“Trepidation” would be the word I’d use to describe our feelings ahead of this cruise on P&O’s Ventura that we boarded on Halloween 2021. Also known as “our wedding anniversary.” The trepidation did not come from it being our wedding anniversary, though, as we’ve had a few of them, but rather because a little earlier in the year we’d had a cruise on another ship in the P&O fleet, Iona, and, well, I could say you’d need to read the set of Iona cruise travelogues to understand why but I’m well aware that this is the internet and you’re a person with a terrible attention span and you’re not going to do that, so let’s sum that up in one word: disappointing. Or in two words: pretty awful. I could use more but then I’d have to start digging into my list of swear words. “Oh, Mark, I’d heard Iona was lovely” or “Oh, Mark, we had a great time on Iona.” Yes. Wonderful for you. I’m happy that your expectations of what makes a good cruise were met. Ours weren’t. You’re not us and you didn’t have the same cruise experience as us.
So, trepidation. If this cruise on Ventura wasn’t a good one then P&O would slide onto our shitlist. Everyone’s got a shitlist. And we didn’t want P&O to move to our shitlist because as a cruise company they’d generally been not bad prior to 2021, and for us, they were super-convenient, sailing often from just down the coast from us. “Please be good,” we thought, “or, at least, better than Iona, which is a low-enough bar for you to surely exceed.”
This wouldn’t be our first time on Ventura, and if you’ve got the ability to select Cruises from the site’s menu then you’ll see that we previously sailed on her in 2017 on a weekend cruise to Belgium. Not only that, but Ventura is a Grand-class ship so to counter that trepidation that I just keep going on about like some madly-obsessed lunatic there was that feeling of familiarity to look forward to, and the warmth that came from knowing this was our favourite design of ship. 2021 had been a year of new ships for us in the form of Regal Princess, Scarlet Lady, Sky Princess, and (mutters) Iona, with only Ventura offering a return trip. We approached this cruise cautiously, but hopeful and as positive-minded as we could, mostly because we still would have pandemic cruise credits with P&O to use up at some point and we didn’t want to throw them and our annual leave away on something that we ultimately would not be massively looking forward to.
Right then, as certain popular cruise bloggers are prone to saying. That’s set the scene in our heads ahead of this Ventura cruise. Was it important I did that? No. Could you have cared any less now that you’ve joined the exclusive club of a handful of people who’ve actually read all that? It’s highly doubtful.
This cruise on Ventura would eventually take us to Spain, Portugal, and a few of the Canary Islands, and it should have taken us to Madeira too but if you ever get that far into this travelogue series you’ll discover that this doesn’t occur for reasons I’ll explain then. The reason we picked this cruise and used up some of our cruise credit was specifically because it was hitting Portugal and the Canary Islands, neither of which we’d visited at all before. But before we could do all that we had to get aboard and depart from Southampton.
Covid-testing had been a stressful activity but necessary precaution ahead of all of 2021’s cruises. As I write this now just into the second half of 2022 that requirement is becoming less stressful with at-home testing with certification and, in some cases now, a wink and a nod and a “Yeah, sure, I’ve definitely tested myself last night and I definitely don’t have anything honest mate” at the port. I have thoughts on all this but I won’t go into them here. The test for Ventura was conducted at the port, involved no queue of traffic at all, which was nice, and was all done with negative results texted to our phones before we’d driven from the testing marquee to the terminal. Lovely. Actually getting onto the ship then involved such a long and unmoving queue on the walkway that our cases made it to the room before we’d boarded. Less lovely, but who cares, right?
The cabin we’d chosen on Ventura was C523. C means it’s deck 10, and deck 10 on Grand-class cruise ships operated by Princess and P&O mean you get a double-sized balcony, half-covered. We like big balconies even if it seems all the major cruise lines have developed an aversion to them with their newer designs, and this mix of cover and non-cover means you can enjoy it in any weather, take advantage of the sun in reasonable privacy if that’s your thing, and get uninterrupted views of the stars above at night (so long as your neighbours either side and above you remember to turn their effing balcony lights off). 523 is an odd number so that means it’s on the starboard side of the ship which is useful for my wife as she’s easily confused by ship layouts hence us trying to be consistent when booking.
As I’ve mentioned already, it was Halloween, and a smattering of themed decorations were present in The Exchange when we headed there for drinks and an early attempt at trivia. P&O do a very good British pub on their ships but our track record prior to this point had been poor in getting the first drinks we’d ordered; every time they’d not had one of the first things to catch our eyes on the drinks menu. However, we were pleasantly surprised when this turned out not to be the case on Ventura. Not only that, but we then went and won the trivia. Prior to 2021 we’d never won any trivia on a P&O ship but on both Iona and Ventura we had decent runs. Either we got smarter or a lot of people got dumber at around the time Covid hit the UK, and checking what the politicians and people on social media were generally frothing at the mouth about over that period I’m leaning towards the latter.
We ended up sharing a table for dinner just because it was easier for everyone involved. The food was average at best, but there was nothing wrong with it. One of the more pleasant surprises was that the menu featured a few things that were slightly different, and that was good to see as cruise lines have certainly tended to keep a fairly small range of dishes on rotation over the years, and especially so in the pandemic era when there’s been repeated messaging about “Oh, we have a limited selection because of Covid” and “Oh, we’ve had to temporarily suspend that thing we used to do or offer because of Covid.”
