Now that travel accounts of our day in port in Split, Croatia are up on the site it’s time to share them for those holdouts who still haven’t embraced the resurgence of RSS feeds once more but who have at some point in the past foolishly subscribed to the newsletter that includes this content.
You likely would not have known, but also likely would have been able to correctly surmise since I’m prone to giving away things in the titles of content (no clickbait here, no sir), that when we cruised aboard the P&O ship Azura just over a year ago it included a first visit for us to the country of Croatia. In fact, it included first visits to Malta and Slovenia too, and even the one port in Italy that we docked at was new. We booked excursions at all but one stop as a result and the posts in this update come primarily from the first of those.
Firstly, though, just to get it out of the way, a filler post of photos taken from the Victorian beam engine house in Eastney. This is a building fairly local to us that’s opened on the last Sunday of most months.
In the last of these summary blog or newsletter posts I’d shared links to the articles covering what we got up to in Malta. Following on from our departure from the port of Valletta we had a day at sea and when you have a website filled with travel content and you have a day at sea on a cruise ship then you take photos of the ship. I don’t make the laws, I just follow them. Most of them.
Split, as you know, was our first stop on this week-long cruise, but the first part of our day’s excursion took us along the coast to the historic town of Trogir. This element of the tour was guided, taking us to see the cathedral there with its impressive architecture and also being treated to some traditional singing in a loggia beside the town square.
Cruise excursions frequently give you some free time to explore and that was the case in Trogir. Cruise excursions frequently don’t give you anywhere near enough time to explore a place on your own, though, and that was also the case here so our free time in Trogir was limited more than we’d have liked but still enough to see some lovely sights along the waterfront of this small island town.
A break for lunch – well, barely more than a snack really – took place next, but even if the meal was a little small and not particularly inspiring then the venue at least was gorgeous. This took place at Mlinice Pantan Restaurant, a former mill on the road between Trogir and Split, and we couldn’t have wished for better weather to enjoy the views of and from it.
The second part of the cruise excursion brought us back to where the ship was docked and where we were taken to see some of the highlights of Split. It wasn’t a very in-depth tour but, naturally, we visited Diocletian’s Palace because everyone does, learning a little about the cellars and gates to what became the central part of the old city that grew up around it in the medieval period.
The final new piece of travel writing on this site then simply covers a little of the walk back to the ship and photographs from her of the Croatian coastline as Azura departed Split in the evening.
That’s new travel content all up-to-date and there’s not a lot else to add at this point. The newest cruise we’ve booked was mentioned in the last blog/newsletter and we’ve been very good and not booked anything else in the meantime.
We did pay attention to Ambassador’s 2-for-1 deals they’ve got running at the moment, correctly guessing that some of them weren’t the bargains the cruise line would like us to believe, but a few did jump out for next year with some very low per-person-per-night prices, even on balconies (which we’d want to do to give the cruise line a fair comparison). The only thing really stopping us from booking with Ambassador is their departure ports aren’t great for us. Bristol would be easier but we don’t like those itineraries, whereas some itineraries from London Tilbury look tempting but getting to London Tilbury would involve being subjected to a stressful pain in the backside, or the M25 as it’s also known. Very much a first world curse, I know.
Friends of ours are heading off to Brazil to pick up a cruise soon and that’s somewhere we keep being drawn to as well. We’d love to repeat part of all of one or both of the South American cruises we’ve taken so far but the prices are stupidly and unjustifiably high. However, some cruises that incorporate a few Brazilian ports – and we’ve never been to Brazil – do come in at a more sensible point if we’re prepared to risk Costa Cruises or MSC in that part of the world. I’m not sure we’re ready for that yet, but with nothing booked for 2025 and beyond who knows what will suddenly appear to tempt us?