Guernsey and Zeebrugge There was a short (three night) cruise to Guernsey and Zeebrugge on the P&O Oriana around the time of my birthday, so we thought it would be a good opportunity to a) celebrate my birthday, b) try a P&O ship we'd not been on before, and c) visit Guernsey for the first time. Because we'd booked so late, there was also a d) to experience - a tiny cabin with no balcony!We'd had suites on four of our five previous cruises and the last cruise we were on we had a huge wrap-around balcony as our suite was on the back corner of the ship, so it was going to be an experience indeed to have just a tiny porthole to peer out of!
Southampton Friday - It was a lovely warm and sunny day when we departed from the Mayflower Terminal in Southampton. There were wonderful views across the car parks from the top deck of Oriana.
Red Cars I think these were Renault Capturs, which had presumably been imported and were awaiting distribution. Apparently red was a popular colour this year.
Cabin Judith in our cabin. On the plus side, we had a porthole each to peer out of. And we were very close to the water, right at the front of the ship on the lowest passenger deck.It would have been interesting to have been in this sort of location when we sailed through that insane storm on the Atlantic on the way back from Icelend.
Crows Nest Having dumped our bags in our cabin, it was time to have a walk around the ship. This was the Crows Nest bar at the front of the ship. This is a good spot to sit if you like to be able to see where you're going.
Theatre Wasn't expecting to spend much time in here.
Pool As the weather was nice, there were a lot of people on deck.
Container Ship Our departure was delayed ever so slightly while we waited for this enormous container ship to pass.
Crows Nest Ship explored, it was time for a beer in the Crows Nest.
Departure Isle of Wight ferries passing each other as we headed down the Solent to the English Channel.
Needles In another cruising first for us, at the end of the Solent we headed West along the coast of the Isle of Wight, which allowed us a lovely view of the Needles as we entered the English Channel. Previously we'd only ever headed West, past Portsmouth.
Sunset We managed to get a reservation for dinner in the premium Beach House. However, the Marco Pierre White restaurant was already fully booked for the entire cruise by the time we boarded, so we wouldn't be trying that out this time round. We've seen surprisingly few good sunsets when we've been on cruises, so this one was a treat.
After Sunset Even after the sun had disappeared from view, the clouds continued to change colour for a further ten or fifteen minutes. Lovely.
Atrium This was the view looking up the atrium, which is apparently one of the signature features of Oriana.
Band There was a Showaddywaddy tribute band on in the theatre. Didn't hang around to watch that.Time for bed.
Guernsey Saturday - Another interesting feature of our room was that it was quite close to the bow thrusters, which are used to manoeuvre the ship when it's in a port. When they turned them on during our approach to Guernsey it sounded like there was a tumble drier full of spanners in our room. On the plus side, there was no chance of accidentally sleeping in and missing the action.
St Peter Port While Judith was thinking of getting up, I went for wander around to ship to see what there was to be seen.Apparently St Peter Port has nowhere to park a cruise ship, so we'd dropped anchor about a mile outside of the town's harbour.
Sailing Apparently sailing is very popular in these parts.
St Peter Port
Deck View I took this looking down the length of deck 13.
Deck View I also took this one looking down deck 13. I couldn't decide which I liked best so I've included them both.
Tender Because we were parked a mile or so from the shore it was going to be necessary to use tenders (basically lifeboats) to get off Oriana. This process turned out to be an organisational disaster. I won't go into the details (because I can't be bothered), but it took almost two hours to get ashore!
Temporary Tender At one point there was such a massive backlog of people waiting to go ashore that they "borrowed" this local boat to help move a few people.
Tender Eventually we made it onto a tender, where I took this photo.
Marina The marina in St Peter Port harbour is very picturesque.
Marina
Flowers There were lots of lovely flowers out around town.
Stairs Here's Judith doing one of her least favourite things - walking uphill. Still, it was necessary to go uphill to be able to see the view.
View Here's the view.
Cappuccino While we were looking for the view point we came across this terribly sad looking Suzuki Cappucino. What a shame. They're lovely little cars.
Candie Gardens On the way back to the harbour we walked through Candie Gardens, which was very impressive.
Flowers Flowers in Candie Gardens.
