2025 London and TA Day 14: Cruise Day 8 - Qaqartoq, Greenland

Saturday, September 6, 2025

Cruise Compass
Dinner Menu: A Taste of the Caribbean
Today’s Weather
Location at Start of Day
View From the Port Webcam
Location at End of Day

One thing I had learned while researching Greenland was that Greenland, despite being a Danish protectorate, is not part of the EU. What that translates to is that international cell phone plans that work in the EU do NOT work in Greenland. Costs to use your cell phone are about $3.15/min to make a call, $1.90/min to receive a call, $0.50/text, over $6.00/MEGAbyte for data. So the moral of this was to put our phones into airplane mode and confirm that data is off when not connected to the ship’s wireless!

The (reasonable) activity at this port appeared to be simply to walk around. As this is something we can do ourselves I didn’t bother trying to find any kind of organized excursion. Instead, I found a nicely photo-documented walking route that would take us up to a scenic overlook of the port. Whether or not we would have the energy to complete the route was TBD.

As per the Cruise Director, this port is apparently pronounced “Cocker-Talk”) Royal was giving out come-first tender tickets starting at 830A. If you were debarking after 1P you could simply show up and wait for a tender. I arrived at 845A and got tickets for tender #16. We reported to MDR Deck 5 at 1045A when our number was called and were actually boarded and onshore by 1130A.

Before that, however, while standing in line to get my water bottle filled at Caffe Latte around 1030A, it turned out that CD Kat was just in front of me in line, so I chatted with her a bit and got clarification on the scope of responsibility of an Activities Director vs Cruise Director. She also confirmed that they’d had about 60 minutes of Northern Lights “activity” last night but, again, I don’t think it was visible to the naked eye.

Once ashore, tried to follow a Geocaching Adventure for the first time, but the one for Qaqortoq appeared to be misconfigured so instead had to complete the Earthcache Stone & Man. We did attempt to follow the walk up the hill, but only made it halfway before deciding to turn around. We stopped by the town’s small/only grocery to look around. It was perhaps 2x the size of Diekman’s.

The town has several stone carvings on a ridge fronting the road by the pier.

We saw a cruise schedule on the door of the gift shop at the pier listing all the ships that were in that season. Brilliance, listed as having about 2200 pax, was by far the largest ship visiting this 3000-person town. The 5-6 taxis we saw were driving quite aggressively, suggesting that while they love the business they may not love all the people!

Tonight’s Headliner was John Paul Ekins (again) but this time paired with a violinist from the Royal College of Music (London), Lucilla Rose Mariotti. Their combined show was the best of the three.

 

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2025 London and TA Day 13: Cruise Day 7 - Sea Day #3

Friday, September 5, 2025

Cruise Compass
Dinner Menu: Giovanni’s Table  
(MDR Menu: A Taste of Royal History)
Today’s Weather
Location at Start of Day
Location at End of Day

A very relaxing day. We went to the Theater to hear from the Singers and Dancers as part of the ongoing Life@Sea series. This was an insight into their audition, casting, rehearsal, performance, and general production processes. Continued with the Life@Sea theme by heading to Colony Club to hear from Kat (Cruise Director) and the Hotel Manager (nominally her boss) as they handled Q&A from the audience.

At the Theater mid-day for another performance by Ekins, this time doing Moonlight Sonata, Clare de Lune, and the Warsaw Concerto from the 1942 movie “Dangerous Moonlight”, ham-fistedly renamed “Suicide Squadron” for its US release. All were very nice and the theater was a full as we’d see it all cruise.

Seas today were fast and a little choppy, but nothing like the first night. Winds were howling however, and when we walked past a door leading outside after the show we got a good blast of very cold air.

Dinner in Giovanni’s was nice – we both enjoyed it a lot.

The Headliner was ventriloquist Jerry Goodspeed. He was entertaining, although kind of “more of the same” when it comes to ventriloquists. His act was gentle, however, as opposed to vulgar, and that was nice. His finale has him controlling two of his dummies doing a duet with himself, including seeming to simultaneously having both dummies singing together!

