The end of December brings with it the annual, traditional look back at what we got up to in 2023, and as is also traditional, little to none of it will have been written about on this website yet because I’m still in the process of completing the travelogues from the year before. Look, it’s just nice to give myself something to do in all those horrible, horrible gaps between travelling.

In February we took a short break to what the locals call Amazingstoke, but what everyone else calls That Town Off The M3 or Basingstoke. The reason for this was a big birthday celebration for a friend of ours, with a meal at a fancy (for Basingstoke) restaurant. Let’s say that we enjoyed the company regarding that aspect of it all and leave it at that, but we also stayed in a hotel that gave us a good opportunity to nose around Milestones Museum (which we always enjoy) and to discover a great little pub in the town that catered well for games players. We’re not games players, but we like nerds and we liked the beers they did.

In April we took the first of two cruises with P&O Cruises when we flew to Malta for the first time, there to board Azura (a ship we were familiar with, having cruised on her twice before in 2017), and embark upon a week in the Adriatic. We were lucky enough to get an early flight so we had time to explore Valletta before departing for seven days and seeing Trogir, Split, Zadar, and Dubrovnik in Croatia, plus Trieste in Italy and both Ljubljana and Lake Bled in Slovenia. Every port stop a new one for us.

Everyone raved about Dubrovnik before we went, but maybe that affected our enjoyment of the place as we found it all a bit samey, a bit directed towards the tourist. Fantastic beers though. We found a craft ale bar and spent a long time and a lot of money there. Far nicer as a general tourist destination in Croatia, for me personally, was Zadar. Hopping across the border to Slovenia was something we loved, and getting to see the country’s capital and Lake Bled ahead of the masses of tourists in the summer months was fabulous; in fact, I can imagine the traffic for the lake in summer and it’s making me nauseous right now. A bonus was Trieste that we didn’t think we’d have time to explore, but which turned out to be incredible. We’d not hesitate to return to every port on this cruise itinerary.

A more detailed summary post-cruise (but not the cruise travelogues) can be read here: P&O Azura Fly-Cruise To Malta: The Good And The Bad.

At the end of May it was time for the second of our P&O cruises for the year, but this time on a new ship for us: Britannia. This was a Norwegian fjords cruise because you can never take too many Norwegian fjords cruises. Okay, some Norwegians have contrasting thoughts about that, but no Norwegian reads this so they don’t count.

This was supposed to be two familiar ports – Stavanger and Flåm – and two new ones – Haugesund and Nordfjordeid – but the last of those was cancelled due to unsafe wind conditions in the fjord. For once, we’d booked no excursions at all on a cruise, and in Nordfjordeid we’d not been convinced we were going to find an awful lot to do anyway, so we didn’t miss out on much, and got some bonus scenic fjord cruising in instead. Haugesund looked the least impressive at first, but grew on me as a destination when walking around it. Flåm was as gorgeous as ever, and yes, we hit the brewery for a few.

A more detailed summary post-cruise (but not the cruise travelogues) can be read here: Britannia Cruise To The Norwegian Fjords: First Thoughts.

In July we did a whole heap of new stuff, and not cheaply (oh no), when we flew to Vancouver, Canada for the first time (via France at stupid o’clock in the morning thanks to some late flight changes), there to board a Holland America ship for the first time (Koningsdam, since you asked nicely), and to undertake a cruise to Alaska for the first time.

Holland America looked after us well. Food and drink were great, the live rock music was absolutely without equal on any other cruise we’ve been on, and they’re a fabulous company on social media too. It would be nice to see other cruise lines be as active. The two aspects of Holland America that give us reason to pause before considering another cruise with them are the price (it’s a little on the high side, guys, and especially those excursions), and whether or not the aspect of everyone (i.e. the bar staff) heading off to bed at midnight is a standard thing on their ships. We like a late night drink and dance, and we couldn’t really do that.

Alaska, though. Ooh! Yes. There’s a thing where people say “Cold fjords and landscapes. Alaska or Norway? Which is better?” That question is meaningless. If you want to feel small against close, towering channels of rock – and you do, because it’s awesome – then head to Norway. If you want to see wildlife against impressive backdrops – and you do, because it’s also awesome – then head to Alaska. Ideally, you do both and tell other people to do the same. What did we see in Alaska? Bald eagles (dozens of them), sea otters, seals, a porcupine up a tree (no, me neither), and humpback whales. So many humpback whales. And they were bubble net feeding too! Just utterly incredible. There was also the small matter of a glacier calving in front of us, but I’m sure you don’t want to hear about that. Yeah, Alaska was fantastic.

A more detailed summary post-cruise (but not the cruise travelogues) can be read here: Cruise To Alaska Aboard Holland America Line’s Koningsdam.

