Why, if it isn’t one of these very-nearly-regular-but-not-really updates to keep you informed about the new content that’s been posted on the site along with travel news from us and perhaps from the wider world when it interests me enough to share.
Let’s jump straight into the updated content on the site.
New Travel Content
If you’d like to learn a little about some of the things you could see were you to ever walk along the shoreline at Old Portsmouth then Old Portsmouth Shoreline Photowalk does exactly what it says on the tin, with photos from a particularly nice day along our city’s coast. Did you know, for instance, that the entire city of Portsmouth was excommunicated by the church?
If that account of a wander along the seafront isn’t enough for you then why not consider reading about the Margate Seafront And The Shell Grotto walk we undertook on our second visit to the Kent seaside town? Who built the grotto, and why? And how did our encounter with a pair of bank robbers pan out?
Staying in the UK, but heading inland now is our write-up of a brief visit to the National Trust property, and more specifically, The Gardens At Hinton Ampner.
Three posts now from our 2008 honeymoon cruise that have had some reworking, image-reprocessing, and expanding just because I can’t leave things alone.
Fresh imagery is the main change covering our Keelung, Taiwan – Cruising Into The Port post.
While we were docked in Taiwan we took a very, very rainy excursion to see the mining village of Jiufen. That post originally included some additional information about some things we saw ahead of the village but I took them out, cleaned up all the pictures, and added a few additional bits of video to drive home just how wet (but still enjoyable) it all was.
The stripped-out content from that Jiufen post then made its way into a new post from that same excursion, Taiwan: Northern Coast And Fushan Temple. More pictures, better processing, and a lot more information about the part of the Taiwanese coast we visited, including our look at the Nanya Rock Formations.
Travel Changes
Well, it didn’t come as a surprise but that didn’t stop it being any less pleasant, to discover that our planned trip on P&O’s Arcadia up the Norwegian coastline and into the Arctic Circle to see the Northern Lights was cancelled last week. The ongoing uncertainty of the world situation, of course. This was disappointing for us, and for my in-laws who’d booked the same cruise as a 50th wedding anniversary present for themselves.
A cancelled cruise suddenly gave us two weeks of annual leave to play with and we’re now both fully-vaccinated so that opened up a lot of options, including ones at short notice, but the situation with countries being okay to visit then not okay, then okay but only if conditions are met, then okay going one way but requiring quarantine come back… well, we decided to sit on that holiday time for now. Perhaps, we thought, we’d do something a bit last-minute like we did last year when we flew over to Kos, book the time off anyway, then see where we can go just a few days before. Exciting. Spontaneous. Let’s do that!
That resolve lasted all of a week.
Today, we’ve used about three quarters of the credit we had from our cancelled P&O cruise to book a different P&O cruise for roughly the same timeframe (shifted just a few days), on a ship we’ve cruised on once before – Ventura – and heading southwards this time, down to Spain, Portugal, and the Canary Islands. While the ship is one we know (and it’s a class of ship we love), all the ports will be new for us, and neither of us have ever visited Portugal or the Canaries before, so that will be nice to tick off the list.
If it doesn’t also get cancelled, of course.
What can I say? We like having plans, even if we live in a time when most don’t survive to fruition, and we like to know we might, maybe, perhaps, possibly be getting on cruise ships. And if this booking does get cancelled too then we can still fall back to our last-minute, somewhere exciting or different or just actually possible to visit travel plan anyway.
The Cruise
The BBC have started re-showing the original series of The Cruise, first broadcast in the late 1990s. We’d never seen it before, although we have been fans of the re-launched version with Jane McDonald in more recent years, so we thought it would be good to see what the programme was like and whether or how much cruising had changed between then and now.
Wow.
Let’s just say that it’s a good thing we never watched the show before we decided to go on our first cruise. We knew that some things had changed, of course; no cash on board the ship being an obvious one. But the emphasis on crowded venues with the same song over and over (please, no more Macarena); or the DJ talking over every track, inviting people up to dance, rather creepily talking about how he must kiss someone at New Year; or the guest representative working with a hacking cough.
Yeah, that’s not what cruising’s like. Well, we’ve managed to avoid it all, anyway.