At around 1130P Cruise Director Kat made a general announcement that folks reported Northern Lights were visible, but we were tired and decided not to get up. It isn’t clear whether lights were ACTUALLY visible to the naked eye. In talking with others during later days it sounds to me like what people saw was only through cameras, much like our outing in Reykjavik. So we don’t think we actually missed anything.

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2025 London and TA Day 12: Cruise Day 6 - Reykjavik, Iceland

Thursday, September 4, 2025

Location at End of Day

In March 2025 I booked us a bus tour (via Costco and ShoreExcursionsGroup.com) of Gullfoss, Geysir & Thingvellir.  I had to first check the excursions offered by Royal because ShoreExcursionsGroup showed us leaving Reykjavik at 11:59P while Royal said 5:00P, and I of course needed to be sure that we’d get back in time.  All of the Royal excursions seemed to arrive back at the ship no later than 4:00P, and since the 3^rd party excursion also came back at 4:00P I figured I didn’t need to worry about their incorrect sail away time.  Of course, by using a 3^rd party site I was able to save about $50 per person over Royal’s price.  Sadly, on May 20 I got a confusing email from the tour operator saying they had move the tour start time to 12:00P to “fit [our] ship’s itinerary”.  To me, that meant they either were shortening the trip to 4 hours (which I didn’t think was physically possible) or they were going to deliver us back to the dock two hours post-sailaway.  I felt like I had no choice but to cancel the trip due to their confounding communication.

Since we had no multi-hour bus trip, we were able to sleep until 10A following our early morning return to the ship.  We then grabbed a quick donut/bagel at the WJ before catching a shuttle to Harpa by 11A.  We decided it was too complicated to deal with using city buses to get to Perlan, so instead we walked over to the Museum of Photography and saw a really interesting retrospective spanning 50 years of work by photojournalist Gunnar V. Andrésson.

From there we decided to head back over to the downtown area to see if we could find lunch.  We ended up at a place called Icelandic Street Food, which served up soups.  It was a mixed bag.  I had the Spicy Tomato while W got the Fisherman’s Special, which we both thought would be a seafood soup but instead turned out to be more like a bowl of fish paste.  We combined the two and made the 2^nd better, but still not great.

We then wandered over to Rainbow Street and got some photos, but my phone’s battery was exhausted by the end of this so no more pictures of Reykjavik after this.  That’s OK, because we were ready to head back to the ship anyway – particularly since we couldn’t find any ice cream in the area. 

 So at 2P we re-boarded and dipped into the stockpiled chocolate from the Clermont minibar and E’s remaining Gingerbread Oreos before heading down to Schooner for the afternoon.  This was the first time we got the Handcrafted Margs and actually enjoyed our cocktails sans terrible OJ.

Tonight’s Headliner was pianist John Paul Ekins presenting music built around VERY earnest stories.  Technically and musically good, but a bit pretentious!  Played Chopin, March of the Tin Soldiers, Rhapsody in Blue, and ended with Hey Jude/Give Peace a Chance.  Before going to bed we set the clocks back another hour.

 

 

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2025 London and TA Day 11: Cruise Day 5 - Reykjavik, Iceland

Wednesday, September 3, 2025

Dinner Menu: Taste of the Mediterranean
Today’s Weather
Location at Start of Day (failed to record it)
Location at End of Day

In April 2025 someone on the CC Roll Call for our cruise mentioned the Perlan Museum, which I hadn’t previously heard of. It actually sounded quite interesting, so I began to look into the logistics of trying to get there on arrival day. The basic options seemed to be the (fee-based) HOHO bus, a taxi, or city buses. The HOHO was quickly ruled out given our noon arrival, the route’s 1.5-2.0 hour round trip timing, and HOHO’s last boarding time of 4:30P. Logistically, that was simply cutting things too tight. Taxis were do-able, but wait times of up to one hour post-arrival sounded nasty.

