For our second cruise with P&O Cruises we booked a five night trip to Amsterdam and Le Havre. For the second time we would be on the Grand-class ship Azura, with our first time on the cruise ship having taken us for a weekend to Belgium.
We’d arranged parking with CPS and this was pretty painless. Friendly staff, a half hour wait to move our car into position for someone to take the keys off us, then we walked into the terminal, were handed a fast track ticket as we were almost bang on our due slot, and were through the check in process and on board about ten minutes later.
Southampton’s not the most attractive place in the world and it doesn’t even have the benefit of any real impressive dock architecture so pictures are few and far between. We were in the Ocean Cruise Terminal (the first time for us) and with the ship facing inland and our state room (B327) on the starboard side (which is our preferred side for reasons of trying to stay consistent and not confusing my wife’s poor sense of direction) we had a view from our balcony to the east and southeast which included the only building of interest, the brutalist design of the grain terminal behind the Queen Elizabeth II cruise terminal.
We, and many others on the balconies, did spend quite a bit of time looking at some container stacking taking place on the dock beside the ship; it was actually quite fascinating but for some reason I didn’t take any photos.
With it being late in the year after we’d had our muster (held in the Glass House for us and which was thankfully not quite as excruciatingly long as on our previous cruise with P&O) and the ship had finally started to depart Southampton we were afforded views of a setting sun and I did remember to take some pictures this time.
I decided not to take many photos on board Azura for this trip as it had only been seven months since our last visit on her and very little had changed. For pictures of the public areas of the cruise ship taken on our first trip please click here: P&O Azura. For the pictures we took on this second trip please click here: On Azura.