2023 Travel Plans Complete, Recent Updates

Well, we’ve gone and used up all our annual leave allowance and booked another trip for next year, and you can read about that at the end of this post. Spoiler: it’s a mini-cruise! I know! You’re shocked! I should’ve warned you to sit down.

First up, though, it’s time once again to go through what’s new on the site and what you’ve missed since the last of these travel updates.

There have been six pieces of travel and photography content published on this site since the last write-up. The first of those I’ll mention here was a photography theme post, taking a journey back to the early months of 2011 when I was working in Chichester and getting out every lunchtime with camera in hand. If you’re one of the millions of people who hit the internet each day thinking “Well, this is all lovely and interesting, but what I’d really love to see is a collection of people carrying a myriad of umbrellas from over a decade ago,” then prepare to be amazed: City of Umbrellas.

Next is the first in a series of posts that will describe the weekend break we took to Salisbury earlier this year. This initial article is about the hotel we picked, The Rose and Crown.

The remaining four posts are all from last year’s cruise on P&O’s Ventura to the Canary Islands.

You can read about the excursion we took on Tenerife to Teide National Park. It wasn’t quite the excursion we were hoping for because the observatory we were supposed to be visiting was being used to monitor a volcanic eruption on a nearby island. Curse you, regional geological instability!

If you want to know what we saw from our balcony and what we got up aboard Ventura in Tenerife after that excursion to the national park, then P&O Ventura at Tenerife is what you want to click on.

The Canary Islands were where we went national park crazy, and on the next island, Lanzarote, we took in an excursion to the lava fields of Timanfaya National Park.

The most recent post continues on from that first part of the Lanzarote excursion with two brief stops to see Aloe Vera and Wine. No vineyards here, where you can use depressions in the heated, volcanic soil to grow your grapes instead!

So that brings us to our 2023 travel-planning news.

First of all, we’ve picked excursions for our upcoming cruises in April and July of next year.

If you can remember our plans – or if you are aware that there is a Future Cruises page on this site in the menu system somewhere (I’ll let you find it yourself to feel a sense of accomplishment) – then you’ll know that in April we’re heading down to the Mediterranean with P&O Cruises for a week when we’ll be making our first visit to Croatia. The excursions finally came up for that cruise, so:

• In Split, we’re going to split (sorry) our time between that city and Trogir.
• When we dock at Rovinj we’re going to head off down the coast instead to Pula because they’ve got an amphitheatre there, and we’re fond of an amphitheatre. Hopefully, there’ll be some time for looking around Rovinj afterwards.
• Dubrovnik is the only place where we’ve not booked a trip, because it looks doable on our own, we have zero interest in anything Game of Thrones-related, and there looks to be a fabulous Communist era museum and local brewery near where the ship will be docked.
• The only other port is Trieste, in Italy, but since we’ve been to Italy several times, and since Trieste is close to the Slovenian border, and since we’ve never been to Slovenia, and since there’s an excursion that will hit both the country’s capital, Ljubljana, as well as its most famous tourist destination, Lake Bled, then, well, we almost had to, didn’t we?

In July we’re cruising in Alaska – a first for both of us – with Holland America Line – a first for both of us – and flying into and out of Canada – a first for me – and we’ve sorted out the flights and excursions for that week of excitement now, too.

• In Juneau, we’re joining a small tour group to visit Mendenhall Glacier followed by a whale-spotting boat trip.
• In Skagway, we’ll be doing a “best of” tour that includes the White Pass narrow gauge railway up into the mountains, some entertainment and food around a gold-panning camp, and a saloon/brothel visit.
• A smaller trip is planned in Ketchikan, where we’ll be boarding a trolley bus, seeing some highlights including some native totems, then leaving us plenty of time to check out the local drinking establishments, of which there appear to be a few.

No excursions are available yet for our Panama Canal cruise with Princess later next year, but you know we’re going to be booking some, and there will be a post when that happens.

Finally, then, and it’s the last of our cruises that we’ve got booked for next year; something we’ve literally booked this morning. We had a couple of days of our 2023 annual leave still to use up, so I took a look to see if there was anything short that ran over the August bank holiday as it slotted in nicely between Alaska in July and Panama in October, and would give us a bonus day and the weekend beside it. There were two possibilities: Disney Dream to La Rochelle, or Celebrity Silhouette to Zeebrugge and Amsterdam.

Now, we’ve never cruised with Disney before, and there’s a good reason for that: they’re expensive. No, there are two good reasons for that: they’re expensive and there will be lots of kids on them. Or grown adults who like Disney. Three good reasons for that. But it would be a new cruise line, and we loved La Rochelle when we visited there before.

Then there’s Celebrity Silhouette. We’ve cruised on Celebrity Silhouette before, and to Amsterdam that time as well, and it wasn’t great, to be brutally honest. That’s an understatement. Some of the worst service we’ve experienced, and food quality that was borderline criminal. Plus, we’ve been to Amsterdam and Belgium quite a few times now. But, then again, we do like both those places.

It was never going to be Disney, and we’re all for giving cruise lines a second chance to make a bad impression, so Celebrity Silhouette it is. We likely won’t do any excursions because we know the places well by now, but you never know; Celebrity might tempt us with something. It’ll be nice to see how she’s changed from our last cruise as she’s undergone a refresh of some areas in the last year or so, including the replacement of the wine bar with a more craft beer-oriented venue. Hey! We’ll be on a cruise. We’ll enjoy ourselves somehow.