City bus actually seemed pretty reasonable. There was a stop at the port that we could walk to in under 10 minutes, and the Perlan stop was (no more then) 15 minutes away from the museum – so a one-way trip would take around 40-45 minutes point-to-point, cost us about $5.25pp each way, and the buses ran until at least 7P – so we could potentially exit the ship at 1P, spend 2-3 hours at Perlan, and still be back onboard by around 5:30P in time for both dinner and a rest before our planned 10:00P excursion to see the Northern Lights! I was very confused regarding whether or not you could do a contactless credit card payment onboard or not. So many sites said that, within the city limits of Reykajavik, you had to use their app on-board. I finally discovered that contactless payment had officially debuted in December 2024 so there was no need to get the app. We could just scan our credit cards when boarding and all would be good!

The more I looked the more I was intrigued. Turns out that The Icelandic Phallological Museum (aka The Penis Museum) was right along the bus route we’d be taking to/from the Perlan. Given that TripAdvisor suggested that the Perlan was around a 2 hour event and the Phal was about an hour, it seemed likely that we could do BOTH during the afternoon of Day 11 of our trip. I figured that the gift shop of the Phal would be more than worth the effort to add a stop. 😊

I had hesitated to take the phone out of airplane mode due to dire warnings about the expense of roaming in Iceland. However, since reliable location services required this – and I also had added international phone service – I finally did this and discovered our Verizon plan included 250 minutes of phone/text plus 20GB of data, so I kept mine running for the rest of the trip as I expected it would last us just fine.







We didn’t get clearance to debark until early afternoon, so we had lunch at WJ first, then made our way to the gangway. Shuttle service from the pier was running at a faster pace during the initial hours after the gangway went down. Despite a long line, shuttles were arriving about every 6 minutes and we were able to board the 3rd bus to arrive and were taken to Harpa within about 5 minutes. Harpa is a very striking building and I took several pictures.









From there, we walked over to the Penis Museum (to think: had things gone as originally planned we could have visited the Vagina AND Penis Museums!) but, finding that there was a collection of free artwork (mostly cartoons) in the entryway and the giftshop was also free, we decided not to pay for admission. Instead, we grabbed a free city guide on our way out (having failed to grab the free lit available when we exited the pier) and Google Map’ed our way to some souvenir shops in hopes to find things for the kids as well as a Christmas ornament for ourselves. We eventually (on about the 3rd try) found what we were looking for and made some purchases.





We stopped at a nearby park to get pictures of the iconic statue of Ingólfr Arnarson and, while there, I realized I’d failed to check around for geocaches. So I pulled out c:geo and started investigating.



I found out that there was one nearby called Þjóðleikhúsið, which translates to “National Theatre”. That seemed quite appropriate to be our Icelandic cache so we walked over to look for. Just as we got to GZ and I looked down to my phone a voice behind us said “hey, are you looking for a geocache?” Turned around and met fellow-shipmates Laura and Graham Lan, retirees who are living a semi-nomadic existence. We found the cache together and then enjoyed chatting with them for about 40 minutes before returning to the ship around 335P. Grabbed a couple drinks from the Pool Bar and then enjoyed some beautiful balcony time in our cabin.

The evening activity was the Northern Lights tour, led by Christian, a former Australian/German banker who has since become an Icelandic “aurora chaser”. He became unhappy with the way various aurora prediction websites presented info and created his own site, https://emeraldskies.is (and also https://emerarlskies.au). During our bus ride down to near Keflakik (pronounced “Keplavik”) International Airport he gave us a great explanation of the fundamentals of both aurora science as well as prediction model science so we could understand how to read the data. We had ideal darkness and clear skies, but the sun’s activity wasn’t ideal and, as such, we never had significant activity visible to the naked eye. Cameras picked up varying evidence, ranging from average photos from my Samsung S21 to pretty good shots from various iPhones to amazing shots from Christian’s expensive SLR with wide-angle lens. However, to the naked eye what we saw could have just as easily been urban light pollution. Kind of looked like clouds lit by moonlight, except there weren’t any clouds. We left the viewing location about 2A and were back onboard by 3A. While we didn’t get the results we wanted we still had a good time, made so by Christian’s commentary.

