Today we board the ship.   The Prinsendam arrived yesterday from it's last cruise, Amsterdam-Bordeaux-Spain-London, and when they have all departed and things are straight again, we can get on.   We were dropped off by Trevor who had driven us to the terminal, only a 30 minute drive from home, and our luggage was taken straight away.   We booked in, fairly painlessly compared to Vancouver on the Alaska tour in 2007, and waited for about 3/4 hour to board.

The London Cruise Terminal at Tilbury is not exactly the best place to be kicking ones heels, there are no facilities to speak of, and nothing much to do.   However the Prinsendam hotel staff had provided coffee and cakes, etc.   We should have done some photography, instead we just sat and waited and read the days broadsheet.   They had told us we would be boarding shortly.   Boarding is done in the standard HAL method, in groups, by coloured numbers.

Once onboard, we went straight to the Mariners Welcome Lunch; a leisurely, relaxing lunch where we met John and Jan Strokis from San Francisco and Regina and Edward also from America.   The welcome boarding lunch is a marriner's priviledge, but strangely most went to the Lido on boarding; although nearly everyone on this trip is a Mariner (we have just the one star).   After lunch the cabins were ready and unpacking began, (we had cabin 509, an MM class stateroom on the Dolphin Deck).   Although people say the cheaper inside cabins are small, we found it quite adequate for the two of us.

At 4:00 p.m. we met with the Cruise Critics committee to help finalise our badges and room sheets, ready for collection or distribution by Ironlegs.   Towards the end of the session some CC members of our roll call stopped by to say hello and pick up their name badges.   These had been prepared for us by Rev Neal, seen here (in the middle) relaxing with a cup of coffee after all the hard work.

Tomorrow we plan to have a trip to Gravesend on the foot ferry, I hope I can use my bus pass.

We finished the evening with a film, (we are not show or casino goers) so we had bought some of our DVDs just in case we had seen all the on-board films.   As it turned out their selection was a good mix of recent and fairly recent films, with many in the gap between cinema and commercial DVD release.   Over the cruise we managed to cross many films off our "Wanted" and "To View" lists.   See cruise.htm for a list of what we watched.

This is a Satellite image of Tilbury from Google earth showing the Cruise Terminal dock, the ferry dock and Gravesend on the south side of the river.   There are many of these scattered throughout the blog, some are links to Google Earth and some are saved, stitched images.   These satellite images and maps are copyright Google see their terms and conditions.   There is more information about the cruise terminal, and Tilbury/Gravesend in general, on my Cruise Critics Information page.   We have already looked at Tilbury Fort, but we might give the World's End pub a go.

Captain Albert's Blog: Changeover day Tilbury