Don & Kully's World Cruise on Viking Neptune

Today was the day every cruiser dreads, disembarkment day. Most of our friends were flying home today, so they had very early transfers to the airport, some began as early as 3:00 AM, but since we are staying on in London for three nights we didn’t have to leave until 9:00 AM. We had our final breakfast in the World Cafe with two other couples who are also staying in London. After saying our final goodbyes, we left the Viking Neptune to begin our adventures in London.

We were a little concerned about disembarking at the Greenwich Cruise port, as there’s no cruise terminal. The ship was moored in the river and a barge converted to tender pier was, tied alongside the ship. Dedicated city water taxis (uber boats), are used to tender passenger the few hundred yards to shore. As on other cruises, luggage was collected the night before and transferred to shore via barges where it was waiting for us in small tents in the yard of the Old Naval College. The process actually works very well. Fortunately, most of the passengers were flying home, so their ground transportation was taken care of by Viking and the airport shuttles we scheduled about 30 minutes apart, so I don’t think there was ever a massive amount of people trying to get off at the same time. There were baggage handlers available to assist with getting bags to Shuttles, Taxis or Car services. The only negative to the process was some of the shuttles went very early in the morning, so keep that in mind if you’re planning to do a World Cruise in the future. I’ll write more about that later in the “Lessons Learned” section of the blog.

Whenever we travel internationally, we use a car service call “Black Lane” for airport and cruise terminal transfers. Black Lane is executive car service that provides a dedicated car and driver. You book the service ahead of time using the Black Lane App. The service is a little more expensive, but they are extremely reliable, well worth the extra expense. Anyway, our driver was waiting for us as scheduled and quickly loaded our bags and took us to are apartment in the Soho neighborhood in central London. We met our host Ali who owns two beautiful apartments in a thirteen-story building. Ali also owns a small “Mediterranean Cafe” just around the corner from the apartment. We are on the 13th floor with great views of London.

We were checked into our apartment by 11:00 am and we headed off to Leicester Square, about a five-minute walk, to the TKT theater ticket booth. The TKT ticket booth sells discounted same day tickets for shows playing in London’s Westend theater district. We had a list of three or four plays we would like to see, our first choice being Hamilton. We were thrilled to get amazing seats – third row, center in the royal circle for Hamilton. With tickets in our pocket, we walked an additional five minutes to Trafalgar Square for a visit to the National Gallery of London. The National Gallery is celebrating is 200th anniversary. The gallery houses a collection of more than 2,300 paintings dating from the 13th century to 1900. The collection is smaller than many European national galleries, but encyclopedic in scope; most major developments in Western painting are represented with important works. Needless to say, we were very impressed.

Our Van Gogh Experience!

We finished off the afternoon with a glass of wine at our host Ali’s Mediterranean Cafe before taking a short subway ride to Victorian Station for our Theater date. We had dinner in pub called the “Duke of York” which is next door to the Victoria Palace Theatre where Hamilton is playing.

The theater was beautiful, and the show exceeded our expectations. The music was amazing, ranging from traditional “Broadway style” show tunes to Rap that told the story of Hamilton and the American Revolution. One of the most powerful theater performances I’ve ever seen. If you’re a theater fan, Hamilton is a must see.

This is obviously the last blog post under the Ports of Call category, but we will add to our lessons learned list/posts in coming days. If any of you are planning a World Cruise feel free to ask questions in the comments block and we’ll be happy to respond.

The last 138 days have been an incredible adventure. We have met incredible people along the way, seen amazing sites, listened to great lectures, ate great food all from the comfort of a beautiful cruise ship. We learned to be flexible with our planning as we can’t control world events or the weather, so we became pretty good at pivoting and quickly changing plans. Africa wasn’t in our original plan, but happy we got to go there, and we even enjoyed the extended days at sea. There are many places we would love to go back to and spend a little more time, but that always seems to be the case when we travel. We are just grateful that we have our health and the ability to take a trip like this and hope that we have many more adventures ahead of us. Thanks for following along!