangs dancing and competing in leaping, climbing, spinning, and bouncing activities while squaring up and acting tough. It was fabulous and I can safely say that it was the best show we’ve seen on a cruise ship but, to be fair, you could count the number of shows we’ve seen on cruise ships on one hand with a couple of fingers lost at sea in a propeller accident.

Dinner And Dancing

Discovering that our dinner booking at the ship’s Italian restaurant, Extra Virgin, was just 15 minutes different from our other friends, Paul and Carole, we headed to the venue together and asked if we could shift from two bookings for two to a single booking for four. No problem. We ordered drinks from the bar then enjoyed the best meal of our short cruise aboard Valiant Lady, although it’s hard to disappoint us with Italian-style offerings.

Entertainment during the meal came in the form of two women – who’d possibly also been indulging in some alcoholic beverages during the day – sitting next to us, one of whom, I swear despite all that earlier champagne I’d knocked back, was flirting with me. I’d knocked her phone when being seated because our tables were very close to one another; she’d mentioned my backside; I’d commented that everything gets bigger and in the way with age; she’d made some double-entendre remarks during the meal; when she went to leave I theatrically moved glasses away from the table’s edge so she wouldn’t knock them as well; she leaned down and offered to knock them off with her breasts; I declined the nice offer; she then remarked “Why are all the good ones gay?”

“There’s a first time for everything,” I told my wife.

“Indeed,” she replied. “Nobody’s ever called you a good one before.”

Post-dinner events on the ship were happening but it perhaps wasn’t as lively as it could have been given that this was the final evening and a fair number of people would be getting off the ship early in the morning and in many cases driving home. That was true of most of the people we were with so we chatted and had a few drinks but didn’t go crazy.

Once everyone else had called it a night we took advantage of the fact that we merely had to walk off the ship home and popped along to The Manor Nightclub for a nightcap, a bit of people watching, and a bit of wondering just what the hell was that music they were playing and asking why did it have to be so loud. We’re at that age where it’s our duty to behave like this. Don’t judge.

Valiant Lady Cruise Conclusion

That brings write-ups of our time aboard Valiant Lady on her Mermaiden cruise out of Portsmouth to an end. We clanked off the ship in the morning with all the bottles from our mini-bar and our excursion in Bruges.

We really like what Virgin Voyages have done in the cruising world, bringing some welcome differences to cruising that aren’t so different they’ll put regular cruisers off, but fresh enough to inject some new love into this form of travelling for old hands.

We knew we’d like Valiant Lady because we liked Scarlet Lady, but, truth be told, we were hoping for more individuality in the ships. We’ve sailed on identical class ships in the P&O fleet and in the Princess fleet, and they all have their personalities; layouts a little different, venues moved around or different, decor changed subtly or more noticeably. Valiant and Scarlet felt as close to carbon copies as it’s possible to be, with just the barest changes in artwork and nothing else. More importantly, with all the restaurants being the same and the menus not changing, there’s nothing to truly differentiate the ships at all. We are destination-first cruisers, but we know a lot of people who like to check off ships in a fleet. I question the long-term enjoyment of the ships themselves if they aren’t going to try to attract those people with something unique to the vessels. I know, though, that in the short-to-medium term it will be Virgin’s crew who keep that loyalty going because the crew, whether serving or entertaining or joining us on our excursion, have been among the very best we’ve sailed with.

If Virgin do more short cruises out of Portsmouth then we’d cruise with them again. As things stand, though, given the pricing of their cruises and the lack of variety aboard, it’s going to take a spectacular itinerary to get us back on one of their ships. We hope that happens, because we really enjoyed our time cruising with them, and Virgin have got some cracking vessels and people here. And, please put in a proper pool.

It was formal night on Caribbean Princess and our views on formal nights is that we’ll take part in one on a cruise but any more than that is more effort than we’re typically prepared to make especially when the cruise lines sometimes barely make any effort to make these occasions special themselves. The cruise line and cruise duration do have an impact here, though, as some lines are more strict while others are more relaxed. Princess are pretty relaxed these days, which we like, and with this being a repositioning, transatlantic cruise there were not many people very dressed up at all but I still brought out my tux, bow tie, EU cufflinks, and fake Rolex for the night. Naturally, if I’m dressed like James Bond – if you squint at my reflection in a distorted mirror stolen from a funfair – then a Vodka Martini is on the cards too.

