The final full day on Ambassador Ambience for our 2025 Arctic Circle cruise was spent at sea – the North Sea specifically – slowly heading down the east coast of Scotland and England towards the final destination, and the port at which we started this fantastic trip, London Tilbury.
The last day on a cruise is always interspersed with jarring reminders that the realities of life are about to take over once more. The disembarkation schedule is one such reminder. We’d need to be hanging around the Observatory given our cabin location, forward on Deck 10. More on the disembarkation at the end of this write-up, because we laughed. What we did like about this note of impending departure, though, was the voyage summary and the breakdown of where all the members of the crew came from.
Another reminder of your cruise coming to an end is the appearance of suitcases outside cabins, awaiting collection so they can be delivered ashore and picked up by you after disembarking. We sometimes hear people making a big deal about needing time to pack to go home and it puzzles us as we’re of the mindset that everything is going to need to be washed anyway so just wrap up the souvenirs and anything vaguely fragile, then stuff the cases with everything from the closets, drawers, and wherever you’ve been storing your dirty underwear (one of the cases does this job for us). If this takes us more then four minutes then we get concerned. It’s not a happy task, and the cabin always looks so cold and bare immediately afterwards, but it is a quick task.
Our cruise was finishing with some lovely bright weather. It wasn’t super-warm as we were just in April at this point, but the views were lovely.
We joined forces with another couple for trivia for the first time and we won comfortably, then engaged in another spot of prize-swapping with other cruisers to give away our bottle of fizz again and ensure we ended up with one of every type of keepsake prize that Ambassador gave out. Were they good prizes? No. But that’s half the joy of them.
Our last dinner aboard Ambience was spent in the company of our irregular dining companions. Irregular in the sense that I’m not sure we sat with them for dinner for two nights in a row at any point of this cruise as one or both of us couples seemed to have other plans. We had four courses on this final evening in the main dining room. We usually have a starter or a soup or salad, but not both, but as we were sharing a table and our fellow diners had ordered from each course it felt only polite and sensible to do the same so we weren’t sitting there and twiddling our thumbs while they ate.
We couldn’t afford to go crazy in the nightclub until the early hours as I’d be driving home the following morning, but we spent some time there, had a farewell drink or two, enjoyed the music, then made our way to bed for the last time on Ambience. Even the polar bear in one of the elevators seemed to be sadly saying goodbye to us.
We needed to be out of our cabin considerably earlier than our scheduled disembarkation time. Cruise lines like to get a head-start on cleaning those rooms ahead of a new batch of passengers and you can hardly blame them for that. The same people who moan that they’re being turfed out of their rooms so early will generally be the same people who moan that their rooms aren’t ready on embarkation when they’ve boarded at the first possible moment too.
One advantage to this early start for us was that we got to see some of the early morning approach to London Tilbury cruise port along the Thames. It’s a river that you associate with skyscrapers and bascule bridges and people selling internal organs to pay for a glass of wine at tables outside bars alongside it, but this far to the east there’s far more of a river cruise through the countryside air to it all. Not that we’ve done a river cruise through the countryside. We don’t think we’re river cruise people.
And then Tilbury cruise port came into view and the wait began for our disembarkation at the end of a superb cruise with Ambassador Cruise Line. For a little more information about Tilbury cruise port and a few more photos of it, the ship, and the Thames, you can look at our Ambience embarkation write-up from the start of this cruise.
I mentioned that we were entertained by the disembarkation process. There was a schedule that you can see in the first photo in this post and we were informed numerous times over the speakers on the day before and on this morning that we had to wait until our section was called before disembarking. Now, this didn’t apply to anyone who self-disembarked – that’s people who carry their own luggage off – but for everyone else who’d put their cases out for collection the night before it was important that we wait.
Some people who’d put their luggage out didn’t want to wait, possibly under the assumption that as soon as Ambience got within range of the dock it would start loading up the cases onto teleporter pads and beaming them ashore in batches. However, Ambience is an old ship without fictional matter-energy transportation systems, and she uses an older method of crew pushing trolleys loaded with cases into the luggage hall in the order of cabins in that disembarkation schedule. And if you get off early – and many people did – then you’re left to stand in a cavernous space with doors open to chilly April winds, no cases in sight for you yet, and – because you’ve got off the ship at this point – no way to get back on. There were some upset people standing around and asking if they could re-board. Oh. Sorry. No.
As I said earlier, we laughed.
And that concludes this first experience of cruising with Ambassador. It was spectacular. We loved the itinerary, we adored the ship, we found ourselves loving the way that Ambassador do things, and this was a cruise with a fabulous crew aboard. And we will be back and cruising with Ambassador again. At the time of writing this we have plans to try out Ambassador Ambition out of Portsmouth in early 2027, then we will be jumping back on Ambience out of London in late 2028 for a return to Norway’s Arctic Circle when we’ll also be treating ourselves to a suite as it will be a big wedding anniversary for us.