As the sun sets on 2021 (the reason for the photo chosen for this blog post, in case that’s not blindingly obvious) the clock ticks around to 2021 Summary Blog Post O’Clock. Traditions, eh?
Certainly, when comparing 2021 to 2020 in terms of travelling, it’s been a far more enjoyable year even if it’s not been without its stressful periods. When you’re considering whether it’s better to be worried about passing infection tests and being allowed to travel with simply not travelling at all and receiving cancellation email after cancellation email, then we will always favour the first.
So, we didn’t get to travel far, but we did manage five cruises. Three of them went nowhere at all, one kept us wholly within British waters, and only one sought out sunnier climes. We got to tick off a new country on our visited list, and we hopped on four ships we’d never cruised on before. We’ve had it okay.
The end of the year has been a quiet one on the website thanks to some technical issues, the sorting out of which just seemed to sap all the blogging energy out of me. If you really want to know what those technical website issues were – and I know nobody is likely to want to know, but it might help someone out one day; you never know – then this site uses a content delivery network to host the images that you see, but in order for that CDN to fetch the images it needs to request them from the server on which this site is hosted, and that server had some security upgrades that started detecting those requests as a denial of service attack, and blocked them. The result was missing images, and the solution, after adjusting the security module’s settings, involved checking every single gallery on every single page of this site, and editing to reupload the images wherever there were any missing. That. Took. Weeks.
Anyway, that’s done now, and while I was doing that I removed some unnecessary bits plus finally implemented a cache, so the site should be both fine and marginally faster to load. Like anyone will notice.
Cruising In 2021
As mentioned, we managed to cruise five times this year, but, as hinted at, not an awful lot of that has been written about yet.
We’ve met some lovely people on these cruises. And we’ve met some people.
Our first escape from the country was a few days pottering about off the English coast on Regal Princess. It didn’t feel like a normal cruise because that simply wasn’t possible, and there were issues with the technology, apparent problems with staffing levels, and there are still aspects of the Royal-class ships we’re not keen on. But it was great to be back at sea. You can read about that cruise here: Regal Princess Seacation.
The second cruise was aboard Scarlet Lady, the first cruise ship from Virgin Voyages. This was the big unknown, given all the press releases about how they were going to do things differently for the hell of it, and this was a big risk, given the PR nights they’d organised that couldn’t have looked less appealing if they’d tried. But then they decided to run some cruises out of Portsmouth, and they threw in a lot of credit if you booked a suite, and one thing led to another. You can read about this cruise here – Scarlet Lady Weekender Cruise – but to spoil it a little if you’ve not already read any of those posts, we were so impressed with our experience on Scarlet Lady that we’ve booked for her sister ship, Valiant Lady, and, as things stand, that will be the first of our 2022 cruises.
The third cruise, and the last to feature no port stops, was on P&O’s Iona. Our least favourite cruise of the year for many reasons. At the time of writing this end-of-the-year post, I still haven’t finished blogging about that, but you can read what’s been said so far about the week in the Bay of Biscay on the largest ship we’ve cruised on to date here: Iona Week Cruise.
Cruise number four was a week on Sky Princess which saw us sail around the coast to Portland, Belfast, and Liverpool. For both of us this was the first time we’d visited Belfast, and the first time hitting anywhere on the island of Ireland at all for my wife. It was good to be able to get off the ship and take excursions again, and we got to see the Giant’s Causeway. Sky Princess was a lovely ship, too; an evolution of the Royal-class that we don’t like, this felt better in most ways to us. Handy, since we’ve got two more cruises on her booked for next year.
The final cruise of 2021 was the only one to take place on a ship we’ve cruised on before: P&O’s Ventura. To be honest, we had some concerns ahead of this cruise because of how disappointing Iona had been, but we actually had a great time on the ship, and it was wonderful to visit Portugal and the Canary Islands for the first time.
No links to those cruise travelogues, of course, because I haven’t got around to them yet, but here, have a few photos from the experiences as teasers:
One of the big reasons we only chose to cruise in 2021 was because of the health requirements. Cruising still remains the cleanest, safest way to travel. Even before the pandemic, cruise ships were clean environments, testing often in order to isolate issues. The only reason you hear about outbreaks on cruise ships is because they report what they’re doing. I can go and stay in a hotel without needing proof of vaccination, without taking a test before entering, and with freedom to mingle with a brand new bunch of potentially anti-vax strangers every day, and if I’m a carrier spreading a virus around then you’ll never get to hear about it. A cruise ship can report that it’s isolating three people as a precaution and it will be on the news, in the papers, and likely about to find its next port refusing it entry. The cruise industry is a responsible industry and we feel safe travelling by cruise ship.
