For some reason I seem to have hit my stride with catching up with travel write-ups on this site, hence yet another blog update letting you know what it is that’s recently been published in the travelogues.
Without further ado – there’s been quite enough ado on this site – here’s what you’ve missed.
Continuing in the accounts from our weekend break to Oxford last year, there’s a post – mainly photographic to be fair – from our visit to Oxford Botanic Garden. If you like flowers and plants and connections with literature then that place has got all of them.
In September 2022 we took a day trip on the Paddle Steamer Waverley as she was based on the south coast for part of the summer season. Waverley is the only ocean-going paddle steamship in the world. We booked a trip that would take us from our home city of Portsmouth around the Isle of Wight, and… things didn’t go quite to plan. The write-ups about that steamship cruise experience are covered in three posts.
In Paddle Steamer Waverley From Portsmouth To The Isle Of Wight we cover the initial boarding experience and sail out of Portsmouth across the Solent. That gave us a chance to sail past the HMS Prince of Wales which was anchored off shore feeling sorry for itself.
The unplanned part of our day aboard Waverley is covered in Yarmouth, Isle Of Wight. You can read why it was unplanned there, but we did get to visit a castle we’d not expected to see.
The concluding part of our account on Paddle Steamer Waverley is mostly just photos from the cruise across the Solent from the Isle of Wight to Portsmouth with the highlight being spotting P&O’s Ventura heading out to sea as we were heading back from it.
In the last of these blog posts I summarised the entirety of the first of two cruises we took on Sky Princess last year as I’d completed the write-ups from that week hitting Norway and Denmark. In unsurprising news, I’ve started on the next cruise travelogue series now and that’s the second of those cruises which took place less than a month later, again hitting Norway, but this time to fjords followed by northern Iceland.
The first of those posts is the Sky Princess embarkation at Southampton and it was a memorable one for us. What happens when the ship is late coming into port and then there’s a fire alarm in the port building while they’re still trying to disembark passengers at the same time that everyone’s turning up and expecting to board? Chaos! But surprisingly enjoyable chaos.
The most recent cruise travelogue post on the site then covers the next two days aboard Sky Princess as they were sea days ahead of some stops in the fjords. We don’t tend to do a lot on sea days, liking the chance to read and swim and drink, but we managed to slip in an afternoon tea and some speciality dining at Bistro Sur La Mer while we recovered from the boarding day turmoil.
That’s all the updates since the last one.
We’ve still got nothing booked at all for next year which is very unlike us but in the last few days we’ve started to narrow the field down a bit to some ideas. Given the amount of long distance travelling we’re doing this year we think we want to keep things a little closer to home in 2024.
We’re keen to visit some places we’ve not been to before, or some places we’ve not been to in a long time. One of the possibilities we’re looking at is again on Sky Princess, but back to the Baltic area. We’ve seen an itinerary that takes us back to Tallinn which we’d like to do, and includes a few new ports.
One place we’re very keen to hit is Morocco so we’ve been checking out cruises that visit there. In terms of itineraries, MSC do some great ones. But they’re MSC. Everything we read or watch with respect to MSC worries us, and we really don’t like what other cruise bloggers and vloggers have to say about the newer ships. But that led us to looking at one of their older vessels, MSC Sinfonia. We saw this ship earlier this year when we were in Croatia and, quite frankly, thought she looked ugly. We took a look at some videos as well and she’s definitely a bit long in the tooth. We also considered that MSC staff have a reputation for being surly and the food is a hit and miss. You know, there’s something that really appeals to us about all these things. The only problem is that we’d have to make a lot of the arrangements ourselves to get this to work because MSC don’t do the flights and transfers for this sort of cruise, and no travel agents seem to have a schedule for it that works for us, as we’d ideally like to fly into Barcelona and pick her up there. It’s a possible, but it’s not looking likely.
One more cruise option that includes Morocco is with Marella. The benefits are that the flights and transfers are taken care of and we’d get a second chance to hit Madeira too since we failed when we tried with P&O a couple of years ago. On the minus side, there is only one Moroccan port on that itinerary, and with that being the main draw for us that increases the risk that it could be cancelled and effectively wipe out the main reason for the cruise.
Another cruise line that’s been fluttering around our heads for a while is Ambassador, and we like the idea of a UK cruise with them as the UK is an area we have largely overlooked when cruising.
Finally, one cruise line we can probably rule out from the reckoning – although we did look into it, just to see – is Virgin. We’ve had so many emails from them over the past few months, promising money towards flights and money towards bar tabs and extra percentages off because we’ve cruised with them before, so we thought that perhaps the price might be reasonable for a possible Mediterranean cruise. Yeah, no. Now, they do some interesting ports, which is good, and my wife is very fond of the Fig Sour they have on board. But we’ve looked at recent videos from people who’ve cruised with them and literally nothing has changed: the same shows, the same food. We’ve seen all the shows we’re interested in, and we’ve eaten all the food we actually like; the thought of eating a limited menu over and over again is not an appealing one. I think that even if the price of a cruise had become reasonable with all the discounts – and it’s not even close – then we’d still have struggled to choose them based on the on-board experience being nothing we’ve not done before. I would love to see Virgin stick a decent pool on their ships and start to rotate or freshen up the food choices because we did like our cruises with them, but we like to experience new things when we travel and Virgin just aren’t offering that right now.
So, no cruise plans for next year, but we are always on the lookout for inspiration.