P&O MV Arcadia; Sunday, 26 October, 2025

The previous evening the ships clocks had moved back from Central European Summer Time to British Summer Time at 10pm, giving everyone two 21:00-21:59s. This is pretty standard for a cruise heading back into the UK, but overnight also marked the end of Daylight Savings and at 2am the clocks had jumped back yet another hour giving us all a second 01:00-01:59

This also meant that by the time most people were waking up at 7am, which had been 9am the previous day, the ship was already moored up at the Mayflower Terminal in Southampton, and the sun was up in the sky, significantly brighter and crisper than on the departure.

We had to be out of our cabins at 8am, and we were due at our departure rendezvous point at 8:50, so mum and I met just before 8 to head down to breakfast with our hand luggage.

After breakfast we made our way along the ship to our departure station, located in the theatre at the front, but in the end it turned out so many people had taken advantage of express disembarkation at 7am they didn’t need to hold people on the ship to regulate the flow of disembarking passengers and we were directed to head straight down to the first deck and off the ship.

Despite the first part of the process being quite disorganised, the rest of disembarking went well with our bags being ready for collection as soon as we were in the baggage hall, so it was now just a case of calling the Taxi company and asking if our pre-booked pickup could be brough forward by nearly an hour as we’d made it out so quickly, ready to start the journey back home.