How about something different to start a first post with other than we made an early start for the airport? OK here goes, this morning we set off a little after 8:00am and drove to the port of Southampton. Yes that’s right the port and not the airport!! After 10 years of cruising we are finally sailing from the UK.
We had a check in time of 12:00 – 12:30 and although the journey only takes us around 2 hours, we were swayed by the fact there were 3 other large ships in port today so having heard lots of gripes about how bad the traffic gets when there are a few ships in port we decided to try and get there early and then just park up and go grab a coffee until our boarding time. However after we parked up and had our bags collected by the porters we wandered down to the terminal to see if we could get on earlier and by luck we more or less walked straight on. Check in was really quick and once through security we had about a 10 minute wait before we were able to get onboard.
You are immediately struck by the size of the ship, to say it’s massive is an understatement.
We have also invested in some Wow bands to see how well the system works.
After meeting up with our friends and having a coffee we decided to go off and explore starting from the top down but not before G and myself trying out the Ultimate Abyss. It’s all over very quickly but great fun and you do get get up quite a speed on the way down. I suspect later in the cruise there will be queues but we managed to get straight on.
There are lots of areas where there is unfinished work with some parts of the deck closed off. For example the fastest internet at sea wasn’t working when we first got to the cabin and neither were the TV channels.
We were able to get into the cabin at 1:00 pm and we were instantly impressed with the layout and size. Nice deep balcony but under cover so it wouldn’t be for us on a sunny cruise. It is a really good use of space.
After a spot of lunch in the Park Café we did a spot more exploring, it’s such a huge ship is going to take all four days to get our bearings.
Muster was at 4:30 and sailaway was at 6:00. We can now officially say we have sailed from UK port.
Tonight we have booked to eat at Chops Grille which is a steak and seafood restaurant which carries a cover charge of $39 per person. Our treat for our friends and using up some of our OBC.
That’s me signing off for today, more to follow tomorrow……..
Flickr Album link >>>Here<<<