Yes, there’s actually a fair bit of news to report regarding changes to the site and a new page and all the details about a new cruise on a new line to us so a new ship to us, too, visiting a few familiar but plenty of new ports and countries for us too! How much new can you deal with?
But first…
There have also been some new travelogues added to the site since the last of these posts. Not too many, you’ll be pleased to hear, but two to finish off one cruise and two to start another.
Concluding our cruise to Norway on Britannia we start with a look at some of the highlights of Haugesund as we walk through the main part of the town. Sculptures feature heavily, and even if Haugesund doesn’t have quite the wow factor of other Norwegian ports given its more industrial feel in more lower-lying landscape, if you’re artistically-minded in any way then Haugesund will not disappoint.
The final post from the Britannia cruise series mainly features pictures of the sail away from Haugesund and some details of food aboard the ship for the final two nights – including some speciality dining in Epicurean – as there was only a somewhat overcast sea day to follow and it didn’t warrant a write-up of its own.
Which brings us to the start of a new cruise travelogue series: Cruising to Alaska on Holland America Line’s Koningsdam.
We always knew that it would be an intense cruise because of the destination but we hadn’t quite expected the first twenty four hours of this week-long trip to wear us out quite so much. In the first article I recount just what it took to even get us onto the plane and flying to Vancouver with Air France and share some of the incredible views over Greenland and Canada we experienced.
The second post is another short one, continuing with our arrival in Canada and the first few hours spent on Koningsdam on her departure from Vancouver to Alaska before the exhaustion of just getting there overwhelmed us.
That’s all the new travel content, but there has been another post published recently, though it was stopped from being sent out to newsletter subscribers as it’s not travel-related. However, if you are at all interested in this sort of thing then I’ve put together a Mastodon Quick Start Guide in case you’re thinking of signing up on a genuine decentralised social media platform. It’s not for everyone, it’s got some technical details about how it works and the culture there, and I wrote it quickly mainly because someone on Facebook asked for something up-to-date in the wake of Meta’s latest descent into nasty bullying and another person suggested I might be the person to have that information to hand.
New Look
I’ve given the website a new look which you’ll know if you’ve looked at the site before and are reading this now from the site. For those reading this via newsletter then it looks a bit like this, from when I shared the news of the revamp on Instagram recently:
It’s darker and there’s a new main font with a slightly increased font size to make it a little easier to read. Not a huge change, but I think the individual posts in particular just pop out a little better with the photos in this form. I may tweak it a little more, but I like the change from the light background to how it is now so it won’t change massively from this.
New Feature: The Blogroll
As promised, there’s a new feature on the website now, too, and it’s an old feature that’s making a comeback. I’ve brought the blogroll back!
I really like people who maintain websites or blogs and who post frequently about things I find interesting, or things they find interesting and are passionate about. I used to love this sort of thing so much I ran a site that did nothing but syndicate RSS feeds from other sites, allowing users to freely customise their own feeds and keep track of what was happening with their friends and on popular sites. I even had a tech presenter from TV contact me to create something specifically for his site back then. Get me!
In recent years many people ditched blogging for the immediacy of social media micro-blogging and for a while that felt like a perfectly valid transition but big companies providing services for free eventually all go the same way and we’ve seen how Facebook enshittified with its unsearchable, dictatorial, walled garden, then how Twitter embraced the Nazi bar mentality, and friendly, interconnected discourse disappeared into a gaping chasm.
It’s therefore nice to see some of it returning in some form and I like to have a central place I can check what others are up to without relying on a search engine that no longer searches but is absolutely the place to go for dangerous misinformation and scams masquerading as adverts. And it’s also nice to discover that WordPress has an RSS block that allows for easy fetching and displaying of this content, even if it’s nowhere near as useful or configurable as the stuff I was coding in the early 2010s.
Most of the feeds right now aren’t travel-related, but those of friends or of very interesting people who write well. I’d love to add more travel feeds to the blogroll but travel bloggers don’t favour the travelogue format and largely either post top ten lists of things to do that are barely distinguishable from one another or simply copy and paste press releases from companies. It’s because they can monetise these sorts of things. Fair enough, but not my cup of tea. Feeds will be added or removed frequently as I discover new ones or realise old ones have died off or no longer post much of interest.
New Cruise: Peru To The USA On Norwegian Jade
We’ve booked a new cruise for next year and the heading right up above this paragraph gives away what it is but that’s not going to stop me from going into more detail anyway.
