Time to catch up with what you’ve missed because you don’t refresh the website daily, what with you not being some kind of weirdo and all that.
To start with – and as the title of this blog somewhat gives away – I’ve completed the write-ups of our short cruise aboard Virgin Voyages’ Scarlet Lady. Did we like this cruise and this ship? Well, you’re going to have to read the posts to find out unless I spoil it all and save you some clicks by saying oh hell yes. Anyway, you might still want to click through to some of these posts because you have to see our cabin, and you have to see what makes Virgin different. Yeah, we didn’t think we were going to like Scarlet Lady but we were very, very wrong.
In Virgin Voyages Scarlet Lady: Seriously Suite Departure From Portsmouth you can read about boarding, taking a look at our stunning suite, and see what it’s like to cruise out of our home city of Portsmouth. Expect to see historic ships, modern naval warships, one of the country’s aircraft carriers, medieval fortifications, and more.
Following on from the sailaway, the first night aboard Scarlet Lady saw us dining in the Test Kitchen, drinking into the early hours, and loving the 1980s games arcade on the ship.
A full day at sea to try to get over the excesses of the night before, trying out the Italian restaurant on the cruise ship, and experiencing the signature Splash of Scarlet Night.
That’s the Scarlet Lady blogs done but there have been other posts published on the site recently too, including one other cruise-related post: a hits and misses post regarding our week aboard P&O’s Iona. P&O Cruise Ship Iona: The Good and the Bad.
Three short posts covering some old trips around the country complete what’s been published since the last update. First up is Cambridge: Corpus Christi College And The Computer Museum which was a side-trip we took while staying in Southend one year.
A stop to stretch our legs on a drive back from Margate one year leads to some views of the shoreline along Whitstable.
Finally, from the very early days of owning a proper digital camera, a visit to the National Trust property of Stourhead in Wiltshire.
The next set of cruising travelogues will start to be written soon and they’ll be covering that week on Iona in a little more depth. It wasn’t a terrible cruise but it would be fair to say that it ranks right down there amongst our least favourites and it’s not a ship we are going to look to cruise on again unless it’s a spectacular deal going to some spectacular places.
After Iona it will be posts from our week aboard Sky Princess that we’ve only recently returned from. This was a fantastic cruise and that can be put down to a wonderful crew, fantastic value for money that you get with Princess Cruises, an excellent ship (a great improvement everywhere on the Royal and Regal on which it’s based), and actually being able to get off the ship in ports and even take excursions. We headed down to the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland and got all artistic in Liverpool.
All that to come. When work stops getting in the way.
In upcoming travel news we’re a few weeks away from our last cruise of the year. It’ll be P&O’s chance to redeem themselves in our eyes as we make a return to Ventura and head down to the Canary Islands, Portugal, and Spain, only the latter of which we’ve visited before. Fingers crossed for no hiccups before that because we’ve got excursions booked everywhere that we’re really looking forward to.
We’ve also just this week booked a fourth cruise for next year to finish off our annual leave that’s already being eaten up by Valiant Lady and two cruises on Sky Princess. We’re still reluctant to risk anything with international flights right now because the world’s just not on top of this pandemic enough for our liking so we’ve kept to our plan of only booking trips we can take from the UK, and that’s when we spotted a late September sailing in 2022 on one of Princess’s older and smaller ships – Island Princess – visiting six countries in ten days: Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Netherlands, and Belgium. A new ship for us and neither of us have visited Germany before so it’ll be nice to tick that off the list. In addition, only Copenhagen and Zeebrugge are ports we’ve visited before, although the stop in Oslo is one that we should achieve on Sky Princess earlier in the year. Plenty of new places to explore, then.