So here we are. The day has arrived! It’s World Cruise Eve and we are heading off to Southampton to stay overnight in the Leonardo Royal Grand Harbour Hotel. Amazingly the luggage fit in the car easily! ……. Well just really!

On arrival to the hotel we had been upgraded into an executive room and it was lovely with a balcony ready to have first sight of our ship Arcadia in the morning.

We ate in the hotels Marco Pierre White restaurant. We both decided to have fillet steak just cooked in different ways. They were scrumptious!

The next morning I had a Quick Look from the balcony. All was good Arcadia was there waiting for her guests. Our boarding time was 14:00 so we had a leisurely breakfast and checked out of our room. The hotel was buzzing with people all heading for a cruise ship as there were 3 in port. It was easy to spot the world cruise people as we all had so many cases!
A 5 minute drive to the Queen Elizabeth Terminal to hand over our car to the parking company. We suddenly realised that we were missing our rucksack full of cameras, lenses and other equipment! Gosh what a pickle!

So…. We loaded our luggage onto the ship and then jumped into a taxi back to the hotel. Luckily it had been handed in and back to the ship we went.

Check in was very busy and I have never seen so many cases! Once on board we had to visit our muster station and then to our cabin.

Our cases were there and the mission of unpacking and finding a place for everything began. Our cabin stewardess came and introduced herself to us. Devah. She seems a lovely girl and is from the Philippines.
In our cabin we found gifts from P&O for the World Cruise, also a bottle of Prosecco from Angela our Travel Counsellor and then a beautiful vase full of flowers for me from Andy ♥

We had all the clothes put away after getting extra hangers. But the sofa was another story haha. All the bits and bobs were put on there to sort at a later time as we had sail away to go to up on deck. There was singing and dancing plus sail away fireworks.

This was followed by the first of many to come lovely dinners in the MDR (Main dining room) We have booked Freedom dining and this means we can go to have dinner any time between 6pm & 9pm. You can choose to have a table for 2 or be happy to share a larger table with other guests. We meet lots of new people by sharing tables at meal times. There are 3 days at sea for us now before we reach our first port of Madeira.

Travel makes you richer in experiences.

Take care, Carol & Andy