Mixing things up for this somewhat regular blog update (or newsletter if that’s the way you’re receiving this) by covering some travel news before listing all the most recent posts published on the website since the last update. I know! What am I like!?
We’ve finally managed to book out the last of our annual leave for 2024 so our travel plans for the year are now complete. We’d been looking for something ideally around the start of September to space out trips relatively evenly across the year and spotted a cruise on P&O’s Ventura that was at a good price, includes a couple of new ports for us in Spain and Portugal, and gives us the opportunity to spend a night in Lisbon. We’d toyed with the idea of a package holiday somewhere instead but price-wise they’re just not as good value for the standard of travelling we’re now used to.
With that done, our travel plans for 2024 now look like this, and to the surprise of nobody they’re all going to be on cruise ships:
- March – P&O Aurora – Rotterdam
- May – Regal Princess – Ireland, Northern Ireland, Scotland, France
- September – P&O Ventura – Spain, Portugal, Guernsey
- November – Caribbean Princess – Italy, Spain, Morocco, Madeira, USA
Two new ships, thirteen new ports, three continents, two overnight stays, around the UK for the first time, and a transatlantic for the first time. And for my wife, two new countries in the form of Ireland and Morocco. Not too bad at all.
We had a small scare when we learned that my in-laws who’d been thinking about doing a UK cruise on Cunard’s Queen Mary 2 had instead opted for Regal Princess as well. Luckily for us, on a different date.
Okay, now it’s time to see what travel and photographic posts have been published since the last of these blog posts. They can broadly be categorised as covering our day in Iceland’s capital, Reykjavík, on our July 2022 Sky Princess cruise, and older travel accounts that all happen to be at southern coastal locations in England. Hence this post’s title. That’s what a title is for.
Starting with the UK posts, Selsey Seafront Photos will not surprise you with its content. We visited this spot with a vague intention of hunting down astronomer Patrick Moore’s house. But did we? No.
The ruins of Netley Abbey are fabulous and surprisingly intact, and when we visited them the grounds were full of mushrooms, so something there for fans of historic buildings and fungus. I think that’s everybody covered.
A short hop from Netley Abbey, and visited on the same day by us, is Royal Victoria Country Park And Hospital Chapel and if you ever cruise out of Southampton then there’s a good chance you’ll spot the chapel tower from the water. This was once home to the longest building in the world and it’s got quite a fascinating history behind it involving Queen Victoria, Florence Nightingale, and D-Day.
Another spot not far from where we live is Emsworth and this post recounts a walk around the Mill Pond as well as the ludicrous thing we overhead a mother tell her child.
The last of the English coastal posts on this site is from a short break we took in Devon several years ago. We stayed in Exmouth but used that as a base to explore the surrounding area. On one of those days we headed into the county’s capital primarily to see the cathedral, but ahead of that we walked around the very attractive Exeter Quay and learnt a little bit about why the Exeter Ship Canal was built.
Now for the cruising travel posts, all of them coming from our Sky Princess cruise in 2022 that concluded in Iceland. The first of the new travelogues has us Cruising From Grundarfjörður, Iceland.
The final port of call on that cruise was Reykjavík, a city we’d visited a couple of times before, so we opted to simply walk from the cruise port to the centre along the shoreline this time. We started off by finding some public modern art pieces in Sigurjón Ólafsson Sculptures in Laugarnes.
Right next to those sculptures is a must-visit location if you’re ever in Reykjavík in my opinion: the Recycled House. Words can’t do it justice, and neither can the photos really. It’s just something you have to explore on your own.
We continued our walk towards the Icelandic capital’s centre and discovered more Art Sculptures Along The North Shore Of Reykjavík.
The only plan we had for the city was to visit the Icelandic Punk Museum in Reykjavík since we’d managed not to visit it on the two previous trips to Iceland, and that’s what we did next. It was fabulous.
And that just leaves one more post from Reykjavík covering our walk back along the shore and saying farewell to the city from Sky Princess.
All of which means that there’s just one more post to come from this cruise which will be pictures of the ship from the final sea days heading back to the UK, and then I can start writing up about the next and last cruise we took in 2022 which was aboard Island Princess.