A Plethora Of Posts

Plethora is a word that instantly brings to mind the movie The Three Amigos but in this edition of the semi-regular round-up of new content, updated content, travel news, and links featuring a plethora of posts – hence the title – you’re sadly going to find nothing at all about the village of Santo Poco in Mexico.

Let’s start with all the new and updated travel content published on this site since the last update.

Some filler posts to start with; these are smaller write-ups, usually of older trips we’ve taken or photos of interest, typically one-off accounts as opposed to being part of a travelogue series, published to keep the site content ticking over and fresh.

First up is a walk along Hayling Island in 2011. Hayling Island is the next little island to the east of our home on Portsea Island so it’s easy to get to and, being an island, it’s got plenty of coastline to photograph.

For my wife’s birthday in 2014 we booked an overnight stay at a fancy hotel and you can see photos of it and the surrounding area in Buxted Park Hotel.

A non-travel post was uploaded recently in the form of some scans of pictures taken on the set of the Angelina Jolie movie, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. The reason for this will become apparent if you read the article.

Back to travel content now with the two concluding posts from our November trip to the Greek island of Kos. On the last day we were allowed to head into Kos Town before the national lockdown restricted us to the hotel resort we did precisely that in order to pay a visit to our favourite bar. That’s covered in Drinking In Kos Town.

The final post from the Kos trip includes just a few photos from around the pool area and you can see them and find out what we thought about our week away overall in Blue Lagoon Resort: Final Thoughts.

Two more connected posts from a travelogue series next, although an older series that was missing a few accounts. These two were from the second cruise we took. To start with, and to start the cruise, there’s coverage of the first day aboard Crown Princess cruising towards Norway.

And to finish up that trip to the Norwegian fjords there’s a walk around the promenade deck on the final sea day heading back to the UK.

Moving onto travel news…

Obviously, travel right now is hugely impacted by the effects of Covid so here are some Covid-related travel bits of news.

Firstly, a whole load of cruise lines have started offering cruises from the UK and only around the UK, either just at sea or stopping at a few UK ports, later this summer. When I say a load I mean a load. The ones I can think of off the top of my head are Princess, P&O, MSC, Cunard, Disney, Saga, Viking, Marella, Celebrity, Fred Olsen, Royal Caribbean, and I’m sure there are others too. For many of them there’s going to be a requirement that passengers are fully-vaccinated which, because of the success of the NHS roll-out of the vaccine in the UK, is why these cruise lines have suddenly sent ships to our waters. A few will allow non-vaccinated passengers but since they’re requiring negative infection tests a few days before sailing that’s a risk I wouldn’t want to take on booking a cruise.

Good news if you’re vaccinated.

Which brings me onto the second bit of Covid-related travel news and that’s that both my wife and I have now had our first jab. Technically, we’re both under the current eligibility threshold but I got the invite during a day of excess vaccines being available locally and my wife got the invite potentially by using a little hack we may have discovered. Nothing illegal, I assure you, but my younger brother and his wife both got their jabs after installing the NHS App then trying to book appointments every day for nearly a week. Every day they got the message “No, you’re not eligible yet” but suddenly they got messages sent to them saying, yep, go ahead and book. Hearing that, we did the same thing for my wife and within four days she’d also got the invite. It might just be all coincidental, of course, but it might also indicate some logic in the invitation process that, when there is availability thanks to no-shows for appointments then people with the app who’ve expressed an interest in actually getting the jab and therefore have a higher likelihood of turning up so the vaccine won’t go to waste get bumped to the front of the local queue. Whatever the reason, this now means we’ll both be fully-vaccinated by the start of August.

And that means we can look at booking some of those UK cruises.

And we have.

We’ve booked two week-long cruises on two ships which derive their design from the Royal-class that we really didn’t like very much when we cruised on one in 2016. However, we’ve decided we need to give this ship design another chance so in late August we’ll be (hopefully) boarding P&O Iona for a cruise around the Channel Islands then down the coast of France to Spain and back, chasing some sunshine. A month later we’ll then head back to Southampton for a round-trip that will see us stop at Belfast and Liverpool before returning on Sky Princess. Assuming our already-booked cruise on P&O Arcadia still takes place at the end of October this will mean three cruises, each about a month apart.

We’ve still got five days of annual leave to play with and I’m considering a short, earlier-in-August cruise to nowhere on Regal Princess which will give us three days left to play with. A five-dayer at the end of the year on P&O Ventura could work thanks to bank holidays but we’re waiting to see what sort of offerings the other lines have. Regal plus Sky would bring us to the magical fifteen cruises total so future cruises with Princess would then be at Elite level. We’ve been waiting to hit that level before we cruise with MSC (because they’ll match loyalty perks) so we’re not looking at any of their cruises this year but everyone else is still in consideration if the price and dates work out. Still to decide on all this, though.

Some Twitter friends sent me a screen capture of the end credits of an HBO documentary about Diamond Princess and how it was affected by Covid last year called The Last Cruise. As you can see above, that’s our travel channel credited with some archival material shown in the programme. I should be pleased at this and probably would be if I’d given permission for it but I didn’t. I was approached by one of the people behind it and asked but I stated that – as with all my material – non-commercial is fine but otherwise, no. They wanted me to sign a licence giving permission to use my videos in any form for any purpose forever throughout the universe in any format existing or yet-to-be invented. I’m not lying; that’s apparently pretty standard. That was a firm no from me, though, because there was no mention of the multiverse there which just indicated some shoddiness from the producers.

They used it anyway. They can likely claim it’s fair use for a documentary but why even ask for my consent if you’re just going to ignore what I say? Disappointed, but nothing I can do about it except mention it here (and on Twitter and on Facebook) and tut loudly.

Some linkage out to other travel write-ups or videos that have recently caught my eye is the traditional way to end these blog posts, and who am I to defy tradition?

To start with is a post from last year that suddenly got a bit of quote-tweeting love this week with people giving their answer to how many of the World’s Best Cities For Food they’d actually eaten in. It turns out that we’ve not been to many of these cities anyway and food is never high on our list of things to do for what are generally fleeting visits. We’ll often have a drink, but food… no. Our answer, though, from that list of cities, is a paltry four.

Sticking with the food and travel theme is a post by Lannie about A Cold, Yet Delicious Akureyri Food Tour. We love Iceland so this was nice to see a different take on food options there since we’ve eaten somewhat differently on our trips. We’ve either stuck with fairly basic food or really weird stuff but this looks a lovely way to experience some Icelandic-yet-not-terrifying dishes if visiting the country.

I’ll finish up with a video now. Take More Detours! are a relatively new and small account worth a follow and have several series of video blogs from their travels and this one featuring a Robot Restaurant and drinking in a tiny bar among the neon landscape is so unashamedly Japanese and exactly the sort of thing we’d love to do should we ever have the opportunity on a future trip to Japan.