At the end of August we decided to give Celebrity Cruises another chance to disappoint us. We’d cruised with them once before to Amsterdam aboard Celebrity Silhouette and this was to be a repeat of that in terms of ship and itinerary. Our first cruise had been notable for its terrible staff and terrible food mainly, but this one proved that the staff could be great. We had no complaints about the staff at all. But the main dining room food was still dreadful. Temperatures all over the place, sometimes not what we ordered, sometimes late; every day of this short cruise had food problems. But we loved the buffet at lunch time. So there is that. Amsterdam was great, as always, and we found some new places to explore and spend time in, in the form of a street art museum and a brewery. A number of other cruise bloggers were on this trip and, thanks to an insider amongst them helping to organise things and give us fair warning, we managed to avoid them all.

A more detailed summary post-cruise (but not the cruise travelogues) can be read here: 2023 Taster Cruise On Celebrity Silhouette.

And the final cruise of the year took place at the end of October. This involved flying to San Francisco (a first for us), flying in the day before the cruise and getting a taxi to a hotel (a first for us), boarding Ruby Princess (a first for us), then hitting Puntarenas, Costa Rica (which we’d done before) as well as Cabo San Lucas in Mexico and Cartagena in Colombia (both firsts) with a Halloween aboard (a first) and a transit through the Panama Canal (another first) and disembarkation in Fort Lauderdale (a final first). We were supposed to revisit Nicaragua and we were supposed to have a day ashore at Panama where we’d really (like really really) been looking forward to visiting a native tribe, but local conditions politically in both locations prevented that. We ended up with a lot of sea days as a result, and a lot of deck parties on board too.

Great locations but obviously some minor disappointment at the missed ports. It happens, and they were minor disappointments in the grand scheme of things. The debark tour we took was an utter shambles, which was another shame, and the less said about the DJ on the ship the better, but that doesn’t detract from great staff otherwise, stupidly good service, great food and drink, and great destinations visited.

A more detailed summary post-cruise (but not the cruise travelogues) can be read here: Ruby Princess: Dry Dock Changes, Panama Canal Transit Cruise, Worst Cruise Ship DJ Ever.

So that’s all the travelling we did in 2023. Our current expectation with a few days we can still book is that we’ll be doing less cruising in 2024 for a number of reasons, but we’ve still got an overnighter in Rotterdam on P&O Aurora (a first time on that ship) to look forward to, a round-UK cruise for the first time with a hop back aboard Regal Princess for the chance to visit Ireland and Scotland by ship for the first time, and a transatlantic (a first!) planned on Caribbean Princess (another first, surprise!) that will also see a few new ports and a first time in Morocco for Marie. Fingers crossed that all happens.

Some quick thoughts about my presence on social media in 2023 to finish up.

  • Mastodon remains my preferred social media haunt. After shifting there towards the end of last year I stopped using all my Twitter (or exTwitter or Xitter or whatever the braindead baby fart owner is calling his tantrum purchase fascist stage these days) accounts, eventually deleting all but my personal account which has been locked down. Mastodon works for me because I use it as a general, social, microblogging platform and not as some sort of driver for clicks and money; that’s one reason why it won’t work for other cruise or travel bloggers so I’d never try to persuade any of them to join.
  • Twitter is dead to me. Elon Musk’s ineptitude as a human is hilarious but not even that is enough draw to bring me anywhere near his products. Quite frankly, I think less of anyone who does, but I wouldn’t pay any attention to what I think. I barely do.
  • Instagram is somewhere I’ve been trying to post imagery to more often but mostly as an experiment to prove it’s no longer any good for photographers, the original audience for it. It’s pivoted so much towards trying to fight off TikTok that if you’re not posting shorts or reels or whatever they’re called there then you won’t get eyeballs on your posts at all. The algorithm is a pile of crud. However, I did get news from there this year that a singer on a cruise ship we’d been on and who we’d supported by providing pictures and videos had then gone on to become a cruise director on a Princess ship, and she told us about it privately before a lot of her real-life friends. So that bit was nice.
  • Threads was supposed to be Instagram/Meta/Facebook’s answer to Twitter. I had some actual hopes for it, especially with the announcements about ActivityPub support. However, it is so bad there I felt compelled to delete everything I’d posted. It’s called Threads, it encourages threads of posts, and… it promotes single posts over them. And it promotes celebrities above people you follow. And its search returns results in some random order so the weird (but okay if implemented correctly (which it isn’t)) hashtag support is useless. And the ActivityPub support is one-directional.
  • Bluesky is, finally, appalling. It looks like Twitter, but it’s style over substance. As a challenge try to follow a subject or hashtag that doesn’t already exist. Suppose there’s a new show on and you want to find everyone talking about it. Well, tough. You might find a few accounts through search but you won’t find them all unless you create (by forking some code) and host some kind of server that relays the results into a list you can subscribe to. I understand the technical reasons for it but there’s never going to be widespread appeal from something so basically elitist as to put the power into the hands of a few tech-savvy people. I know it’s still being developed but it’s hard to see how it can attract general use numbers and that might explain why it’s still not opened up beyond invite.

So, that’s the 2023 travel and social media review done then. Just a year to go until I edit this post, slap a 2024 on it, and post it all again.

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