We’re back on Victoria for the first time since our Western Med cruise back in 2018, and back in Britannia for the first time since the post Covid “Cruise to Nowhere” in 2021. We took this short cruise because we needed three more days to reach the Diamond loyalty tier and we are off on another QV cruise in a couple of weeks and the extra benefits provided by being diamond would be welcome.
Because this was a short cruise my theory was we wouldn’t need much luggage so it would be a good time to try getting the train to Southampton. It turned out that I could book First Class return travel for the pair of us for £66, much cheaper than the cost of driving down and the CPS car parking. My only concern, apart from the ongoing train strikes, was we’d get there too early. I’d booked the 11:05 from London Waterloo, arriving at 12:21 in Southampton. That turned out to be the least of our worries. The first problem was massive disruption of our services into London because of a “trespasser” on the tracks at New Cross. Luckily living in South London has the advantage of multiple options for travel into the City, so we walked to a different station and took a line that was unaffected by the New Cross incident. The next issue was the woeful lack of space for luggage on SW Rail’s First Class compartment. We managed to slot the little case into the “hutch” formed by two sets of seats backing on to each other, but the large one wasn’t fitting anywhere and ended up taking up the two seats across our table from us. Luckily the carriage wasn’t anywhere near full or we would have had issues. When we arrived at Southampton it was time to grab a cab to the Mayflower Terminal, not as easy as it should be because there’s roadworks outside the front of the station and the Taxi rank has moved across the bridge outside platform three. There’s a lift to get over the bridge, there’s also a massive queue to use that so we decided to not bother and ordered up an Uber to meet us on the other side of West Quay Road. Ten minutes later and £6.98 lighter we were dropping our bags off and strolling into the Mayflower Cruise Terminal.
The Mayflower Cruise Terminal is my new favourite, on entering we were ushered in to the Priority queue courtesy of our Platinum status, and all checked in in less than 10 minutes. There was a big old queue for Security, but that moved on quickly and before we knew it we were through and climbing the gangplank to start our voyage.
Our first port of call was muster station B to get our card scanned, when we got there we realised that we hadn’t been to the room to pick up our cards, but it turns out that our boarding pass works just as well. We would need our room cards though for lunch in the Golden Lion Pub. My suit carrier was waiting by the door to our stateroom, so I quickly unpacked that while Jane inspected the Pol Acker in the fridge.
Lunch in the pub was good, I had no real complaints about the Chicken Tikka Massala other than it wasn’t very spicy. Jane had the Fish and Chips and had a bit of a moan about the tiny portion of mushy peas, and the tartar sauce wasn’t very tartar, a distinct lack of capers apparently.
Lunch out of the way meant it was time to check on our table for dinner. We’d requested a table for 10 second sitting fixed dining. Turns out that table 622 is a table for two. Time to go and see the Maitre’d and see if we can get this resolved. It turns out that there are only two ten seater tables on the whole ship and there are lots of groups on this short cruise taking up all of the eight and ten seat tables.
We chilled in the room for a while with Jane unpacking and me tapping away on the keyboard before it was time to hit the Commodore Club and our afternoon drink. We walked there via deck ten overlooking the Lido pool and the Sailaway party. This is very much a party cruise, there were far more people around the pool than I’ve ever seen at a Sailaway outside of the Caribbean. The Commodore Club was really busy, with most of the tables taken and the two waiters rushing around delivering drinks. We sat down near the piano and waited for a waiter, and waited, and waited…….. eventually after waiting for over twenty minutes, Jane gave up waiting and headed to the bar to get the drinks. There were only three staff on, the barman and two waiters for a full Commodore Club. It didn’t stay that way though, the crowds soon thinned out with the early diners drifting off and more staff appearing. Our second drink was procured much more quickly and even came with nibbles. Jane was pleased to see the Cosmopolitan was more to her liking after being disappointed with it on QE last year, but she was even more pleased with the Ginger Cosmo she had for her second drink. By now it was seven pm and after listening to the band for a while it was time to get ready for dinner.
We arrived in the Britannia Main Dining Room discussing whether to see if the Maitre’d had found us a larger table or just head to the one assigned to us. We went directly to the table to see someone sat there already, so we headed to the Maitre’d again to find it was all a mess. I’m still not sure what went wrong, but there was something about a group of six sitting at the 3 adjacent tables to us who shouldn’t have been there and at least two of us had the same table number. After an age it all got sorted and we ended up as a table for eight. It wasn’t ideal as it was just four tables pushed together and the end couples couldn’t hear each other, but we still had a very pleasant evening once it all got sorted. I won’t mention the lack of a sommelier and it taking an age to get the wine as again that was sorted.