I saw a friend talking to one of his friends on Twitter regarding the presence of Virgin’s Scarlet Lady in Portsmouth (which has looked absolutely wonderful, by the way) and they both mentioned that cruising culture (whatever that is) wasn’t for them. If they think it’s like the first series of The Cruise then it’s no wonder why.
Our August cruise to W. Greenland/Arctic Canada with Nat Geo just got canceled, but they offered a substitute cruise that is shorter and which goes to E. Greenland (briefly) and around to west coast of Iceland. The cruise was on the same approximate dates as the original and was cheaper, even though it was on their new ship, the Endurance. So, we rebooked on that cruise, upgraded our cabin to a veranda suite (winning!), and planned for additional land activities in Iceland to use up the extra 3-4 days we have off the boat. We’re getting a hotel up in the northern part around Lake Myvatn and doing some hiking in the parks around there. We probably won’t see polar bears on this trip, which had been the original goal of the cruise, but we’ll get to see parts of Iceland we wouldn’t otherwise have seen, AND we got a nice chunk of cash back that we can put on that Nat Geo cruise to Indonesia/Papua New Guinea that we booked for Nov, 2022. Overall not a bad result.
Lindblad, Nat Geo’s cruise company, is requiring that all guests be fully-vaccinated and have a negative PCR test prior to boarding. The test has to be within 48 h of boarding, I think, which is only sensible, given all the variants now circulating. Iceland requires vaccination also. We just got back from 5 days in Puerto Rico, which was my first time flying and traveling since the pandemic started. It was great to finally be traveling again, but the experience still felt…strange. Different. Things are not the same. There’s no more food or liquor sampling, which I particularly missed in Duty Free coming back. They are enforcing strict per person limits in many restaurants and stores, so there were lines to just get into a store to shop. Everybody is masked up all the time indoors, of course, which makes for very thirsty touring. Masking up during our flights also made us very thirsty, as we could only remove our masks briefly to take a sip or a bite, which complicates eating and drinking. Hotels aren’t providing gratis notepads, pens, or snacks anymore; and we couldn’t serve ourselves from the breakfast buffet. We had to get a server to fill our plates. These are all minor in the grand scheme of things, but it makes me wonder what our upcoming experience in August will be like.
We have two cruises already booked with Lindblad for 2022, and we have that cruise credit with Crystal cruises we have to use up by 2023. We are not booking any more cruises until we see what covid will do; we plan to book private land tours instead. They are more expensive, but the chances that they will be canceled are much less, in our estimation. Covid has really killed the cruise industry. As much as we love cruising, we can’t keep taking the kicks to the gut that all of these fucking cancellations are delivering.
Shame about the polar bears, but they’ll be there when you can go again. Unless the Earth heats up really quickly and destroys all their habitat in the meantime. Oh.
Aye, these cancellations are getting a little tedious and every time we think there’s light at the end of the tunnel our government over here does something stupid to prolong the agony, with the latest likely course of action in a few weeks being to simply open everything up and dispense with all restrictions anyway, not caring what impact that has on anyone who’d actually like to travel when other more sensible countries slam the brakes on us getting there.
We had that week in Kos in November (and the mask restrictions on flights etc. weren’t ideal but we didn’t mind them too much) but that’s been our only time out of the country in over 20 months now and we’re really missing being at sea. Stress has got so much for Marie with her work (four people quit in four months in her department) that she’s literally getting signed off work as of today; her blood pressure’s a cause for concern, although not super-high, apparently, and her doctor has seen so much of it over the last year and a half that they’re taking no chances. It’s all having a toll on everyone.
I hope your rearranged cruises go ahead, and I hope ours do too, of course, even though we’re not doing anything as fancy as you. We are hoping that by keeping ours small and local(ish) for the next year’s planned trips we can reduce the risk of more cancellations, but I’m trying to be as reasonable as I can with it all as there’s not a thing we can do about it, plus I’m trying not to stress Marie out any more than necessary.
I can certainly identify with what Marie is going though regarding work stress. My office is losing people left and right too. It’s a shitty time to have to work for a living, to be sure. I hope she feels better soon.