Voyage Day 9 - Tuesday 5 August

We glided into Southampton Water at around 6am to be welcomed by the rising sun and a well named ship (glad to see it's spelled properly!).

We had our last breakfast, left the ship at around 8.20am, boarded the InterCruises coach to Heathrow Terminal 5 (took about 90 minutes), retrieved our car and then came home - phew!

Voyage Day 8 - Monday 4 August

We had a light breakfast in the restaurant and then moved on to the Commodore Club where they were playing some lovely classical music to read.

Then it was time to start packing!

We could only manage a dessert for lunch and then went to the Boardwalk Café for an ice cream only to find it shut for no apparent reason.

We started to see more and more ships and could just make out the Scilly Isles at lunchtime on our left hand side.

Land ahoy!

Yes, after almost 8 days at sea, there's land

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For our first pre-dinner drinks of this voyage we went to the Commodore Club.  Roger McGuinn was there and we were given crisps and peanuts and four canapés.  There was a lovely atmosphere there and they even served Warsteiner German beer.

Voyage Day 7 - Sunday 3 August

We woke to find there was quite noticeable movement of the ship.  Elizabeth doubted she could eat breakfast but was OK in the end.  The sea was flat calm but there was a swell which came and went throughout the day.

We had a table for two, but adjacent to a couple from Oklahoma who were moving on from Hamburg to do Norway by train before flying home.

The highlight of the morning was a tour of the galley at which cameras were allowed.

Our table!

We then had lunch in ‘The Golden Lion’ and sat adjacent to a couple from the Blue Mountains near Sydney, Australia who were on tour for 3 months.

This was the last formal evening, described as Royal Ascot Night.  Many of the women wore hats or fascinators, but only a very few men wore morning suits and I saw no top hats at all.  The evening meal had lobster tail as its highlight and our waiter arranged for us to have crème brûlée as we had joked the day before as to when it might be in the menu!

At the Royal Ascot Ball in the Queen’s Room, there was a parade of ladies who were wearing some sort of Ascot-related head gear and each one was given a voucher to be redeemed for a small memento in one of the shops on board.

We were approached by an American couple from Connecticut – Lisa and Jeff – who described us as ‘the couple who could dance’. They were both university professors (lecturers on our terms) with him teaching computer science and Lisa teaching English.  They were on their first sea trip/cruise en route to a wedding in the UK and were enjoying it enormously.