Anyone who receives these updates as a newsletter and who actually reads and who even more actually retains any of that information might know that the travelogues that make up nearly all the content on this site have not been added to in quite some time on account of a rather large bit of housekeeping that’s been required to bring the site’s footprint down and speed up. I’m very happy to report that the housekeeping is now complete, the site should be a smidge faster, and it will certainly use up less bandwidth.
So, with the housekeeping out of the way I have made a return to writing up about our travels, and that means picking up where I left off on 2023’s Adriatic cruise aboard P&O Azura. Before I began removing a load of images and replacing a load of JavaScript and editing a few write-ups to correct spelling mistakes and take out links to videos that no longer existed or other bloggers’ sites that have disappeared or are run by people who have turned out to be arseholes, I had got as far as recounting our time in the Croatian port of Split. The next port of call was Trieste in Italy and while we’d never been to Trieste before we had visited Italy enough times to jump at the chance to instead zip across the border into Slovenia.
In P&O Cruises Excursion To Ljubljana, Slovenia I cover the guided portion of our time in the Slovenian capital city with some explanations about the natural disaster that led to the prevalence of Art Nouveau architecture visible in the city.
It wouldn’t be a cruise excursion if it didn’t have some free time to explore on our own and we took advantage of this to enjoy some of the wonderful abstract artwork you can’t help but happen upon if you’re visiting Ljubljana.
The second part of this cruise excursion in Slovenia took us to the extremely popular tourist destination of Lake Bled. We had mixed luck here. On the one hand we visited outside the height of the summer season so the traffic wasn’t anywhere near as bad as it could have been. On the other hand, light drizzle persisted throughout the visit, affecting the experience and views of the lake, castle, island, and church. It was still a gorgeous location.
That’s it for Slovenia so the next bit of travel content on the site will see us return to Trieste then carry on to see more of Croatia.
It’s been a while since I made any substantial changes to the site – not counting the recent big clean-up – but a minor one recently has been to adjust some of the link colours to contrast them more with the background colour. A tiny thing for improved accessibility, but they all add up.
Travel Plans
No new cruises have been booked so our upcoming plans right now remain the same as they were in the last update:
- In five weeks we’ll be off down to Spain and Portugal with a stop at Guernsey on the way back. My birthday will occur during that and our plan for that day includes lunch in the Douro Valley.
- In November we’ll fly to Italy and cruise to Sardinia, Spain, Morocco, Madeira, and Tenerife ahead of our first crossing of the Atlantic to Florida.
- March next year sees us try Ambassador for the first time on a cruise into the Arctic Circle and as far up as Alta in Norway before stopping in Scotland on the way back.
- October next year sees us experiencing Caribbean islands for the first time on what will then be the last of the Grand-class cruise ships that we won’t have cruised on. Another chance for a wedding anniversary and Halloween party at sea for us there.
For that first trip we’ve got a couple of tours booked but are mostly going to be doing that lazy thing of just getting off and seeing what happens. We might find something locally to book in Lisbon because we’ll be there overnight and there’s far less risk of late returns, etc., but our backup plan is that it’s going to be museums and galleries on foot to start with followed by local food and craft ales somewhere as reward. That backup plan is our primary plan in Vigo, but in each case we can afford to be very flexible here. Without wishing to sound flippant, this first cruise is the shortest of those we’ve got booked, it’s on a ship we’re familiar with, to several ports we’ve already been to, and it’s therefore got an element of the throwaway filler holiday to it. That sounds awful now I say it. We shall have a wonderful break, regardless, and we shall endeavour to put some money into the local economies of everywhere we visit.
We’ve still got seven days of leave to play with for next year but right now we’ve got no idea at all what we’ll use that on. Some of the week-long fly-cruise options with P&O in the Mediterranean are well-priced and there’s so much to see and do in that part of the world even if you’ve been there before. We’ll see.