Oriana Due to the earlier issues, we didn't manage to make it ashore until gone midday. As everyone was supposed to be back onboard by 4pm, we decided to head back just after 2pm to hopefully avoid the rush, but still had to queue for hald an hour for a tender back to the ship. So altogether we spent almost three hours in transit between ship and shore to spend a mere two hours ashore. Good planning P&O. Thanks for that.
Guernsey View There was a nice Tony Hart view of the coast as we left Guernsey and headed back out to sea.
Portholes An interesting view of the portholes in our cabin.
Dinner As it was formal dress night, we didn't really want to eat in the buffet so we headed for one of the ship's main restaurants. Which was full. So we queued for 15 minutes to get a pager so that we could be paged when a table became available, which it did about an hour later.You would almost think this was the first cruise these people had ever organised and they were completely unprepared for the number of people that had turned up.Judith wasn't impressed with the "discreet" table lamp that was bolted to the middle of our dinner table. She's only little and could hardly see me over the top of it.
Eclipse Sunday - When we arrived in Zeebrugge the Celebrity Eclipse was already there. It was the only other cruise ship we saw all weekend.
Gangway There were problems getting off the ship again this morning. Apparently the gangway hadn't been attached properly and was wobbling about quite a lot. It took a surprisingly large number of engineer type people about ten minutes to fix it.
Ticket Despite the fact that Oriana was parked in Zeebrugge, the destination is heavily marketed as being a visit to Brugge. However, P&O cheekily charge a minimum of £36 per person for a coach trip to Brugge! Handily they do provide free coaches to the nearby town of Blankenberge and from there you can get a train to Brugge for 4 Euros (about £2.80). That's 4 Euros return, not each way. Bargain.
Scary Babies Having bought our train tickets, we had half an hour to spare before the train left (it was Sunday after all), so we went for a quick walk down the seafront. These scary baby monster things were climbing up the front of the casino.
Zot Half an hour later and we were in the De Halve Maan brewery in Brugge drinking a lovely glass of Zot while we waited for our magnificent beef stew to arrive.
De Halve Maan This is the impressive display behind the bar in the De Halve Maan brewery. That must take some dusting.
Bier Bistro Being a Sunday in August, Brugge was pretty rammed, so we thought we'd pop into one of our favourite bars that's often a bit quieter than everywhere else - perhaps because it's in a rather discreet basement. However, we weren't expecting it to be completely deserted. We were in there for about an hour and no-one else came in. Very disappointing. I hope they don't go out of business as it's a nice bar. They have a great range of beers and their food is pretty good too.
Hopus There's apparently a knack to pouring this Hopus. The last half inch of the bottle contains the yeast and sediment and the careful barman has poured it into its own little branded glass. He advises that I can pour it back into the big glass or drink it separately. As it looks rather cloudy and intense, I decide to just leave it. Lightweight.
Minnewater Having left the Bier Bistro we headed back to the railway station via the Minnewater. The bar/hotel in the photo has been closed for as long as we've been visiting Brugge, but on this day their terrace was open. We went for a closer look and the place was still in somewhat of a state, but at least they seemed to be moving in the right direction. It might be nice to stay there at some point in the future.
Pool View An hour later and we were back on Oriana. It had been positively scorchio all weekend so far, but now the sun had gone in and there were even a few spots of rain, so there were few people round the pool for the first time all weekend.
Ferry A couple of hours later and we left Zeebrugge. This P&O ferry followed us for about an hour after we left the port. I suspect that it might have been going to Hull.
Ferry You can just about still see the ferry as it's turned North and headed off into the distance.
Sunset It looked like there was going to be a fine sunset for our last night on Oriana.
Deck The approaching sunset was casting a really nice orange glow on the deck. This would be what (proper) photographers call "the golden hour."
Sunset And as anticipated there was a very nice sunset.
Sunset And that was it for Sunday.Monday - We were supposed to be docked in Southampton at 7am with disembarkation starting at 7:15am. However, for some unspecified reason things were running about an hour late and there was a massive queue of very disgruntled people waiting to get off.All things considered, this has been by far the worst cruise experience we've had and I would not recommend one of these short cruises to anyone looking to get an idea of what a 7+ night cruise might be like. However, if you're having a hen party or looking to go away for a birthday weekend with a large group of friends, this might just be the sort of thing you're looking for.