My Love Of Cruising Part 2

So in my last blog on my love of cruising, I talked about my relationship and history with the SS Canberra.

When Canberra was sold to be scrapped in 1997, I had to find a new cruise ship to fall in love with. P&O had had the Oriana purposely built in 1995 for the British cruise market and also recruited the Star Princess from their sister line Princess and after a refurbishment renamed her Arcadia. More about those two ships shortly.

As you will recall, shortly after my final cruise on Canberra, and the shock of the passing of Princess Diana, I proposed to my girlfriend Nicola and she accepted. We immediately started planning for our wedding and it was left to me to organise the honeymoon ! I scoured the market for a cruise that would be a little different to what I had done in the past and with lots of new ships, that were much bigger than the Canberra. I eventually found a fly cruise on board what was at the time the largest cruise ship in the world, the 120,000 tonne Grand Princess from the Princess fleet.

So we flew to Istanbul after our wonderful wedding and joined this massive ship.  Her facilities were impressive, the food amazing and we had a wonderful 12 days on board her seeing some of europe’s Amazing culture and heritage but, Grand Princess wasn’t a Canberra and the onboard atmosphere was nothing like what it should be.

We didn’t cruise in 1999 but in late 2000 as we were thinking about starting a family so we returned to P&O and flew out to Barbados to join Arcadia for 2 weeks travelling around the Caribbean, including a partial transit of the Panama Canal and a visit to Columbia.  This was more like it, Arcadia had more of an atmosphere akin to Canberra with an English pub, a swim up bar and great entertainment.  We were sat at dinner with 2 couples who were so much fun, one being of a similar age to us with a little baby boy. Throughout the cruise we socialised with them and became part of the onboard entertainment by hijacking the radio show with three characters that had the passengers (and crew) wondering who they were. Our restaurant waiters were amazing too (they were called Elvis and Olwyn) and became part of our enjoyment, we even served them dinner at out table one evening. Little did we know on that cruise, that firstly Elvis was going to become a long term friend who we would cruise with many times but Steve and Jo, our dining companions with the baby boy, would become lifelong friends, who we have cruised, holidayed and done many things with frequently since.

I had found my new Canberra and had loved Arcadia so much that we decided pretty much as soon as we got back that we would go on her again just five months later back out cruising around the Caribbean, but this time to some different islands.  As soon  as we boarded her in Barbados, we felt like we were home. On board we met the DJ who had been on Canberra with us in 1997, and he was on holiday with his girlfriend. We renewed our friendship as well as meeting another couple and this cruise was just like the previous one in so far that we had so much fun both on board and ashore, making great friends (John (the dj) & Gillian became life long friends). I had definitely passed on the cruising bug to Nicola but after we returned from Arcadia news of having a family hadn’t progressed. 

John and Gillian shortly after returning contacted us and encouraged us to join them whilst John was working on board Oriana during the summer so we agreed to go on our third cruise in 8 months !!
This was going to be a cruise that would change our lives for ever and we weren’t aware of this when we boarded Oriana in Southampton in July. We left that evening to probably the warmest sail away I have ever had from Southampton and we partied on deck as John spun the tunes and England was left behind amd we headed to Madeira.

2 days in and Nicola was feeling a bit queasy. She couldn’t quite put her finger on why she was feeling like this amd was wary about getting Norovirus having once suffered it before on Canberra. Erring on the side of caution we paid a visit to the ships hospital to see if they could work out what was wrong.  After running some tests what the nurse told us surprised us and left us elated all at once.  The nurse told us that Nicola was pregnant amd we were at last expecting our first child. Elated with our news we celebrated in private amd after talking about it we decided we would share our news with our parents and also John and Gillian.  We used the ships phone amd my parents were so happy for us but when we called Nicola’s parents whilst they were happy, they seemed to be tinged with sadness. Upon probing them a little we learnt that at the same time as us finding out about Nicola’s great news, sadly her Grandfather had passed away. Nicola was sad but we made plans for the funeral to be held upon our return amd we promised to celebrate our news and continue to enjoy our holiday.

We shared our news with John and Gillian and they were delighted, especially John who decided to not only share our news in Harlequins one evening but he also told the Captain, Hamish Reid who personally came to congratulate us. We loved Oriana as a ship and again she was similar to Canberra but with slightly more modern facilities. With our news, Oriana was going to forever hold a special place in our hearts.

With Nicola expecting, after Oriana in July 2002 we had to put a hold on our cruising but we decided that as soon as our baby was born we would look to book the first P&O cruise that was departing after our baby was old enough to cruise.

We talked about baby names and my attempts to have Oriana in our child’s name didn’t wash with Nicola. However on 4th April 2003 Sophie Amy was born and the plans for our next cruise were in the making.