Since the last update there has been a plethora of changes around the place, not that you’d notice.
Site Changes
The page of RSS feeds syndicating travel posts from other bloggers… is no more. 2020 shoulders a lot of blame for that, I suppose, in that the content from other travel bloggers has fallen so sharply in terms of quality and quantity it just wasn’t providing a lot of enjoyment looking at it to discover new bits of writing any longer. Regurgitated press releases and wholly lifted snippets of news announcing yet another delay to the start of cruising were starting to fill the input with so few articles containing something to actually read in the gaps between. A simple decision in the end, therefore, to remove the page and shut down the syndication plugin.
Still, I can’t help but be a bit disappointed in a lot of bloggers whose content I used to read a lot but who seem to have seen this period of enforced home-based lingering as the termination of their creative output; it reinforces the belief that for a lot of them their site was primarily a means to getting clicks and earning pennies or kudos with travel companies, and only tangentially something for their own memories to revisit, revamp, tidy up, enhance, expand upon, etc. Obviously, this doesn’t apply to everyone. Chances are that if you’re the sort of travel blogger who’s actually reading this then there’s a strong likelihood you’re an exception to that observation.
I have noticed that traffic to this site is up, bizarrely, and that traffic from search engines is significantly up while traffic from social media is way down, and I think it’s reasonable to point the finger for the first part in the direction of having a website that keeps getting updated fairly regularly and the reason for the second part being the impact of some bloggers on social media often only being interested in visiting other people’s sites when they themselves have something to promote. I know, I know, that’s not painting travel bloggers in a nice light and it’s a horrible generalisation but, again, I probably don’t mean you when I say that. Probably.
There’s a new submenu on this site now. Have you spotted it? Have you even noticed that there is a menu on this site let alone submenus? Oh, you.
During my regular editing of past posts, adding new content from this year’s short breaks, and looking back at lots of old trips that haven’t made it onto this site yet (and boy, are there a lot!?; let’s just say that if we couldn’t travel for another three years I’ve probably got enough content for new posts to go up every few days even discounting the earlier published content here that could benefit from rewriting) I realised that, of course, with this being 2020 and The Year The Cruise Ships All Dropped Anchors there was no new cruise content appearing. Yes, I have been revisiting and improving Norway and Asia cruise content (more on that in the next section) but a lot of consideration has been leaning towards the trips we took around the UK or abroad not on a ship. While a lot of that content is standalone – a day trip to a nearby stately home, for instance – there are some that were part of short breaks of up to a week or so. I decided to start grouping those trips together by tag (and I really like to tag things: see Tags) and, in a similar manner to the Cruises submenu I’ve now added a Trips submenu. It’s got a little suitcase icon next to it. There’s not a lot there yet and what travel posts there are within the categories will have spotty coverage of the breaks requiring completion at some point, but it helps me as a guide to what I still need to do and it might provide a little more guidance for someone planning a trip as to what else might be in the vicinity. Hey, anything’s possible.
New Travel Content
Right, I’ll try to keep this bit brief as I’ve rambled on far more than I was planning so far (I always plan a little bit of rambling).
Here are the new travelogues published since the last blog update from this year’s West Country Break (which you can now find listed under the Trips menu now as explained above):
- The Sidmouth Shoreline – A couple of hours in the Devon coastal town.
- First Evening In Weymouth – Post-Sidmouth, we arrived in Weymouth along the coast in Dorset, and had some fun and games trying to park.
- Weymouth And The South West Coast Path – Our first full day in Weymouth covering visits to a castle and a fort and a smattering of pubs.
The rewrites, image-reprocessing, and additions to our first two cruises on Diamond Princess in Asia and on Crown Princess in Norway has continued with recent updates being:
- Beijing Hutongs – Total rewrite with more information along with the discovery of new photos from our last full day in the Chinese capital.
- Stegastein Lookout, Aurlandsvangen – Fresh image processing for this post from Norway and the removal of the brief Flåm coverage in the original write-up so as to give it its own post.
- The Village And Cruise Port Of Flåm, Norway – And this is the newly-isolated post describing the charming village along the fjords and its oh-so-fabulous brewery.
New posts from old trips have also been published on the website recently.
- Bournemouth Seafront Walk – Inspired by a video from some travel blogging friends of ours who had a similar wet and windy visit there a few months ago, this is our 2017 experience.
- Ightham Mote Manor House, Kent – One of the many, many, many “oh yeah, I never got around to writing about that” realisations when adding the Trips submenu is this medieval manor house visit during a 2014 getaway in Kent.
And finally, another in my series of single photo reworkings with this being a more vibrant, more detailed, cropped version of a shot when we were in the Coquimbo region of Chile.
Travel News
Amazingly, there actually has been some travel news.
