The first port at which Ventura stopped on our 2024 cruise to Spain and Portugal was a new one for us despite there being direct ferry links from our home city to it. This was Santander and it actually looked quite an interesting place to look around both according to the map and from what we could see from our balcony when we threw open the curtains on the morning of our arrival.
We didn’t look around it, though, instead opting to take a cruise excursion to visit two nearby towns to see the local architecture. The first of those was at Comillas (and a rare Gaudí design outside Catalonia) with the second town being Santillana Del Mar. Follow those links if you’d like to see pictures of the towns to compare late nineteenth century modernist works in the former with medieval charm in the latter.
So, Santander looked very nice. The same couldn’t be said of the view from our balcony where I could see someone on the deck below smoking a cigarette. Some ships do permit this vile habit despite it being dangerous while others don’t, and P&O Cruises don’t which is why the woman in question was trying to keep out of view of those above, particularly when she caught me looking over. It’s dirty, it’s dangerous, it’s selfish, and people like this who absolutely know they shouldn’t be doing it deserve to be banned from ever cruising again.
Anyway, we had a very nice architecture-themed day in Cantabria then sailed away from Santander, even catching sight of one of those ferries that runs the route from this port to our home city as we left.
Dinner for this evening was taken in the main dining room and you can see the menu and what we ate below.
The evening was the typical one after that of finding any trivia going on and hunting down venues with music to listen to. With the odd drink, of course.
The next day was another sea day (the first day of this cruise had been spent at sea) which, for us, means doing very little. We like to test our trivia knowledge against others if it’s going on, we like to read, we like to spend time on the balcony once we’re sure the room has been cleaned, and we got to do all these things. If you’d like to see what other sorts of activities there are taking place around a ship like Ventura then there are scans of the daily programme of events below to take a look at. This sort of range of things to do – or avoid – is very typical of most cruise lines.
One unexpected activity – and unwanted for those involved – occurred during our time on our balcony when the ship slowed practically to a stop and the captain announced that a medical evacuation would be taking place. We certainly heard the helicopter from our private outside space but never saw anything. We’ve seen a few of these over our years of cruising and you always feel so sad for the people affected by this.
Formal nights often fall on sea days and that was the case for this day which is why we booked the speciality dining venue of Epicurean on Ventura ahead of the cruise. The main dining room can be absolutely heaving on formal nights and we preferred a more relaxed meal.
Epicurean was fine, no real complaints, and we’ve dined at this venue on ships before and had both better experiences and worse ones. You can take a look at the menu and our food choices below. The starter selection of bread was lovely but then again I’ve never met a bread I didn’t love.
And once again – we are creatures of habit – it was drinks in bars and finding music to round off the sea day evening on Ventura.
In the next post in this cruise travelogue series we’ll arrive at a port we’d visited once before and on this very same ship three years earlier. On that occasion we’d headed off on an excursion but this time around we would be exploring Vigo on our own.