Health In 2021
There’s not a lot else to report because we didn’t travel anywhere in the country this year; no weekend breaks; no overnight stays; not even a day trip. But being prepared to travel abroad and just not being pricks has meant we’ve made sure to get our vaccinations as soon as they were offered, and we’ve both gone for a cocktail of a double shot of AstraZeneca with a booster of Pfizer floated on top.
My wife had some time off work in the middle of the year, signed off with stress, the result of a high blood pressure reading; that was a result of just too much work piling up following numerous people leaving the department she works in, itself a mixture of all the shit problems we knew Brexit would be and having ideological incompetents running the country and working for a company that loves its managers and doesn’t really understand what the people who actually do work really have to do. I’ve also become a statistic among the highly-strung population (I know! Me! Calm, quiet, never quick-to-anger me!), although my hope that I could get signed off too, to see if that helped, has been scuppered as my surgery wants me to start popping pills instead. Fine.
Happy to report that among our close friends and family nobody has succumbed to the Big Virus, although several friends outside the core circle have found themselves isolating with mild symptoms or positive tests at various points. We’re lucky to have surrounded ourselves with mostly sensible people who look out for the wider community. I have a low tolerance for people who centre the world on themselves.
Cruising In 2022 And 2023
Naturally, these plans are subject to world events and the repercussions of whatever letter variant of Covid we reach thanks to the ongoing efforts of the anti-vaxxers to keep spreading and mutating the virus, and the governments who worry about how they’re going to get their kickbacks if businesses need to shut in order to save lives. Always remember that when someone tells you we need to start living with the virus, what they mean is that they’re mildly inconvenienced and want to take a gamble on accepting other people dying from the virus.
Even though it’s the hot topic that nobody can get enough of, I think I’m done with virus talk now. And the crowd goes wild.
Valiant Lady will be our first cruise of 2022. Like Scarlet Lady, we’ll be taking a weekender trip out of our home city, and we’ll be in the exact same type of suite in the exact same place on the ship. We did like that room a lot. There will be a stop, however, and that will be to Zeebrugge. At the moment we haven’t decided what we’ll do there as we’re waiting to see what Virgin offer in the way of excursions, but if nothing tickles our fancy – we’ve been to Bruges and Ghent before – then we might even just wander off and explore Blankenberge as that’ll be new. It’s got an aquarium, and we like those.
The next two cruises we’ve got booked will both be on Sky Princess. The first of those will be visiting Norway and Denmark, with Copenhagen being the only port of four that we’ll have visited before. The second cruise is a longer one, hitting Norway again, but this time for a few fjord-based stops ahead of cruising around the northern coast of Iceland. Olden will be the only Norwegian port we’ll have visited before, while Iceland’s capital Reykjavik is very familiar to us, although this will be the first time cruising to it.
The final cruise of 2022 is planned for Island Princess, an older and narrower cruise ship, and one that you may not be surprised to learn will be hitting Norway yet again; Oslo: the second visit to that city in the year as the first Sky Princess cruise will be breaking our Norwegian capital virginity. It will also visit Copenhagen and Zeebrugge for those cities’ second visits of the year, but in addition to the new ports in familiar countries of Gothenburg and Rotterdam, will also make a stop at Hamburg, marking our first time in Germany.
Fingers crossed, and all that.
As you can see, all cruises next year sailing from the UK, and all in nearby countries in northern Europe. We’re not quite ready for how many hoops we will have to jump through for international flights and testing requirements yet, but we’ve had a momentary flare of optimism and used the remainder of some cruise credit to also book a week’s cruise in 2023 that will involve a plane journey. That cruise will be on P&O’s Azura, and if that goes ahead then we’ll get to check Croatia off the visited countries list too.
New Year’s Resolution
Enough of this post. Nobody really likes reading these things anyway.