We will book something other than a balcony cabin if money is an issue or we book late so that availability is an issue or it’s a smaller, older ship with few balcony cabins available, but on a Grand-class ship like Caribbean Princess we’ll always go for a balcony, and with this being a repositioning cruise with a lot of sea days in the second week aboard the pricing was very low. We knew we’d be spending a lot of time on the balcony during those sea days but we also love heading out onto our private space late at night just to enjoy the stars. It’s this reason why we don’t like the newer ships that the likes of Princess or P&O have built – Star and Sun Princess, and Iona and Arvia – as night views are trashed thanks to setting back the balconies from the floodlit promenade deck spaces. The days when cruise lines considered what it is that their passengers might like rather than simply trying to cram as many rooms onto ships as possible is long gone, sadly.

The following day saw Caribbean Princess docked in Málaga, Spain, a place we’d never been to before but one which we’d made some lovely plans for as there were plenty of places of interest to explore. We were looking forward to having some food then setting off early to hit the bull fighting museum, the Roman amphitheatre, maybe the castle, the cathedral, and a great-looking craft ale brewery.

It was raining quite heavily when we pulled open the curtains and stepped onto the balcony. Really quite heavily. The photos don’t do this justice.

There were a few other ships in port and we could see one of the Virgin ships anchored in the very choppy Mediterranean Sea off the coast. We noticed immediately that there didn’t seem to be any tendering operation taking place from it but didn’t think too much on that.

We ate breakfast and then had to stop and take some photos from the top deck as the heavy rain had actually got heavier, coming down almost like hail on the loungers and already forming a small lake on the deck surface.

We headed back to our cabin just to get our coats. Yes, it was heavy rain and yes, we would be getting wet, but you don’t just skip a new place to visit because of the weather.

We headed down to the gangway to get off the ship and joined a short queue of people swiping their cards for security, buttoning everything up, then disembarking. We were just two people from the front of the queue when the captain made an announcement. The local authorities in Málaga were effectively closing down the city as the rain was expected to get even worse with strong risks of flooding. For safety reasons everybody needed to stay aboard so getting off was now suspended. That was that for our day in Spain then. On the one hand we were disappointed that we hadn’t got off the ship but we counted ourselves lucky that we’d not been early enough to get off only to then get drenched and find everything closing down. More on that in a few paragraphs.

Back in our room to drop off our coats as we wouldn’t be going anywhere we could now see how the rain was having an impact on our balcony space with the drainage struggling to cope with the deluge.

We spent the remainder of the day doing many of the same things we’d done on the previous one: reading, eating, drinking, taking part in trivia again.

The weather had cleared somewhat by the time late evening rolled around and we could depart. The ship had needed to stay in port to take on staff and supplies, plus some people had managed to head ashore before that was stopped so they needed to be accounted for. As Caribbean Princess made her way out from Málaga we saw that we’d been docked next to Marella Voyager. We’ve only cruised once with Marella so far, and on another ship, but we very much enjoyed the experience and would like to do so again one day.

Early in the evening we bumped into our new Romanian friend we’d met on the first night on the ship. She introduced us to a Canadian man she’d also met who, like us, had flown into Italy on embarkation day. Unlike us, his luggage hadn’t come with him and hadn’t caught up in Sardinia either so he’d been making do with what he’d been wearing for the flight and a few things he’d bought on the ship since then plus some loans from the cruise line. It turned out he’d got off the ship as early as possible just to buy more clothes, not trusting that his luggage would find him in Spain either. He’d made it into the city only to find nothing open and he’d got soaked to the skin, sometimes sheltering near buildings but mostly finding it impossible to escape the rain. That left him with almost the only set of clothes he had now completely sodden to add insult to injury. His attitude was good, though, and we all had a good laugh about it. We’d check in with him a few times over the next few days and the last we heard was that his luggage still hadn’t arrived by the last port before the transatlantic crossing.

We’d not had the day we’d planned on having but the evening was as intended with a speciality dining experience at Crown Grill. Starters and desserts often change around a bit but for the main course we always go for filet mignon, rare, and Princess never disappoint here.

In the next post in this Caribbean Princess cruise series it’s a new port for the pair of us and even a new country and continent for my wife as our ship docks at Casablanca in Morocco where we set off on an excursion to visit Rabat.