Wednesday 8th October, 2025 – Southampton to Home (via Hungerford)

And so we arrived back in Southampton ready to disembark after 12 nights of being so well looked after. It was going to be a wrench to get off. Breakfast was early (they stop serving at 08:00 on the final morning and there’s a limited menu), so it was one last Bircher muesli, though I do now have the recipe so I could make it myself.

Bircher muesli

Ingredients (serves four)
150g rolled or quick oats
200ml milk
1 small apple, cored and grated
½ a pear, cored and grated (skin off)
1-2 tablespoons honey
200g Greek yogurt
Sprinkle of cinnamon

Method
1. Combine the oats and milk in a bowl and place in the fridge overnight.
2. In the morning add the apple, pear, honey, yogurt, and cinnamon and mix well.
3. Serve in your desired dish, and customise with your choice of toppings.
To make an even lighter version of the Bircher muesli, you can swap the milk for a dairy alternative, and the Greek yogurt for low-fat yogurt.

After breakfast we were scheduled to disembark around 10:15 but there wasn’t much of a queue so we were off by 9:30 and soon had the car repacked. We had a small detour planned. A long time ago, I lived in Newbury and used to work a second job in a pub not far away, the Red House at Marsh Benham. a couple of decades later when we were regularly travelling from our home to Bristol to see Lynne’s parents, we’d stop off there for food – it had been extensively remodelled, and was now run by a Frenchman and his wife, and the food, which had been good, was now at another level (it’s still the only time I’ve ever enjoyed mushy peas with their sensational fish and chips – and yes I do appreciate the irony that a most British dish was done so well by a French chef). Later they would give up the pub and open a bistro and deli in Hungerford, around 13 miles from Newbury. Now the deli has gone from strength to strength, and I would argue it’s far more of a proper traiteur than a deli as they are usually known in the UK. I had booked us a table for lunch at The Funghi Club and we’d also stock up with “ready meals” to eat over the following couple of days.

We arrived in Newbury far too early, despite the awful traffic getting out of Southampton (I have no idea how long the roadworks on the M27 have been going on but it seems like it’s been forever). We had a potter around what is basically a quiet but prosperous little town with a canal running through it, which was the initial source of its prosperity.

It also has a very high level of charity shop. The one we dipped into supplied me with a cookbook I’ve been looking for for a while, which is not that surprising. It also supplied me two pairs of shoes – a shoe shop had closed and the leftover stock was donated to the shop. There were shoes in my size which was a surprise (I take a UK size 10, which is 45 to most other people and shoes in that size are rarer than hens’ teeth). I tried them on and took the ones that fitted, because they felt very comfortable and were also under £25 a pair from around £130 when originally on sale. Got to love a bargain!

Lunch was fabulous. We started with a Kir Royale each and then ordered the mushroom parfait and the cassolette of prawns and queen scallops (crevettes et pétoncles in French). For mains we opted for the crab gratin (Lynne) and the cassoulet de Carcassonne for me because I cannot resist it – plus Lynne doesn’t like it and so I don’t ever cook it myself. We couldn’t finish either main, so were given foil containers to pack the remains in to take home. We probably shouldn’t have eaten as much of the accompanying delicious bread and butter as we did but it’s easy to be wise after the event! In addition to our leftover lunch dishes, we took home enough different dishes to feed ourselves for several days – just as well as we both came down with bad colds within a day of getting home.

And so, finally, home. The cat was collected from his incarceration, and the luggage was eventually unpacked, laundered and put away. I was very happy with our holiday and had thoroughly enjoyed it although not being in control of our own itinerary is not something I want to do all the time. I do want to go back to Norway and spend more time on the ground, so am now hatching a plan for a Baltic and Nordics road trip in 2027 when I can also take the paid three week sabbatical that my company offers to anyone with over 8 years continuous service. We will almost certainly cruise again, probably in 2028, because we have so much else we want to do first and I only have a finite amount of holiday to play with even with the sabbatical option to play with.