We’re childless atheists so we haven’t done anything special for Christmas and we don’t make a big deal about the changing over of the calendar either. However, if you’re the sort who celebrates this sort of thing, then have a happy new year. If you’re the sort who makes a resolution, then do like I do and make it an easy one to follow. I’m going to resolve to post more often than I have done over the last few months. That shouldn’t be difficult at all. Just think how good I’m going to feel when I achieve that.
Our travel year has been confined to the US: Puerto Rico and a road trip thru California’s national parks. Both have been fine, but I do miss international travel. We have two cruises booked for 2022: the rebook of the 3-week cruise in French Polynesia with Nat Geo/Lindblad (May) and a 3-weeker to Indonesia/Papua New Guinea with Lindblad/Nat Geo (November). We plan on going come hell or high water, unless the cruise(s) are canceled. If we get stuck due to covid-return restrictions, then we get stuck and burn the fucking leave. After 2 years of covid, it ain’t like either of us are short.
We also have a $12k Crystal cruise credit to burn, so we’ve tentatively booked a South Asia cruise for ’24; it starts in Singapore and ends in Mumbai, hitting Malaysia, Thailand, Sri Lanka, and other ports in India along the way. We had to be careful to avoid ones going to Myanmar, as those tend to get canceled. We also have an Icelandair ticket credit to use up, and we are looking at hiking trips to Greenland, or maybe a self-guided trip around the Ring Road. The good thing is, we’ll be burning credits in ’23 and ’24, instead of having to splash out for trips.
My aunt is on a cruise to Norway on Hurtigruten right now. She had to jump through a million covid-hoops to go, and she and her hubby have to mask up in all public spaces on board, despite the requirements that all be fully-vaxxed and testing negative for covid before boarding. Doesn’t make any sense to me, but whatever. Don’t know how they’re managing dining, as those are all shared spaces where people will be unmasked for an hour or more. Unless all the dining is outside, or all the windows in the restaurant are open, that negates all the “protection” the mask requirement in the rest of the ship provides.
Here in the States, I think everybody is on a pill of some sort for stress, many for the first time. What with covid, the final days of the fuckcheeto regime, the Jan 6th insurrection, and the continuing political chaos, we all need something just to keep going. I guarantee you that those few Yanks who aren’t on Rx happy pills are on some other substance, legal or illegal, to cope. We’re a hot mess. I hope you and your wife feel better and that 2022 brings better things than 2021 did.
Two three-weekers in that part of the world sounds bloody lovely. Goes without saying that everything’s crossed for your travel plans – for everyone’s travel plans! – and you’re certainly overdue these ones. It would be good to hear how those turn out when you finally make it; miss your Facebook posts there. And Crystal as well! Very fancy! Another line well outside our cruising budget. Love Asia, but never headed west from the main cruise ports there; we’ve hit Singapore and Thailand before but not the others in your itinerary, and India and Sri Lanka are definitely on our list (of course). We tried to use some cruise credit for a line that was transitioning from Asia to Europe in 2023 but none of the legs of it were short enough and we’d have ended up eating up far more annual leave in one chunk than we wanted. The bit we wanted to do included India. That credit ended up going towards a bit of Italy’s east coast and Croatia instead, but we’re on the lookout for good itineraries at sensible prices around India from 2023 onwards.
Yeah, don’t get me started on nonsensical science on cruise ships. I mentioned in the last post I put up on P&O’s Iona that the rule about wearing a mask in the huge, spacious, mostly empty theatre defied logic when you could spend hours, unmasked, nearly shoulder-to-shoulder on tables in the bar, drinking, talking, even singing at points. I get they’ve got to be careful and to be seen to be doing things, but sometimes you have to question whether they’re coming up with answers after consulting entrails.
I’ll definitely let you know how the cruises go. I wish I had a travel blog or something so that I can share pics also, but the rules on social media for my agency are so crazily strict that they more or less ban participation in any kind of social media except strictly professional sites such as LinkedIn, and even there, we have to be super careful and can’t really post much. I can’t wait until I can retire!
Yeah, there’s definitely a lot of ‘pandemic theater’ going on in the cruise industry right now. I’m hoping that all the bullshit will diminish as the vaccines prove themselves further against the ever revolving stable of variants and the anti-covid meds become widely available. Once covid becomes similar to a cold in health consequences–and it’s basically already there for vaxxed and booster people–then there’s no reason for all the testing and masking. Just require the crew and all the passengers to be fully-vaxxed and boosted and be done with it.