The time has come to start another cruise travelogue series and this one will be covering a week’s cruise aboard Princess Cruises Sky Princess, roundtrip from Southampton, making port stops in Norway and Denmark. That’s barely any more information than in the title of this post and yet I felt compelled to explain it anyway.
However, unlike many of the other cruise travelogues on this site – and there are many; if you’ve landed here from searching online and managing to wade through all the useless paid-for listings and optimised crap laden with keywords just so you can add to someone’s advertising income then, truly, congratulations are in order, and please feel free to hit the site’s menu for more travel write-ups than you can shake a stick at – this one is mostly going to skip over the cruise ship itself. The reasons for this number two.
The first of those reasons is that we are and always have been cruisers and travellers who consider the destination, the ports, and the experiences within, the primary goal. True, sometimes we just want to get away and we’re a little less bothered about where we go, but then it’s mostly a matter of time and economics. What I mean by all this is that the ship itself isn’t very important. Yes, the line can be, because there are some things we want (good service) and some things we don’t (kids), but the ship: nah, not so much.
The second of those reasons is more important. This cruise on Sky Princess took place about half a year after our first cruise on Sky Princess. You can read about that cruise here – Sky Princess cruise around the UK – and, indeed, if you want more of a look at the venues aboard Sky Princess, the room, the pros and cons compared to other ships, then that’s the place to start. In addition, a month after this cruise we boarded Sky Princess again and that will be the next cruise travelogue series to begin on this site. Basically, I’m not going to waste time covering the same bits of the ship over and over again when we’ll have been on her three times in under a year. Any changes? They’ll be mentioned. But this and the next series will be more diary-like covers of where we went and what we did there with far less about the vessel.
Right then (phrase used under licence, copyright Paul and Carole), let’s start with the first couple of days aboard, and another quick warning: we did mostly nothing of interest on these two days. The first day was boarding; the second day was relaxing at sea. From the next post onwards there will be trips to cover – and we had some good ones – but for this post it’s going to be pictures of Southampton, some food, and some drinks. It’s how cruises start from the UK for us, and for many people I imagine.
Pictures of the cruise port area of Southampton from our room kick this off. The Upside-Down Silver Pudding Bowl is a fond and familiar sight. Its purpose? Nobody knows. Nobody even questions. It just is. There are rumours, sure, but I won’t spread any of them here. Aliens.
But another very popular sight for us when we visit Southampton is the Great Big Pile Of Crap. Sometimes when you’re cruising out of Southampton you’ll leave from a dock too far away to experience one of Southampton’s best tourist attractions, but sometimes you’ll get lucky. Marvel at the undulations, almost mountain-like and natural, yet formed from rusting garbage. Is it a metaphor for the wastefulness of life and a message to cruisers to make the most of your time at sea? Is it a criticism of the ruination of the planet by corporate and political short-sightedness? Is it a sleeping giant under a blanket of metal? That’s for you to decide. It’s art. Glory in its artistic beauty.
I’ve skipped over the muster drill bits and the departure bits – again, you can read them in the other travelogue series; they weren’t any different – but will pause briefly to mention our room. We always book a certain type of room in a certain type of location, and the important thing for us is a big balcony. Well, we were out of luck because the room we had booked with the big balcony was taken away from us (we think to allocate those rooms for Covid passengers if any magically appeared) and replaced with another room a deck up. As you can see from the photo below, that’s a standard balcony on Sky Princess and, well, it’s frankly not good enough. That said, it also wasn’t terrible for a week’s cruise. What we did get as part of our unwanted move was an upgrade to a mini-suite. In terms of what that means on a Princess ship then it meant a second TV, a sofa, and a bath. We wouldn’t normally pay extra for those things because they aren’t that important to us, but the sofa and the bath instead of the small shower space are actually good things to have and we ended up missing them on the cruise after this.
Obviously, first thing to do when you get aboard a cruise ship is get some alcohol inside you, and we did.
Ahead of the sail away from Southampton we decided to hang around by the adults pool. It provided shelter from any wind, formed a nice sun trap, and had its own bar.
We had known, prior to boarding, that some other cruise blogging people would be aboard. One, we’d never met before, and amazingly managed to not spot her at all for the entire week nor find a way to get in touch thanks to the ship’s abysmal internet coverage. The other couple we had met before, we’d been out drinking with before, and we’d subsequently been assigned to a pile to be ignored for reasons unknown. Did we do something wrong? I don’t think so. Did we say something wrong? Well, we can be honest when people don’t want it. Are we the sort of people that some people just don’t like? Almost certainly. But I suspect it wasn’t any of that. Is it more likely that the two people realised we wouldn’t help them out with ostracising other people in the cruising community they didn’t like and/or furthering their goals to get recognition and freebies from cruise companies? Well, I couldn’t possibly comment. But I could wink and make a gun sign with a hand aimed at you and click the thumb down as if it’s just fired. Anyway, all that is to say that any thought that maybe we’d bump into them and ask them if we’d done something to offend their precious sensibilities got thrown overboard while still in port as they turned up at the pool, sat in front of us, absolutely saw us, and blanked us. One of them would go out of his way to look away as we walked down a corridor past them on another day on the cruise too. To say we were amused that so-called adults behaved this way would be a gross understatement. On the plus side, it had did confirm a feeling we’d had that forasmuch as we’d got on okay with them before this trip there had been that certain something murmuring at the back of the subconscious, muttering things like “I don’t completely trust these two.” Oh, perhaps they heard it!
One thing we did do for this first night on Sky Princess was book ourselves into Sabatini’s for Italian speciality dining. This is our kind of food, and it didn’t disappoint. If you’d like to read about more of our experiences of Sabatini’s on Princess Cruises ships (including how it’s changed over the years and how it compares with other lines) then the search system on this site is absolutely just about adequate for that purpose. Here: I’ll provide a link for you as I’m in a good mood right now: Sabatini’s.
Day two on Sky Princess was spent at sea and, yeah, not a lot to report here. Below you’ll see the programme for the day and a photo from the trivia we attended. Popular, as you can tell.
Sea days are the most likely candidates for formal nights on Princess ships and that was the case here. We don’t mind them, but we don’t really enjoy them that much either. A lot of effort to get dressed in uncomfortable clothing for little reward. We went super-casual instead, filling up at Alfredo’s for a late lunch then hitting the buffet and spending the evening in our room watching movies from our mini-suite’s sofa.
So, I wasn’t lying when I said we did very little on Sky Princess to start with. Honest Mark; that’s what they call me. In the next post in this travelogue series, though, we’ll be stopping in at Kristiansand, Norway, and there may be things of actual interest to an interested traveller like yourself. It would be a first time in Kristiansand for us, and a short excursion followed by time to explore the city on foot afterwards would be the order of the day. We’ll be starting with a quick look at the fishing village of Høllen.