Time once more for the round-up of posts that have been trickling onto the site since the last time I wrote one of these round-up of posts that have been trickling onto the site. There will also be an overview after that of the most recent cruise we’ve taken, which was our second time on Sky Princess, this one visiting Norway and Denmark over the course of a week, and a little bit about what we’re planning to do this coming weekend.
First up is that write-ups of our weekender, maiden voyage cruise aboard Valiant Lady out of Portsmouth and to Bruges and back have now concluded. The first post you’ll have missed from that last travelogue series covers the Bruges Brewery Tour we took with, mostly, members of the Virgin Voyages crew. One of the most entertaining and memorable excursions we’ve ever had.
The final post from that short Valiant Lady cruise covers the day and night at sea on the way back from Belgium to Portsmouth. On this day we met some new cruise blogging friends, discovered together just what the Rock Star perk of free champagne meant, and checked out the dazzling Duel Reality show on the ship.
A one-off, non-cruising travel post has also been recently published, this being the second of three rewrites concerning the day we spent wandering the streets of New York on a visit there over a decade ago. It’s mainly just photos of buildings and people along Broadway with a few of the sights picked out and described.
There have been four cruise travelogues posted from our week-long Sky Princess cruise in UK waters last year, and there are still a few more to come to finish that cruise off.
The first of those posts covers a sea day and it was very much in the mould of many sea days in that it was spent relaxing, reading, drinking, watching the sea, and enjoying a bit of music. This relaxing sea day includes a bit of fine dining and jazz too.
The remaining three posts from our Sky Princess cruise all centre on the port stop that was made at Belfast. Despite this being the first time at Belfast for either of us we decided not to see any of Northern Ireland’s capital, but to instead head towards the north coast and take a look at the Giant’s Causeway first.
Following on from that trip to one of Ireland’s most-visited tourist destinations we were given a chance to take some photos at a few stops along County Antrim’s coastline, and you might spot some locations that were used for Game of Thrones if you’re a fan of that series.
The final post from Northern Ireland is of leaving the port in the evening, so you can expect to see the port area, some views of the ships having work done on them, the ferries, seals swimming in the water, sunset views, and a couple of videos including a time lapse of our departure from Belfast.
Since the last update we’ve had a few chances to spend weekends and weeks away so there will be loads of updates yet to come, and that’s on top of the backlog that still includes the Canary Islands cruise from late last year.
We spent a few days on nearby Hayling Island, this time with my wife’s parents for a 1960s-themed music weekend. Good bands, even if they covered a lot of the same tracks, but also good weather, a chance to swim, a walk along the shore with a train ride, and an encounter with the coast guard performing helicopter rescue drills in the shallow water.
We also stayed a few days in Salisbury which we’ve visited a few times in the past but only briefly. As you’d expect, we visited the cathedral, saw the Magna Carta, but also hit some museums, including the fabulous Arundells, and took drives out to look at Wilton House and the ancient settlement and ruins at Old Sarum.
At the time of writing this we’ve only been back two weeks from another cruise on Sky Princess. We visited a couple of ports in each of Denmark and Norway, where only Copenhagen was a port we’d been to before. We had a couple of issues on the ship around service, Wi-Fi, and general glitches with the app that Princess Cruises would like everyone to use, and we had a not-so-nice experience in Copenhagen thanks to some poor information and service from Princess, but the cruise as a whole was wonderful, and the ports we visited and the excursions we took and the beer we consumed couldn’t be faulted. Oslo was very clean, very modern, and we’re looking forward to returning there later in the year; we visited a sculpture park and a few museums this time around. Kristiansand, the other Norwegian port, saw us hit a fishing port, an open air museum (with a fabulous guide), and left plenty of time to explore the town and see its lovely water sculptures. A walking tour in the Danish capital was interesting but left us drenched as we got caught in a torrential downpour. Lovely craft beer afterwards helped us get over that. Skagen (pictured below) was an absolute delight of a port, though, with fine weather accompanying our tours of a Danish resistance museum and part of the Atlantic Wall defences constructed by the Nazis, then time to find a local brewery and distillery in town where drinking took place. Surprise!
And we’ll very soon be boarding Sky Princess again as we’re off to visit the Norwegian fjords – only one port there of the three we’ll be hitting that we’ve visited before – followed by four stops in Iceland – with only the capital being somewhere we’ve travelled to previously – so I’m going to be busy, busy, busy trying to catch up with all of this over the summer ahead of the last planned cruise this year in September. This will be our first time visiting Iceland in summer months so we’re going to see it without snow, without aurorae, and without much in the way of darkness at all. And if the weather forecasts are accurate, we’re going to get wet. We’re not going to be at work, and we’re going to see some stunning landscapes, so we’ll be fine.
Other than our existing plans for a week on Azura visiting Italy and Croatia, we’ve still not booked anything else for 2023. There are things we want to do but we’ve been brought to a halt by the sheer number of cruises we’ve seen being cancelled or swapped over recently, an ongoing problem with getting crew into positions in a world that’s had a pandemic that’s still not over, and one that is now teetering on the edge of escalating war thanks to Russian duplicity and aggression. We’ve got our eyes on Alaska and the Panama Canal, though, because we’ve not done either, but we’re still dithering a bit.