These newsletter-style blog updates are coming more and more regularly as I appear to be going through a purple patch where it comes to reporting recent or new activities and throwing new and old travel accounts up on the site at the moment. Embrace this time, because I’m sure there will be another slump and hiatus of months again at some point.
Let’s start as we always start with the travel content that’s been published here since the last update.
I finished off the weekend coverage of our second stay at Warner Leisure Hotels Lakeside on nearby Hayling Island with an account of what we did on the Sunday. To be honest, we didn’t do a lot and the post reflects that as it’s mostly just photos of the walk around Hayling Island’s eastern side: Hayling Island and Mengeham Rythe Coastal Path Walk Photos.
To keep the site content a bit mixed up so it’s not just all the recent cruising and short breaks activity I dug back into my archives of photos and put up two posts of old, non-travel stuff. This site is mostly travel-related, of course, but it also serves as an archive of everything I’ve seen fit to take pictures of.
First of those posts is a short stop we made here in Portsmouth while walking down to Southsea so that we could witness the Royal Naval Volunteer Band Festival taking place in Guildhall Square in 2016. Not my type of music and not something we’d go out of our way to necessarily see, but some people like that sort of thing. These volunteers, for instance.
The second of these filler posts features a few photos taken one lunchtime at a place I used to work where I’d make sure to get away from my desk and wander into the countryside whenever I needed a break. There will probably be many of these sorts of occasional posts eventually added to the site because I used to do this a lot. Chilgrove, April, 2010.
You didn’t think there’d be an update without any cruising content, did you? Of course you didn’t! Two more posts have been published now from last year’s cruise on Ventura down to the Canary Islands. We haven’t quite reached the Canary Islands yet but that will change from the next update.
The first cruise travelogue update concludes our time in Lisbon so if you want to see pictures and videos of Ventura Departing Lisbon, including the sail under the Ponte 25 de Abril suspension bridge, then you know what to do.
The final piece of new travel content is the day at sea on Ventura following our visit to Portugal. I take pictures of the cruise ship’s top deck, we visit the Beach House for dinner, and get to see another stunning sunset at sea. The clouds and colours in the sky were truly magical. Ventura Cruise Ship Photos, Sunset Sea Views, Beach House.
So, about that Steamship Experience you can see in the title of this update…
This weekend we spent one day in Southampton so that we could take a short trip down the Solent and out towards the Isle of Wight aboard Steamship Shieldhall, with the big draw of this particular sailing being that we’d also pass four cruise ships docked in the city before they departed in the evening. Of course there will be a full write-up on this site in due course but here’s a brief review: it was brilliant.
A slightly longer review now. Firstly, we hadn’t originally planned to stay in Southampton. Because the steamship had a bar aboard and we thought it would be nice to drink (well, you know us) we were going to take the train to our neighbouring city along the coast. Sadly, the RMT strike put paid to that – which we fully support; total solidarity with those seeking to not be exploited while the companies and bosses and shareholders and their supporters in government rake in massive profits – so we booked a hotel last minute, drove down, then walked to the berth for the ship. The steamship is all run by very friendly volunteers and National Lottery funding, and she’s a beauty. You can wander almost wherever you want; the bridge and engine room are open before and during the sailing; crew cabins are open for nosing around in too. A great selection of drinks and food options were able to be bought, and we did, and there was plenty of seating for the passengers on a couple of decks of space plus an interior lounge.
We sailed down the Solent and past two P&O ships – Ventura and Iona – as well as Sky Princess, all of which we’ve cruised on, plus NCL Prima which definitely had the wow factor in design. Coming back at the end of our four-hour trip Shieldhall sounded her steam whistle as Sky Princess passed but without any response from the cruise ship. I tweeted to the caption of Sky Princess that I was disappointed in him and got an instant response that we needed to speed up next time, so that was entertaining. When we passed Ventura cruising out, though, there was a lot of back-and-forth horns and whistles, and it’s lovely to see that sort of interaction on the water. All in all, a very enjoyable day about which I’ll fill in more details much later on this site, and very highly recommended if you’re visiting Southampton. In a couple of weekends time we’ll be on the Paddle Steamer Waverley circling the Isle of Wight so we’re very much looking forward to our second steamship experience soon.
We’re about a month away from our next cruise, and the last one of the year, and there will be a lot of new things to see on that one. A new ship for us, even though she’s fairly old, and smaller than we typically cruise on; a few new ports, and one new country to experience too.
In the meantime we’ve been looking ahead to next year’s cruises, seeing if we could work out which excursions to book. For our Croatia and Italy cruise next April there still aren’t any trips listed so that planning hasn’t been an issue. For our week-long Alaskan cruise we’ve got the opposite problem in that there are so many excursions to choose from I’ve had to put on my Super Nerd helmet and start a spreadsheet to work out the best combination of activities. When I finally select options then I’ll put an update on the site but right now it’s all very much “Well, this one sees a glacier up close, while this one is from a distance but near a waterfall and there’s food, unless we try this one at this port that promises whale sightings and save the glacier views for the train ride one here, although we could…”
Finally, some new cruise booking news for us. If all goes to plan then next year should see us tick off two bucket list travel items, those being the aforementioned visit to Alaska, and also, as of this week, a cruise through the Panama Canal. We’ve gone and booked a cruise out of San Francisco and into Fort Lauderdale – two American ports we’ve not visited – and in addition to the full transit through the Panama Canal’s new locks on Ruby Princess (one of Princess’s Grand-class ships we’ve not cruised on yet) we’ll be hitting ports in Nicaragua and Costa Rica that we visited on our 2019 Star Princess cruise plus a new one in Mexico (Cabo San Lucas), and two new ones in two new countries: Panama City, Panama and Cartagena, Colombia.
I think that will do for this update.