It’s been no secret that we’ve had four available days of annual leave for 2020 hovering over our heads for a few months now but have struggled to find anything to fill the gaps. We weren’t under any time constraints to do so, of course, but we like to have an idea early so we can both let our respective places of employment know well in advance.
We obviously like cruising when it comes to travelling around the world (there are clues to this preference dotted around this website) so cruises was where we were looking but that short amount of time (that we might have been able to stretch to six days with a weekend) still didn’t bring up much that was going to be cost-effective and I don’t like the idea of flying for anything less than a week’s break otherwise a too-hefty chunk of holiday is spent in airports and planes.
We were pretty much resigned to perhaps looking into some short city breaks for next year, potentially in Europe or Morocco; they are things I’d like to do but, again, if there’s a cruise option we like the sound of then we’ll probably pick that first. But, to cut what’s turning into a long story short we’re now down to two days of annual leave allowance remaining as we had an impulsive moment and booked two weekend breaks on P&O Cruises’ Ventura anyway. We still might take a European city break next year with what’s left.
We’ve cruised on Ventura before and of the P&O cruise ships we’ve been on she’s been our favourite. Like Azura and the bulk of the Princess Cruises fleet she’s a Grand-class ship and that’s a design we love and with which we are very familiar. We found Ventura more friendly-feeling than her sister ship and, most importantly, lacking a sewage smell that Azura maintained across two cruises months apart.
The two cruises will be to places we’ve been before because destinations are limited when you do weekend jaunts from Southampton.
First up will be Cherbourg and, having visited the port before (Cruise Port Review: Cherbourg) and explored as well as we could on foot with the French city’s bizarre opening times for businesses, we’ll likely be looking to see what excursions we can undertake in the vicinity this time around.
The second Ventura cruise of 2020 will take us back to Zeebrugge. In the space of one year from 2017 into 2018 we visited this Belgian port four times having never even been to Belgium before. There are still plenty of options for exploring and with this particular cruise in 2020 coming just a couple of weeks before Christmas we wouldn’t be averse to returning to any of the places we’ve hit before anyway to see the festive markets. Not only that, but it will be close to three years since the last time we’ll have visited and they do some mighty fine soap in Bruges and Ghent that we’re quite keen to stock up on.
One of the things you might have noticed if you’ve ever seen more than a couple of the photos I take from balconies on cruise ships – like the one above – is that the view tends to look very similar. There’s a simple reason for that: we tend to book a cabin in around the same place on the same side of the same class of ship when we cruise. Somebody’s wife – and I’m mentioning no names – gets turned around quickly and this familiarity helps a lot.
On Grand-class ships we like Deck 10 Forward, Starboard side. We like that exiting an elevator means turning right then turning left in the corridor to head towards the room. We like that 10 Forward has a Star Trek connection. We like that the balconies on deck 10 are twice the size of standard balconies but half-covered unlike the mini-suite’s. We like that the forward section of the ship gets plenty of vertical movement on rough seas and that it’s the cheapest area to book cabins.
As we’ve booked these two cruises on Ventura well ahead of time and as we nearly always pay the extra to select our own room we’ve picked the same cabin for both of these trips. More than that, though, is the fact that between these two cruises we’ll be taking two cruises back-to-back on Crown Princess next year as well. You might not be surprised to learn that we’ll also be in exactly the same cabin for Crown Princess as we will be for Ventura. It’s also the same cabin we had for our 2018 Diamond Princess cruise and the same cabin we had for our 2019 Star Princess cruise. We know what we like.
For a complete list of our upcoming cruises please see the Future Cruises page.