Day one. Barcelona. The flight from Liverpool and subsequent transfer was pretty painless. We were in celebration/guilt mode anyway. When we had booked the cruise, father in law was pretty well, but he fell over 10 days before we were due to leave. It looked unlikely we would be able to go at all. Then on the day before our flight, we felt he had recovered sufficiently for us to leave him in hospital with respite care to follow.

NCL offers a coach transfer from the airport to the cruise ship, but it’s a bit of a hike from the terminal to the coach. I think we would take a taxi and pay a few euros more another time. We visited the duty free, got our ciggies and were on board supping our first half of lager within 2 hours of landing at the airport and 9 hours after getting up which is pretty good. After a drear Macclesfield winter this Barcelona steel blue sky was sheer heaven.

Rant of the day. We have been on three cruises and have to say that the emergency drills on all of them have been pretty skimpy. I note that NCL were not interested enough in their post cruise feedback email (which takes ages to complete) to even mention it. On this one we stood in serried ranks for nearly half an hour for a very short non hands on demonstration. Read more