We had a sea day after our first port stop in Hamburg and it was another nice, bright, warm, sunny day so after making ourselves presentable and taking a quick look through the newsletter with its daily programme of events on Princess Cruises ships – the Princess Patter, named for the Princess Patricia, the first ship to operate for the cruise line and an occasional answer in trivia on board so file that little bit of knowledge away for when you absolutely need to win a coaster – we headed off to breakfast with books and camera in hand so that we’d not need to return to the room for a while and give our cabin steward a chance to get it all looking lovely once again.
The bulk of this post will be photographs taken around the outside spaces of the Island Princess cruise ship since we occupied our post-breakfast time with a decent explore of the ship’s top deck and promenade. When you’ve been on a few cruises – and we’ve been on a few cruises – and especially if you cruise with the same line a lot, then there’s not a lot to surprise you even when you hop aboard a new ship but there were a few things that did make us say “Huh! That’s different.”
The first thing we really noticed, especially given that the ship was small relative to the rest of the fleet, was how spacious Island Princess felt. Admittedly, there was next to nobody about on the decks for these pictures so it looks quiet, and if you ever view the videos by other cruise bloggers or watch the TV adverts for cruising then you might think this is normal. This is not normal. Cruise bloggers tend to take a lot of their video at stupid hours of the day so they can avoid people appearing, and advertising companies work in a similar way and have a lot of control regarding who can go where and when in order to present a serene scene. Lovely, but very atypical for an actual cruise and I really wish they’d all stop doing it because it gives a false impression to would-be cruisers that may then put them off for life. For our cruise on Island Princess, though, it simply never got crowded at all, and that was at full capacity. Itinerary and date and slightly elevated pricing for the smaller ship may have played a part in dissuading the younger crowd here.
In our many years of cruising I’ve still not managed to persuade my wife to join me for a game of chess on a ship. It’s not like I’d beat her; I’m terrible at chess too.
Island Princess has an indoor pool called the Lotus Pool and this was the second thing about this particular class of ship that gave us a moment’s pause; we absolutely loved the look of this. The retractable roof can be opened if the weather warrants it but late in the year on the North Sea did not warrant it even though it felt surprisingly warm outside to us.
You can tell the pool is from an older ship because of those straw hut coverings over the small pavilion at one end of the swimming pool and the hot tubs either side. You could argue that they’re dated, especially if you’re more familiar with modern ships, and I wouldn’t argue with you (although I might point at the ship’s name with a condescending look on my face) but I would ask “So what?” Dated doesn’t mean bad. They’re just different, and different is good. Different is why Island Princess factored high in our cruise-planning in the first place.
We knew we’d be swimming in that pool later in the day, and more on that a bit further down.
We concluded our exterior exploration of Island Princess with a walk along its promenade deck. Island Princess has a wide promenade deck for more genteel strolling without getting in the way of speed walkers and it’s nice to see them returning on the larger, newer ships, but it would be really nice if they covered them over so that the light pollution and noise pollution from the newer ships doesn’t completely ruin the point of having a balcony cabin in the first place. I know, I’ve moaned about this problem with promenade decks before. On Island Princess, however, the promenade deck is a great place to appreciate the sea views without bothering anyone else.
With our walk around Island Princess complete and breakfast now long-consumed we checked that our room had been serviced – it had – then changed into swimming gear so that we could try out that Lotus Pool.
Oh boy.
The Lotus Pool was not heated. The Lotus Pool was freezing cold. It wasn’t the coldest swimming pool on a cruise ship we’ve ever been in; that record is currently held by Diamond Princess when we felt in danger of cardiac arrest with shock. No, this swimming pool wasn’t quite that bad but it took a very, very, very large amount of inching down and trying to dab water on exposed flesh to acclimatise ourselves to the temperature before we could start swimming, and it never really seemed to get any warmer. We rarely use hot tubs on ships but with there being hardly anyone around we treated ourselves to some warming-up time after the swim to get the circulation going again.
Despite the cold temperature of the swimming pool it was still a lovely location and we like swimming so we subjected ourselves to more torture during the rest of the cruise too.
The afternoon found us in Crooners with some Prosecco and our books, overlooking the piazza where speed painting was taking place. I keep telling my wife that we should take part in more ship activities and she keeps agreeing with me and we keep not doing it.
As the afternoon turned into the evening we returned to our cabin to change for the night – sea days are often formal nights on cruise ships and that was the case here – and we enjoyed some lovely dusk views from our balcony.
We were back in Crooners before dinner in order to uphold a cruising tradition for me in the form of a Vodka Martini on formal night. If I’m going to go to all the effort of putting a tuxedo and bow tie on (real, not a clip-on!), then I’m going to go the full James Bond route.
We could see the champagne waterfall being set up below us. We don’t attend these; it’s not something we’ve seen being done since the earliest cruises when drinks packages didn’t exist and loyalty hadn’t been built up and the desperate urge to get a free glass of questionable fizz was overwhelming. But a lot of people seem to enjoy the spectacle and it’s good to see the return of them as a thing because they went away around the pandemic, for obvious reasons.
As for the remainder of this sea day on Island Princess, there was simply dinner to get through, and that was lovely, then a few drinks in the Wheelhouse Bar to round the night off.
In the next post in this Island Princess cruise travelogue series we’ll be visiting a country we’d visited once before – Sweden – but a new port this time when we dock at Gothenburg.