Sunday January 11th, 2026 Queen Anne, Southampton, England

Today we returned to Southampton and said goodbye to Billy and Tracy who are returning to Scotland. Yesterday evening we spent a little time packing up our cabin and today the stewards will move our things down the hall from 7049 to 7099. As we had left two suit bags unopened, and most of our things were on hangers in the wardrobes the move should be pretty easy. Our new cabin is a Club Balcony and allows us to take all of our meals in the Club Restaurant at the same table with the same servers. We went off to do some essential shopping in Southampton while the stewards took care of our move. The Cunard shuttle bus dropped us at the main shopping mall and as many of the shops were not yet open, we found a coffee shop and filled our time with an excellent latte. The main focus for our shopping was to buy the things that we need for the world voyage but did not bring along from home; most of this was achieved at Marks and Spencer and Boot the Chemist. With the rain beginning to fall, and a bit of a wait for the bus, I ordered an Uber and we made our way back to the ship.

We knew that storage space was going to be tight on the Queen Anne, having sailed on her briefly in 2024 – and with all of the clothes required for a world voyage we were a bit concerned. However we found the new cabin to be slightly bigger than our original and with a slightly different wardrobe configuration; one trick we’ve learned over the years is to have our steward remove all of the thick wooden hangers from the wardrobes as we bring our own thin wire hanger that enable a lot more items to be hung. In addition the floor manager saw that we had a lot of luggage and provided us with a plastic 5-drawer unit that has come in really handy. Other tricks we use; we bring a few flat pack storage cubes that are about 1ft square and provide really handy storage under the sink or on top of the vanity unit. In addition we use a large concertina shoe storage cubby, the kind that normally hang on the back of doors – on some of the ships this can be hung over the end of the main wardrobe. But on Queen Anne the wardrobe extends all the way to the ceiling so, before leaving home, I devised a method of hanging the cubby storage unit from the ceiling of the cabin using strong magnets and a short piece of dowel. The cubby system works great as it folds very flat for fitting in our suitcase and opens up to not only store shoes but all manner of other items. Finally we bring a range of other strong magnets to create more coat hooks in the cabin. Using all of these enhancements we managed to get everything unpacked and the 4 large cases stored under the bed.