South to London Tilbury

This morning, Tracey and I were up early, and very organised (not like us at all), and heading down the A1 towards Tilbury Cruise Terminal, all in good time and absolutely bang-on to schedule.

The journey was smooth and uneventful… until we hit the A14, near Cambridge. I thought we had it bad up North, with the improvements to the A1 between Leeming and Barton, that just seem to be going on forever, and causing constant disruption. I have to say that the A14 improvements seem to be taking dusruption to a whole new level.

Fortunately, I had Tracey in the navigator’s seat wielding the AA travel app on her phone, so when the traffic came quickly to a grinding halt, with little hope of movement anytime soon, we were able to take the first exit, away from the stationary traffic, and make a couple of round-the-houses jumps, that eventually brought us back onto the A14 and into moving traffic, and having lost hardly any time at all.

We arrived at Tilbury Cruise Terminal in good time. Within the space of about 45 minutes, we’d deposited our luggage with the porters, parked the van in the long-stay car park, filled out the compulsory medical questionnaire to say that we are fit as fiddles, checked-in and been given our plastic cruise cards, jumped the passenger check-in queues (being on the VIP list n’ all), boarded and found our way to our cabin.

We spent our first hour or so on board reacquainting ourselves with the ship, walking around and stopping off at the bistro for a light lunch and an overdue cup of tea.

One thing we remember from our previous stay on the Magellan is the garden on the back deck, which is lovely, relaxing place to sit and watch the world go by. This was the view of the sun setting over the Thames as we set sail for our first port, Amsterdam, where we will be arriving tomorrow morning.

By the evening, we were both completely shattered. We ate dinner in the bistro and crashed-out in the on-board pub (which replaces the old Scotts Bar, and gets a massive, enthusiastic thumbs-up from me).

Amsterdam here we come…