ICELAND CRUISE 2026

It's late August 2026 and we are on a cruise to Iceland. Once more we are on board the Sky Princess and indeed in the same cabin as for our mediterranean cruise last year (L217). We set off from Southampton yesterday and, travelling westwards, we arrived this morning just a few miles along the coast in Weymouth.

There were a few threatening clouds overhead as we arrived but fortunately these gave no more than an odd raindrop or so and no sooner had we put on our raincoats than the rain stopped and we were left with a lovely sunny morning.

Cobh was originally named Cove but was renamed to Queenstown following a visit by Queen Victoria (when her ship got stuck for a number of hours on a sandbank in the harbour (she was not amused!). Following independence, the town was again renamed to Cove but they adopted the Gaelic spelling of Cobh ... the bh is pronounced as v as in the girl's name Siobhan.

We thought that there were two main places to visit whilst stopping here: The Deck of Cards Houses (see the first photograph below) and Spike Island (which is the Irish Alcatraz ... as the island was the location of what, for a time at least, was the largest prison in the world).

Queenstown was the last stop where passengers boarded the Titanic before it set off across the Atlantic. At that time the pier in Queenstown was not large enough for the Titanic to berth against and so it actually stopped just off Spike Island and the joining passengers were transferred across from the mainland by tender boats.

The prison at Spike Island was originally a military base built for the Napoleonic Wars. Of course, at that time it was owned and operated by the British. It stayed that way, and used as a prison, until 1938 when Spike Island was finally ceded to the Irish. It then remained as an operational prison until the first few years of the 21st century before being left abandoned. The prison was turned into a tourist attraction in 2016.

Here are some views of the town of Cobh:

We have now landed in Iceland. Rather than walk around the city of Reykjavik, we decided that the most important thing was to experience the countryside and therefore we took one of the full-day ship excursions and visited the Gulfloss Waterfall and Geysir (from where our english word "geyser" is derived), as well as travelling to see where the tectonic plates of Eurasia and North America meet. All sights were amazing!

This is where the tectonic plates meet:

The North American plate is on the left and the Eurasian plate is on the right: