There has been a slew of new content posted on this site since the last of these regular update blog posts but since we’re the exception rather than the rule in the current travel blogging world on account of the continuing global lockdown due to the virus there hasn’t been much in the way of anything new to link to from other people recently. So, a shorter update than usual but on with it anyway.
Site Changes
No plugin or layout changes to report but a small modification to the Future Cruises page to remove both the P&O Britannia and the Enchanted Princess cruises we were due to sail on, both falling victim to that pesky little blighter dominating the news right now. With P&O today announcing an extension of their pause in operations to just the week before we’re scheduled to embark Ventura in August we don’t exactly have a whole lot of hope that it will be taking place either. C’est la vie.
New Travel Content
Yes, that slew of content…
Posts containing more of our November Marella Discovery cruise have continued to arrive fairly regularly.
- Transit through the Suez Canal takes place across two posts. The northern half is contained in Fog And Flies In The Suez Canal where the cruise ship’s passage was accompanied by fog and, that’s right, flies. The southern portion of the canal was under clearer conditions and you can read about it in Suez Canal Southern Transit And Sunset In The Suez Gulf.
- We spent a day at sea in the Gulf of Suez where I decided to take a walk around the ship photographing its interior and exterior spaces. If it’s a ship that interests you then take a read of Exploring Marella Discovery In The Gulf Of Suez.
- It turns out that a lot of photos were taken in and around Petra so I’ve had to break the travelogue entries into three to do it all justice. The first two parts are on the website now and these take you – if you fancy coming along for the trek – firstly from the visitors centre to the Treasury building in Petra and then from the Treasury on a hike to the Monastery in Petra.
There will be one more post in that Petra series detailing the return leg from the Monastery back to the bus and then one more post concluding the final few hours in Jordan before our flight back to the UK. The next new content posts on the site will then explore Chester where we broke up our return trip.
While looking to break that content up with some additional ones I found an old photo of Olden to rework.
This then led me down a rabbit hole of looking back at some of the content from that particular cruise, it being the second one we ever did. What I discovered was that a lot of my earlier travel blog writing lacked detail, lacked narrative, and even lacked a lot of photos. Writing styles change over time, dudes. Not only that, but the photos that were there were processed in a less than ideal manner. To cut a long description short I’ve decided to revisit a lot of older posts and add more information, pad them out with better photos, and include some of the more typical asides that now adorn travelogues where it makes sense. To me.
The old, single post that barely covered the first port of call on that Norwegian fjords cruise has been completely rewritten to deeply detail our walk around Bergen. Places we wandered to are listed, sculptures we found described, some of the history of the city recounted, etc. Absolutely nothing of the original article remains except its URL.
To fill out that day in and around Bergen the sentence or two that were given over to our cruise to and from Norway’s second largest city have been given their own brand new posts with a few errors including use of tender boats getting corrected and a complete omission concerning cruising under a bridge being rectified. You can read that new content in Crown Princess Cruise Into Bergen and Crown Princess Departing Bergen.
It’s actually been really mentally therapeutic in these trying times for those of us who love to travel to go back and rework old content like that, look back through documents from the time, scour the external drives for photos taken during the period. Admittedly, it’s an easier task for me on this site than for a lot of other travel content-writers because this site’s style of travelogues lends itself easily to adding in newly-found photos or scans of pamphlets, or remembering some activity that took place, or finally looking up the name of a place on Google Maps, etc. For those people whose travel content is purely a number of tips or a list of best things or barely-disguised syndication of travel news or press releases from the time I imagine it isn’t something that quite-so-easily pulls the author back into wanting or even being able to alter it somehow.
Travel Plans
Does anyone even have any travel plans now?
Well…
Our annual leave allowance each is 25 days plus bank holidays. This had all been booked up but those cruise cancellations have clawed back twelve days and we imagine that our August is going to fall by the wayside too. We’ve got everything crossed for our October trips still happening (update:nope) but we’re already looking towards next year.
Now, we’ve also already got most of next year’s allowance booked up too but a recent change by the UK government means we can now carry over four weeks of unused allowance for up to two years. Next year’s plans already include two two-weeker cruises so now we’re giving some thoughts to squeezing in a third one. It’s risky in the current climate, of course, but we’ve got our eyes on something already. The airport we’d need to fly into would be awful and one we said we’d never want to visit, but we’d tick off several new countries and get to experience something we’ve always liked the sound of. I’m saying no more for now. If we go ahead and book this then I’ll explain more. It’s nice to dream, though, isn’t it?