First vaccinations have taken place in the UK for 2020’s travel nemesis. Good news, of course, but merely the first step on a long journey. At-risk people will be vaccinated first and we’re not on any of the categories expected to be offered it at any point soon – like most people, to be fair – which means there’s still many months (if not another year or more) of mask-wearing, isolating, testing, etc. for the majority of those who want to travel. Plus, being protected from the virus doesn’t mean you can’t be a carrier so don’t expect mask-wearing to vanish overnight. Travelling will still be disrupted for a long time to come but hopefully the restrictions and requirements for negative tests before going away will ease as the impact of the virus recedes, the R-number plummets, and the capacity for dealing with it among those fewer numbers infected improves. If they don’t then the travel industry hasn’t got a hope in hell of looking anything like it used to in the years to come and we’ll all be worse off because of it.
P&O have announced that current new ship that nobody’s been on, Iona, will be getting a sister in the next few years. No name has been revealed yet but I feel this is a good time to refer back to the last time I wrote about a new cruise ship name for P&O. I’ve made an addition to that list especially for 2020. You can probably already guess what it is.
We came within a whisker of spending the eleven days off before Christmas – since we have them off work anyway – in the Dominican Republic. We looked. We ummed. We ahhed. We thought about some winter sunshine in an all-inclusive resort on an island in the Caribbean. We almost booked a package deal with TUI to do it. We almost booked a deal through British Airways to do it when the TUI option sold out during our dithering. We decided that our dithering was a sign that perhaps we shouldn’t. So we didn’t.
The Dominican Republic was the second place we almost booked time away for in the lead-up to Christmas. We’d first looked at Cuba instead but the requirements for a travel card ahead of the trip, rumours of unrest in the country, and only being able to get a week there which we didn’t think would do the country justice eventually ruled that one out. For now.
Travel Links
As the removal of the Cruise and Travel RSS feeds page has demonstrated it’s not easy finding content I want to dish out a link to any longer but I’ll do my best to continue this blogging tradition of promoting things from other people I think are worth reading or viewing for those who still like to do that thing.
Tulum – So Much More than a Pretty Instagram Picture takes a look at the Mexican town on the Caribbean coastline. We’ve been to Mexico before but not to its eastern side or anywhere near the sorts of ruins we’d really liked to have seen so this was a great read to not only cover that aspect but also general nightlife, food and drink, and what’s good around the town and beach.
Malaysia: Kuala Lumpur & Penang Island – A Very Kerry Christmas and a Happy New Year! recounts Dawn’s experience of this (usually) festive time of the year in Malaysia, which you’ve no doubt worked out already from the helpful title. Expect rain. If you like travel blogging then that’s a site to lose yourself in for many hours or days.
Finally, a video, and like the previous blog round-up write-up this one also features train travel. Experience a ride through Norway from the cab. Put this on in fullscreen view at the highest resolution on the biggest screen you’ve got, and just relax.
Tulum was amazing, on land at least. The reef there was not impressive, even though it was part of the Mesoamerican reef system, which is supposed to be the Western Hemisphere’s answer to the Great Barrier Reef. It is, but you need to go further south and away from touristy areas to see it. Good for them for staying in Tulum instead of Playa del Carmen, which is kind of a shithole. Mexican roads vary by state. The ones in Quintana Roo can be sketchy in parts, but the ones in Baja are nice. Better than in some US states, actually, which doesn’t say much when one thinks about it. I’m a little surprised that they stayed at Tulum but didn’t see Chichen Itza or Coba, which are close by Tulum. Maybe Tulum scratched their itch to see Mayan ruins sufficiently.
Our FDA has authorized the Pfizer vaccine for distribution, and the Moderna vaccine will also likely be authorized soon. Distribution in the US will be an utter cluster-fuck, of course, at least until Jan 20th, and probably even after. Nobody really knows who will get priority, other than the billionaires, whom everyone knows will be first in line. I may not be able to take the Pfizer vaccine, as it may have an elevated risk of inducing anaphylaxis in people like me who have severe allergies (i.e.: people with an Rx for an epi-pen). I’m hoping those two NHS cases were a fluke finding. Either way, Hubby and I may or may not have vaccine access by the time we are ready to depart for our South Pacific cruise in April.
Plenty of vaccines in the pipeline so one should be suitable for you soon enough. I hope you get to do your cruise in April regardless. We were about to book a cruise for the last few days of March and I forgot to do it when planned; one day later and that cruise was cancelled anyway with the line pushing some of their bookings out to early June. I know the lines would love to be up and running by April but the confidence seems low for that early over here. Our first cruise for next year is currently supposed to be the middle of June so we’re right on the cusp of any additional pauses in operations. Nothing we can but wait and hope.