Usually, for cruises of long enough duration, these series of cruise travelogue write-ups finish with a final sea day, some snaps of the disembarkation port, and a few concluding thoughts about the trip as whole; ports and ship. This will only be slightly different in that I’m also going to include some photos from the night before the final sea day, although technically they’re on that last sea day as they were shot in the early hours of the morning. We can’t go crazy with drinks on the very last night for obvious reasons but the penultimate night is a different matter and we often try to make the most of it. As it was, then, by the time we staggered off to our room after our day in Dubrovnik and the sail away from Croatia Azura was like a ghost ship. There’s something eerie about a cruise ship when it’s like this, like you’ve got the whole vessel to yourself.

If you’re at all interested in the sorts of things that will take place on a cruise ship on a sea day then the following scans of Horizon, P&O‘s daily programme delivered to the room each evening beforehand, may enlighten you. These sorts of activities are fairly standard not just on P&O but on most lines, and enough people obviously take part in enough of them for the cruise lines to vary them very little. We enjoy the quizzes but very little else, and that’s fine by us because a day at sea on our balcony, catching some sun if there’s any around, reading our books, listening to the sound of the ship breaking through the waves, sipping the odd drink or two, is the perfect counterpoint to those days ashore engaging in more cultural, social, or physically-demanding activities.

We decided to eat at The Glass House for this last night, a casual dining venue on P&O ships that does a small selection of usually very high quality food for not much money. I’ve written about this particular experience before (see: P&O Azura Fly-Cruise To Malta: The Good And The Bad) but I’ll go over it again because I know you well enough by now to know you’ve no intention of clicking that link.

We were seated fairly quickly in a little, tucked away section of the restaurant, and there were two other couples sat nearby. Nods, small smiles, that sort of thing. And we waited. And waited. Waiters rushing around everywhere but nobody in our little section. Twenty minutes passed before one member of one of the other couples got up to find a waiter and soon after someone came along to take a drinks order. Wine is good value on P&O ships so we ordered a bottle and started to drink while we waited for someone to take our food order. A starter arrived for one of the other couples but we’d almost finished the bottle of wine by the time anyone asked what food we wanted so we ordered a second bottle and decided we’d skip the starters and just go straight for a mains and dessert.

One hour and forty minutes after sitting down, and well into our second bottle of wine, food turned up for our three tables. My wife’s was lovely, mine had clearly been prepared too early and left out under a heat lamp but I ate the plate of disappointment anyway, and at least it wasn’t as bad as one of the other couples whose medium rare steak was burnt to a crisp. They summoned the head waiter and gave him a piece of their minds then left. The other couple also left after eating their mains and I jokingly asked why they weren’t staying for dessert; by this point they’d been there two hours.

We were pretty hammered, quite amused by the whole dining debacle on Azura, and decided we’d stick around for dessert just for the hell of it and that at least was very nice.

However, yeah, this Glass House experience was just hilariously awful.

We dropped off into Malabar to finish this final evening and got to listen to Andrew Browning performing as George Michael. He had the look and the voice and was nice enough to hang around and pose for photographs.

One final sight on the way back to our room was that of a fellow passenger who’d clearly been married or renewed vows on the ship. She was happy enough to pose for a photograph too.

And so to the following morning, back in Valletta where it all started a week before, and the only time on any cruise where we’re up around the same time as the sun. We’re very much night owls.

That brings this 2023 Adriatic cruise on Azura to an end. Food and service on the ship were not the best but unlike a lot of our fellow cruise bloggers we are experiences and destination-first cruisers so we can overlook this to some extent; these things can and do happen and you just have to be in the wrong venue at the wrong time on the wrong ship. So, for us, I’d have to say that this cruise that allowed us to visit Malta, Croatia, and Slovenia, all for the first time, was fabulous.

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