Holy heck, Mark! How many new travel posts are there on your site!?
Yeah, I know, inner conversation voice! I’ve clearly suffered some kind of brain injury that conjures up imaginary people with which to chat while guiding me into a flurry of travelogue-writing activity. Or the recent cold snap in the country has encouraged me to keep my fingers moving in lulls while working so they don’t lose all sensation.
Go with the latter option. It makes you seem less mad.
Good thinking, me!
So, yes, indeed, it’s been less than two weeks since I last published a round-up of travelogues and other travel-related content on this site, but I’ve been super-busy. It’s helped that the content I’ve been pushing out has been smaller in length, benefitting from being able to split up aspects of some trip or another in chunks; that’s not always the case so an article can take a long time to just hurl up onto the web to be ignored. However, for the concluding parts of Alesund in Norway on last year’s cruise aboard Sky Princess, and for the posts covering the first port in Iceland after that, Akureyri, I’ve been a regular travel-writing machine.
Onto the new content then, with a hopefully short account of anything else site-related or travel-related to follow, as usual.
I’ll begin with the only non-cruising bit of writing, which almost has no writing at all. It’s just a few photos of drinks in pubs in Oxford for the most part that came at the end of a day there last year and which is part of a series of posts about the weekend in Oxfordshire which has reached the mid-point.
Two posts close off our visit to Alesund in Norway. First up is a short walk around the town and a little history lesson about the architecture and how it owes a lot of influence to Kaiser Wilhelm. That’s in Ålesund And Some Architectural History
The final Norwegian travel post shows off Alesund from Sky Princess as we departed in the evening.
A cruise ship sea day post next, but one a little different on account of there being next to nothing to see. We travelled across the Norwegian Sea and over the Arctic Circle towards Iceland for an entire day while encased in a thick bank of fog.
Five posts perform the duty of recounting what we got up to in Akureyri, Iceland. Iceland is our favourite European country and we loved being able to cruise along the northern coast as it’s an area we’d not visited before, making all the ports but the capital new for us.
Some photos of the port of Akureyri from the morning of our arrival while we waited for that last bit of fog to burn off and for our day’s excursion to begin.
The first part of our excursion while docked at Akureyri was to Laufás Turf House Museum, and it was a fabulous place indeed.
You can’t visit Iceland and not see a waterfall or they set the trolls on you, so we enjoyed this excursion that next took us to see both Goðafoss and Geitafoss.
The excursion concluded with a short (too short) stop at Akureyri Botanical Garden with its thousands of species of non-native plants to enjoy.
Finally, we had enough time to go for a little walk around Akureyri, take some photos, grab a drink or two, before getting back on Sky Princess for the sail away along the fjord.
That’s brought you up to date with posts, bar a couple of reworked photos that you can always check out on the Photo Rework tag if you’re that way inclined.
What else is new?
Another look at connecting this site up with ActivityPub and publishing it that way so that anyone on the Fediverse can subscribe and receive post updates and comment has highlighted a couple of issues with the official plug-in. Looks like I’ll have to fork the code and modify it to my needs. It also exposed that the author page on this site (which isn’t publicised, but is discoverable if you know where to look) was only showing blog posts (like this content) but not the travel content (like the posts linked in this post). But it is now, thanks to a little code snippet wizardry.
After stating that Threads was improving in the last update I’ve refined my opinion to No, It’s Still Garbage. I tested engagement and discoverability through searches with standalone posts and threads, figuring threads would be more prominent given that the platform is called, you know, Threads. Oh no. Absolutely not. Everything about it makes me think it’s just one big public Facebook page skinned to look different. Big accounts get the algorithm boost for engagement and everyone else is handed out scraps on a random basis. Outside followers when first signing up that brought along Instagram accounts automatically, finding new people to follow or being followed by someone with whom you had no previous connection has been almost impossible. It’s just, ultimately, not worth the effort, so I deleted all my content there and any comments that were ignored or look like they were placed on accounts that also subsequently gave up. I’ll check on it periodically, but it seems like it’s being designed and run by someone who’s been told Just Make Another Facebook for us, cheers.
Warner Leisure have announced a new hotel to add to their portfolio later next year: The Runnymede on Thames. The interesting thing about this is that we very almost stayed there this year; it was on our shortlist of locations not too far from Heathrow ahead of the flight out to San Francisco in October. Looked lovely, well-priced, with good access to interesting places nearby, but we ultimately went for something that didn’t mean we’d need to hop on the M25 for a junction or two first thing in the morning as it was just a little bit of extra stress to avoid.
No new travel bookings for 2024 beyond what was mentioned in the last update. UK breaks have been discussed, as have short package holidays, but the price of everything in the period we’re looking at – the summer months, sadly – is difficult to justify. Something will turn up and when it does it will inevitably feature in one of these updates.
That’ll do for this post. Fairly short for me. The next one will either be another flood of posts from Iceland, or it will be the year’s travel round-up that all travel bloggers are required by law to produce.