Keeping the momentum of putting travel posts up, much to the surprise of everyone, especially me, means the time has rolled around once more for a blog post (or newsletter if you’re reading this that way) summarising everything new on the site since the last time I wrote one. Not that long ago, as it turns out.
If you keep up to date with posts through the newsletters or just because you actually like reading the travel content on this site – look, it could happen; people get hit on the head all the time and discover thrilling new ways to live their lives – then you might know that the cruise travelogues have been following our 2022 Western Europe cruise on Island Princess and that Hamburg, Germany featured heavily last time out. Using the incredible powers of Your Eyes and Your Brain you’ll know that Gothenburg, Sweden is going to feature heavily this time around.
But first, because I like to keep things fresh and exciting but mostly confusing, a few other posts have been published. The first of those mostly features photos from an overcast day walking around Portchester Castle in 2009. This castle is not far from where we live so it’s been visited more times than we can recall. This isn’t the first post on the site about Portchester Castle, and it won’t be the last.
In August 2022 we spent a weekend in Oxford to look around the city, and posts from there have been put up already, but on our final day we took the car and drove to nearby Stowe in Buckinghamshire, and the first of two posts from that visit is now up, featuring a look inside Stowe House. The remaining post from this trip will concentrate on the gardens… when I remember to get around to it.
So now to the cruise travelogue posts, and before we reached Sweden we had a day at sea on Island Princess which gave me time to take some photos around this particular cruise ship.
There are four posts describing what we got up to on our day in Gothenburg. This was our first visit to Gothenburg, but unusually for us – although, strangely, typical for this Island Princess cruise when we did the same thing in Hamburg and Rotterdam – we decided not to take a tour for the first time in a new city, instead opting to walk around on our own. This, coupled with perhaps not the best decision in terms of what to see out of a sense of trying to be different plus some miserable weather too, may have affected our enjoyment of this Swedish city a little. However, I maintain that it was the people of Gothenburg who mostly put us off from liking it as a destination. That’s explained a little more in the posts.
We started with arriving at Gothenburg, or, more accurately, about nine kilometres away. Thankfully, Princess Cruises laid on free shuttle buses.
Our first bit of exploration took place after a short walk to The Garden Society Of Gothenburg And The Palm House. If you like tropical plants in Victorian era greenhouses then you’ll like this, although there’s a warning in the post about not confusing it with another, larger botanical garden in the city.
The second and, as it would turn out, last place we visited was the building that was part science museum, part zoo, and part aquarium; the Universeum. Just to be super-confusing the photo below is from there, not of there. You want to see the place itself? Then, my friend, you have the power to click things.
Anyway, we were so put off by the general attitude of the average Swede in Gothenburg by now that this was all we actually ended up doing. It didn’t help that the rain picked up too so the more traditional old town area we were hoping to head to just felt too far away at this point and we didn’t want to take the risk that even more sullen Scandinavians would be all we’d encounter there. We didn’t even make it back to the shuttle bus without being talked to by someone on a loudspeaker in an angry voice before we could finally get a ride back to the ship and say goodbye to Gothenburg.
We’re in no rush to revisit Gothenburg but we are fair and science-minded so we would give it a fair crack at winning us over with new evidence that it wasn’t just where every miserable person in Sweden was sent to live as punishment were we to return at some future date. It’s very odd that in all our cruises we’ve never really felt anywhere close to just not liking a place quite this much.
At the time of writing this we are exactly four weeks away from our first cruise of the year when we’ll be seeing if P&O’s Aurora can win us over on a short jaunt to the Netherlands and back. Having watched a few videos from Sisters on the Seas recently, and knowing that Tom and Dom (or Tom or Dom, as some people we know insist on calling them) had some issues too on this ship, we’re keen to see if our cruise will be problem-free.
We’ve only just realised, as well, that this year we’ll be at sea when Eurovision is taking place. We’ll be on Regal Princess at the time, somewhere off the coast of Scotland, and since we know Princess showed the event on its ships last year we’re hopeful that it will do so again, even though Royal Caribbean are officially sponsors of Eurovision. We’re also hopeful that it will be a nice, dry, surprisingly warm evening so it can all take place on the top deck in more of a party atmosphere. And since we’re expecting lots of Americans on board because cruising around the United Kingdom will definitely appeal to them, we’re hoping the show and those of us celebrating it will confuse the absolute crap out of them.
That’s all I can think of for now so that wraps up this update. The next one of these will likely list the things we did in Copenhagen and possibly Oslo too as the Island Princess cruise travelogues continue to get published, and there will undoubtedly be some filler content from older travelling experiences in there as well.