We first visited South America in 2016 (Star Princess from Buenos Aires to Santiago) on what was the twentieth anniversary of our first date. We returned there three years later to continue from Santiago to Los Angeles on the same ship, but on that occasion I ended up losing absolutely loads of videos and photos afterwards. Devastated doesn’t cover it. But, it’s meant that we’ve constantly been looking for something to recreate fully or partially some of that second cruise in particular, and next year will be the thirtieth anniversary of our first date, so we’ve been keener than ever to get something sorted.
We’d have loved to cruise with Princess Cruises again but their itineraries and pricing for this part of the world are frankly disappointing given how they’ve always been the cruise line for destinations we default to when the cruising bug gets us (every other evening, in case you’re wondering), so we cast our cruising net wider and spotted a cruise on Norwegian Jade that ticked an awful lot of boxes.
- We’ve never cruised with Norwegian Cruise Line before.
- So we’ve never cruised on Norwegian Jade before.
- Norwegian Jade is an older, smaller ship in the NCL fleet so she’ll likely suit us more than the bigger, newer vessels.
- A new port in Peru: Salaverry for Trujillo.
- A new country in Ecuador: Manta.
- Crossing the equator for the second time.
- A chance to actually get off in Panama at Panama City this time. We cruised through the canal in 2023, but weren’t allowed off for safety reasons.
- Return visits to Costa Rica (Puntarenas) and Nicaragua (San Juan del Sur) where photos and videos were lost in 2019.
- A new country in El Salvador: Acajutla.
- A new country in Guatemala: Puerto Quetzal.
- Three new Mexican ports: Huatulco, Acapulco, and Manzanillo.
- Return visits to Mexico (Puerto Vallarta and Cabo San Lucas).
- A new US port in San Diego.
And here’s what that looks like on a map:
That brings our upcoming cruises over the next fifteen months to just three (“just” three; I know for some people that’s a lot, but it’s low for us) but they are big ones. All three on new ships for us (and all three ships older ones because the new ones just don’t have the same appeal), two on new lines for us. One into the Arctic Circle for the first time (17 days), one to the Caribbean for the first time with all new countries to visit (14 days), and one returning to South and Central American waters again with a load of new ports and countries to hopefully get to as well (17 days again).
We don’t have much annual leave left for 2025 and that new cruise takes a big bite out of 2026 too so we’re thinking that we’re going to scale back a lot for the next 18 months now, looking at smaller jaunts at sea, maybe even some super-cheap inside cabin cruises just to get away. Partly, we have to if we want to spread holidays out over the year, but partly we’re also already starting to look ahead to 2028 when it will be our twentieth wedding anniversary and we’d really love to get back to Asia but know if we find something we like then that’s also likely to be not short or on the cheap side of things.
And that will do for this update.
WRT, what’s happening in Meta, I’d stay away from any US-based social media apps for the foreseeable future, as they are all being run by fascist sociopaths. I don’t know what good replacements for them are. Maybe we’ll all have to go back to blogging or something. It wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. Social media platforms are overrun by right-wing trolls and bots peddling disinformation. I quit Facebook to get away from all that. It sucks to lose contact with so many people, but I am a lot saner.
Your upcoming Panama Canal cruise sounds interesting. Our Panama Canal cruise on the Viking Mars went very well. Viking Ocean is definitely a do-again for us, if they can come up with an itinerary that interests us. We looked through their catalog onboard and just didn’t see anything. We are looking a some expedition cruises up the coast of West Africa and/or some cruises in Western Australia/Indonesia with Silversea for 2026/2027 timeframe, when I’ll be retired. We haven’t booked much for this year, except my November cruise with Azamara in the Eastern Caribbean and Hubby’s Mt Kili climb/gorilla trek trip in August. Things are just so uncertain now with my job that we are holding back to see what happens.
I’ve found a home in Mastodon, but it won’t be to everyone’s tastes either, even if it’s nazi-free and advert-free, and there’s effort involved initially in getting the best of it and getting used to it that a lot of people these days don’t seem to have the patience for. I’m keeping Facebook as a point of contact with family members who won’t leave it even though I’m privileged enough to drop it entirely if I really wanted. As I don’t engage in politics there, it’s no big deal for me.
Yeah, we won’t be going through the canal this time around, but we did that at the end of 2023 and it was great, even though local unrest meant we couldn’t get off to do the trip into the jungle to meet a local tribe that we’d planned. We’ll likely just see what the options are in Panama City itself this time around, assuming they let us off the ship at all. Given that itinerary and some of the ports on it we’re not expecting to stop at all of them. The risk you take on any Latin American cruise.
Your future plans sound great despite the uncertainty with your job. Silversea are definitely not on our radar because they’re definitely not in our price range but I imagine the itinerary and service will be superb and you can’t fail to have a great time if that comes about.