The wind was fierce and the sea conditions rough on the sailaway – enough that traffic in the Solent was limited, the sailaway was delayed a few hours, and we were warned to expect a bit of a lean on the ship – so it wasn’t a complete surprise to later on hear announcements on the ship asking for stretcher bearers. We were also told not to worry if checking the position of the ship at any point as instead of heading directly towards the Bay of Biscay we were going to detour towards Brixham in Devon to offload the pilot in the early hours of the morning as it was far too rough to attempt it anywhere in the Solent or English Channel.
We finished our first evening aboard Ventura in Metropolis with cocktails and the accompanying sounds of the pianist who we got to chat with a bit during breaks.
We would have two full days at sea before hitting our first port in Portugal.
We awoke after a terrible night’s sleep which we think was down to our cabin’s position coupled with the sea conditions. C523 is in what cruise ships consider to be the best location: midship. Midship means that you get less up-and-down motion than being fore or aft because the ship acts a little like a see-saw on the waves. If you don’t like too much motion then this is considered better, and things that are considered better are more expensive. Midship cabins are more expensive than those at the fore, which is where we’d normally book a cabin, but not because of the price difference; no, we love lots of motion. C523 was all we could get, though, because we left it late to book. Our cabin, however, despite apparently receiving less vertical motion, appeared to be on the pivot point of the ship. It creaked and cracked and groaned all night. We had to remove all the hangers from the wardrobe to stop them driving us insane but we were still woken up dozens of time through the night wondering if we’d just heard someone stumble into our room and bounce off the wall.
Luckily, neither of us suffer from motion sickness and if there’s one thing that’s very welcome after a poor night’s sleep then it’s a day of doing very little. Armed with reading material and some photos of the day’s programme of events on the phone for convenience we headed off to do nothing but relax.
We don’t often go and see talks or shows on cruise ships – that’s just the way we are – but a talk about journalism by Ian Murray caught my eye and we gave it a go. Very interesting, and some great anecdotes alongside the history of how local journalism has changed (not for the better) over the decades.
The day was spent mostly inside Ventura. We’d have loved to have used our balcony more but the wind on the first day of November was ferocious and had a bite to it as you can imagine, and the weather was clear one minute, showering with rain the next.
We did not go with a drinks package on Ventura. Iona had demonstrated to us oh so clearly that P&O’s drinks packages are designed for the lowest common denominator of drinkers who cruise with them, and that’s not us. This, though, gave us more freedom to pick what we actually wanted to drink without worrying about wasting what we’d already spent on a near-worthless daily package. Wine flights in the Glass House and a pre-dinner cocktail in the Tamarind Club went down nicely, and this would be our first encounter with the club’s singer, Nikki Jayne, on this cruise. She would prove to be a firm favourite.
And as for dinner on this first sea day aboard Ventura: we decided to pay extra for some speciality dining at the Epicurean. Our experience at this venue in the past had been decent, but Iona a few months earlier – and I know I keep harping on about that horrible ship – had inflicted upon us an absolutely awful meal, environment, level of service, and spot in which to eat. We wanted to give P&O a chance to redeem themselves. Everything on Ventura was a chance for P&O to say to us “Hey, we’re sorry, look, really, Iona was an aberration, a horrible mistake, we will make things up to you, you’ll see.”
We loved our meal at the Epicurean on Ventura. Everything was perfectly prepared, the service was impeccable; it all felt just like it should. So impressed and relieved were we by the meal we’d had, we decided to book a second visit to the Epicurean for later in the cruise.
The only issue with speciality dining on a cruise ship, for us, is that we tend to book for late in the evening and it typically tends to render us incapable of doing anything else after we’ve finished. A walk? A dance? Hell no. I just want to unbutton my trousers, thank you very much. We ended up taking a drink back to the cabin and watching Hotel Transylvania 2 in bed – yes, we are that rock ‘n’ roll when we cruise – ahead of another creaking, groaning night of highly-interrupted sleep.
The second day at sea on Ventura rolled around, a little brighter, a little less windy, a little warmer.
We did even less on this day aboard the cruise ship than we’d done the day before, and that’s no bad thing. We did manage to get a little more time on our balcony for some decent views while reading. There were no trivia wins today, but we got close with a tie-breaker that we ended up losing out on. We also met another couple with whom we would start combining forces for the trivia for the remainder of the cruise.
One thing that we did spot in the activity planner for the day was a large advert for Eric Lanlard’s Afternoon Tea, something we’d heard good things about but had never experienced before. We decided to book it up and give it a go and we were not disappointed at all. The presentation was wonderful, the range of food very interesting, and it met with our approval. Is it the best afternoon tea we’ve ever had on a cruise ship? No. To date, that accolade belongs to afternoon tea on Virgin Voyages’ Scarlet Lady, probably on the quality of the tea itself, rather than the assortment of sweet and savoury dishes. However, we wouldn’t hesitate to have this special afternoon tea on a P&O cruise again.
It was a formal night on P&O Ventura and we’re not the biggest fans of formal nights. I don’t particularly like wearing jackets as I find them too restricting in movement and don’t have the inclination to get something tailored for my body shape that might make me appreciate them more. Since we were pretty full from that afternoon tea anyway we decided to buy a bottle of wine at the Glass House, grab some Pringles and M&Ms from the shop, and retire to our room for the evening to have a cinema night, watching the first two of the Maze Runner films. Yeah, we know how to live. The wine was lovely, the evening views from our balcony were gorgeous, and the movies were just appalling.
In the next post of this P&O Ventura Canary Islands Cruise travelogue series we’ll be paying our first ever visit to Portugal with a stop at Lisbon, an excursion to see the city’s aqueducts, and a lovely sailaway out of the port at sunset under the city’s bridge.