August 25th, 2026

Our luck with the good weather ended today. We woke up to cloudy and rainy and it stayed that way all day. We had a ship’s excursion in the afternoon. We did not dock until 10am so most private excursions did not want to leave that late. Our plan was to walk around town and see the sites.

Cobh is very colorful and its big claim to fame is that this is the last stop the Titanic made to pick up passengers. On April 11, 1912 123 people from the area boarded the Titanic via tender boats for the trip to America. Most were 3rd class ticket holders seeking new lives; escaping a poor job market , famine & poverty. Only 54 survived the sinking. There is a Titanic experience museum here also where they talk about the different people on the boat from the area. From Cobh you can go to the Jameson distillery and also to Blarney castle. We have done both before so we opted to stay in Cobb

We walked into town in the drizzle and Kathy saw a bar that was advertising Irish coffees so we decided to stop in and get one.

When I went to pay at the bar I realized that unlike Northern Ireland that uses pounds, The Republic of Ireland uses Euros. I had left my Euros in the safe on board. So I left Kathy at the pub and went back to the ship to get the Euros. I was a little concerned leaving Kathy in an Irish pub but all was good on my return.

Cobh is full of colorful houses and this row is called “deck of cards”. It is a row of 25 different houses and they are on a very steep street that goes up to the cathedral.

The cathedral Is quite large and towers over the city. They have a large pipe organ with great stained glass windows.

You can see our boat sticking out over the city.

We overheard several locals talking about the weather and saying this was the first rain they had in 8 weeks.

We walked around for a bit, went back to the same pub so Kathy could try their Murphy’s Irish red beer. Mostly we were trying to stay out of the rain. We had to be back to the boat by 2:15 to meet our tour so we returned and had a quick sandwich since we were supposed to do a boat tour in a rigid inflatable boat but as the weather deteriorated the company canceled the tour at the last minute 🙁

Since we had the opportunity we went back out and found some fish and chips at a nearby restaurant 🙂

Kathy with her Murphy’s Irish red and the condiments they serve with the fish & chips. We shared a plate. I was thrilled because they served it with a nice tartar sauce with dill and Kathy used the malt vinegar.

We walked around a little bit more

More views of the colorful town.

As the rain continued and we had seen everything we wanted to see and done a little bit of shopping and a stop at the grocery store we headed back on board. We were a little late in leaving Cobh because we had a passenger disembark to an ambulance. Since our next stop is not for 6 days and we are crossing the Atlantic, where there is no help if needed we figured the passenger disembarked to be on the safe side.

The meals on Princess are much better than we remember. Also since we have the Premiere package we can eat in the speciality restaurants at no charge as many times as we want. We have taken advantage of that a lot and greatly prefer the Crown Grill where we can get filet mignons or lobster. The cover charges for the speciality restaurants has gone up to $55 per person so we want to make sure we get our monies worth.

We now have 5 days at sea crossing the Atlantic. We will stop twice, first on August 31st (Sydney Nova Scotia, Canada) and then Sept 1st in Halifax. 1 more sea day on the 2nd before disembarking on Sept 3rd in Boston.

We are hoping the weather stays cool and that I get to play a little mah jongg in the afternoon.

We won’t post every sea day since they are basically the same and just do 1 post at the end of the sea days before we hit Nova Scotia, Canada.