Bon Voyage

I wish I could tell you that the morning drive to the cruise port in Southampton was lovely and scenic, but to be honest, I slept through most of it. Jetlag is not a joke. I've done my best to keep myself on a local sleep schedule, but it is not as easy as I expected this trip. In case you're not already aware, when you travel abroad where there's a big time difference, the best thing you can do is start abiding by the local time as soon as possible; usually, once you board the plane. When you land in the new time zone, do not sleep until it is bedtime in the local time. Sometimes that means that sleeping on the plane is critical. In my case, we boarded the plane at about 5pm EST, which was already about 10pm LST. So ideally, I would have been asleep rather quickly so that I would be well rested when we landed at 7am LST. This was not how it worked out unfortunately. So, word to the wise, sleep smart.

Back to the subject of today's post, I did get to see a little bit of the English countryside between catnaps; it is not quite like anything we have alongside our highways in the States. The rolling hills and quaint cottages were straight out of a movie.

We arrived at the port, which is unlike any American port I have experienced lately. The port was very expansive and largely industrial with cruise ships scattered about. The unloading zone was also in a large warehouse-type building; different than what we're use to. Upon check in they explained that Irish immigration requires that our passports be collected for review and stamping; this was a unique situation for me even after having cruised to about 9 countries. I was simply excited to get a passport stamp. For some reason, passport stamps are not really a consistent thing nowadays. I have been to 16 countries and only have stamps from 2 (Haiti and Israel) - now 3!

The ship, the Norwegian Spirit, is just as unique as the rest of our experience. It's an old ship, built in the late '90s, and was formerly owned by a company out of Hong Kong. It's rather small and has an entirely Oriental theme throughout. NCL has clearly attempted to adapt the ship to their brand, but it results in a funny mix of '90s China and '10s America. The twins and I have concluded that we feel like we are in St. Petersburg, FL at a Disney hotel that was opened in 2001. If that doesn't make sense, go visit an old beachfront hotel in St. Petersburg and it will. Either way, we like this ship; we also like that we are, decidedly, in the youngest 5% of the ship's passengers. The predominant age group, which consitutes roughly 60% of the passengers eats dinner rather early and leaves the pool decks vacant for the bulk of the day. I'll let you make your assumptions.

Our entertainment for the beginning of the afternoon consisted of watching the dockhands clean up the pallet of wine they dropped while we were supposed to be listening to the safety drill. We also enjoyed watching the luggage be unloaded (which is a lot more interesting than it sounds). After setting up our very small room for the next two weeks (I will be writing another post about this - if you're cruising soon, read it), we ate dinner at the ship's french restaurant, Le Bistro. We've eaten at this restaurant 3 times before on some of Norwegian's other ships. If you're cruising with NCL, we highly recommend dinner here and I highly recommend the duck entree.

We'll be aboard this ship for a grand total of 14 days - by far, the longest I've experienced since I was a baby. Be sure to check out the destinations tab on the website and let me know if you have any recommendations for any of the places I am going.

That is all from me for now!

From: The Expeditioner