My camera:



Christian’s camera:

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2025 London and TA Day 10: Cruise Day 4 - Sea Day #2

Tuesday, September 2, 2025

Cruise Compass
Dinner Menu: Izumi    (MDR Menu: Taste of Mexico)
Today’s Weather
Location at Start of Day
Location at End of Day

Captain’s Corner was hampered a bit by the occasional mis-understanding of questions by the captain (Captain Juan).

New desserts tried at lunch: Pistachio Apricot Cake (not bad, just a bit one-note, not enough apricot) and Praline Chocolate Crème Puffs (ditto) and Churros (good).

We started playing a new campaign of The Crew using the special JARVIS 3^rd player rules.  We would ultimately complete all 50 missions during the cruise in 83 attempts, as the game is much simpler with only 2 players.  It did, however, still manage to “feel” like a perfectly cromulent playthrough, so we were very pleased we’d brought it along.

I tried one of Schooner’s specialty drinks: Peanut Butter Tropic.  Would not normally order a whiskey-based drink, but the novelty won me over.  I had spoken yesterday to a woman at the bar who’d asked the bartender to make it for her, but “make it more like a PB&J”.  The bartender had apparently added something like strawberry puree and Frangelico and created a winner.

I was incorrect about our trivia performance: we actually tied for 1^st today on one of the puzzle games where you had to come up with two-word phrases starting the “R” and “C” that matched the clues given.  We tied with 25/30…but didn’t try to assert our claim on another keychain.

Dinner at Izumi was disappointing.  There’s just not enough choices to satisfy E, so unless/until we find a Izumi Hibachi/teppanyaki there’s no point in going again.  We didn’t know the optimal pathway to Izumi (via a staircase in the Windjammer) so had made the mistake of going up to Deck 13 and having to work our way aft in blustery, wet winds.  When we left we did find the stairs down to WJ and had intended to get our dessert there, but the options were uninspiring so we went dessert-less this night.

The Headliner tonight, comedy juggler Steve Rawlings, was excellent.  His act was quite funny and he did some unique skills we’d not seen before.

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2025 London and TA Day 9: Cruise Day 3 - Greenock, Scotland

Monday, September 1, 2025

Cruise Compass
Dinner Menu: A Taste of the UK
Today’s Weather
Location at Start of Day
View From the Port Webcam
Location at End of Day

When first thinking about the trip I had assembled a lot of self-led walking tours of various ports because, with the exception of our Alaska trip, we’ve generally avoided official shore excursions and I expected we’d follow the same approach this trip.  However, as we got into 2025 I started to have a change of heart, and Greenock was the first port where I proposed a sponsored excursion.  Specifically, I found an option to take a bus trip in order to see Stirling Castle. This was an “official” RCCL shore excursion, so we finally got to experience their process for ship-sponsored tours.  The excursion was 4:40 in length, departing at 9:00A, which suggested that we’ll only have about 2 hours at Stirling itself – but we’d see how it went!

It actually went quite well.  Our received our tickets in our stateroom upon arrival, and then reported to the Theater around 830A where we were giving an excursion number label that we adhered to our clothing.  When called, we were escorted down to the gangway and onto our bus, which drove us over to Stirling.  We had a driver and a separate guide who narrated the bus ride to describe what sights we were passing by and gave us history and factoids about Scotland.  He also called ahead to pre-arrange entry tickets to the castle so we didn’t have to wait in the ticket line.

Upon arrival at the castle most of our bus (including us) opted for the guided tour.  Our guide, Joni, was a bundle of energy and gave us a great (mostly outdoor) tour of about 55 minutes, ending about 2 minute before heavy rain hit.  That gave us the excuse to buy some snacks and eat under shelter before we took in a couple of quick exhibits and returned to the bus around 1215P for the trip back, arriving at the ship around 210P. 

 

After a quick WJ snack, we went down to Schooner where we met Christine, a travel agent from AZ, who we’d see several more times on the trip.

Tonight’s show was the RC Singers and Dancers.  The usual hit-and-miss with the singers, while the dancers seemed pretty good.  Only 8 dancers on this ship, so a smaller complement than usual.  There was an “oops” moment where one of the male dancers almost dropped his partner on a lift, but not a major spill.

We had our first onboard time change tonight, with clocks being set back one hour at bedtime.

 

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