There’d been fog when we’d arrived at Lerwick in the morning but that had mostly lifted during the day while we’d explored ashore. However, when it came time for us to take a tender boat back to Regal Princess – not the last tender boat because we always try to build in some leeway on these things just for peace of mind – the fog had returned and started to thicken up once more. We could only just see our cruise ship at anchor from the harbour.
As with the tender boat trip ashore in the morning my wife opted to get inside where the damp chill couldn’t permeate her bones quite as easily as they could mine since I went up top again to grab some photos during the short but necessarily slow journey to the ship. It was eerie, but pleasantly so, to see Lerwick fade into nothingness and then to see Regal Princess silently loom out of it.
We try to pick balcony cabins when we can, and especially on a Princess ship, because there’s nothing quite like getting back on board after a day on land, ordering a drink to be delivered to the room, and just relaxing with the views, maybe doing a little write-up in the diary for these later travelogue accounts, backing up photos, etc. The views were somewhat lacking on this occasion but I was up and out there with drinks ordered for me and my wife before she got back to the room. Sitting up top on the tender boat means you’re the first people they let off and you can largely avoid the scrum for the elevators.
I was pleased to see the beetroot soup as a starter option for this night’s dinner in the main dining room. It’s one of the many foods that my wife and I disagree upon with me finding it wonderfully sweet and her finding it tastes like dirt. We’re also largely incompatible with fruits, cheese, mushrooms, spices, and seafood.
After dinner we were pleased to see that Regal Princess had sailed south far enough to escape the fog and give us a lovely view of a post-sunset sea from the promenade deck.
The views then got better again as we heard an announcement that it might be possible to see the Northern Lights from open spaces on the ship. We ended up heading back to our room for this simply because the top deck of modern cruise ships favour being lit up like Christmas trees and effectively ruining any chance of seeing much. It wasn’t massively improved on the balcony because a lot of our neighbours seemed to have found the button to switch the light on for their balcony early on then never switched it off again. A pet peeve there: we’d really like it if those balcony lights automatically switched off after a while. With this class of ship you’re never likely to spend hours in the dark on your balcony anyway.
We did spot aurorae, and with the naked eye too. Phone cameras do an often over-the-top job of boosting aurora colours but the shots here are pretty close to what we could actually make out from our balcony. Always lovely to see the lights and we’ve been lucky enough to have seen them on several occasions now.
In the next post in our 2024 Regal Princess British Isles cruise travelogue series our ship will dock at Invergordon where we’ll head off to explore Inverness on our own.