We have been looking further ahead into 2026 already and there’s a part of the world we’d really like to return to (clue in the photo below) that we’re patiently waiting on itineraries to start opening up on before we make a decision. We did see one itinerary and deal in that part of the world that was actually fantastic, visiting loads of new countries and aboard a new line for us too, but the dates and length would eat up so much leave early in the year that it would make the rest of 2026 a horrible slog to get through. We restrained ourselves.
Miscellaneous Travel News
Princess Cruises suffered a technical snafu during the week that saw people logging into the website seeing account and booking information of other travellers. The app wasn’t affected. As an experienced commerce software developer I paid a lot of attention to our own upcoming bookings for this year and next just to make sure there had been no modifications, accidentally or on purpose. It all looks okay, though.
The most recent Sun Princess and to-be-completed Star Princess are losing some of their much-lauded features already. No official announcement why the sky glider and ropes courses are going but I can’t say that I’m sorry to hear this. Neither ship seems to have followed with the Princess traditional niche of relaxation and destination-based cruising treating everyone the same that we fell in love with, favouring instead the “Oh God, we’ve got to try to appeal to everyone all the time in as large a space as possible as noisily as possible with isolated sections for richer people and more teens and more kids and, yes, more tendering as we can’t get into any small ports any longer” that so many other brands of their parent company have embraced too. In five years the answer to the question “What distinguishes Princess Cruises from other cruise lines?” will be “Absolutely fucking nothing at all” if they keep on like this.
There have been some reports that Brodie’s on some P&O ships have moved to bar service only “to make for a more authentic British pub experience” and if you believe that then I’ve got a bridge I can sell you. We’ll see if we notice anything like this cost-cutting disguised as a feature on Ventura next month.
Nothing controversial comes to mind from social media recently, but then again I’ve completely ditched Twitter and that is the place where most controversy festers. Always remember: it’s called Twitter, not X. Twitter’s fascist incel has made it perfectly clear recently that nothing is allowed to change what it is or its name. Should you still be one of those people supporting Elon’s flaccid dick enlarger by using Twitter then hopefully you’re also aware that you’ve been opted in to having all your posts, images, and messages scraped and used to train its own language learning models recently to very little fanfare. Congratulations to you. My only annoyance on Instagram has come from the over-promotion of some video podcast featuring a smug-faced egotist as its guest threatening a cruise line that he’d never cruise with them again unless he gets an apology. The self-importance and self-promotion is why I blocked the git way before he started falling out with all the other decent cruise bloggers too and I didn’t really want to see or hear him again.
Carnival announced a trio of new ships to be built in the next five to nine years, each capable of accommodating eight thousand passengers. When you look at the recent wave of protests against cruise ships disgorging passengers into places to use facilities and spend as little as possible (Must get back to the ship to have lunch! Can’t possibly eat ashore in a local place!) it’s not hard to sympathise with those destinations at all and look with some disgust at the cruise lines whose only concern isn’t them, isn’t you, isn’t the crew, but just how much money they can make for shareholders. And if that means fewer ports and you having to spend more aboard… well, so be it. Not that I necessarily agree with the protestors’ actions; their complaints should be against their local politicians who aren’t doing more to make sure locals come first, stopping short term rentals pricing out locals, and ensuring money from cruising is clearly seen to be reinvested in those destinations rather than some declaration of “into the local economy” mystery hole. I personally like the idea of charging all passengers a minimum fee in every port in the region of twenty euros per person, offset by receipts of purchases in those ports, not to include national chains; local bars, local restaurants, local retailers only. It’s a thought, anyway, and I have loads of those.
Right, I’ve written enough for posterity. Until next time.
“Elon’s flaccid dick enlarger”–LOLOLOLOL!!!
Classic for the ages, that. At least you don’t have to share a country with him. We haven’t booked anything for 2025 beyond that Caribbean cruise for next October, as we’re waiting to see how things shake out in November of this year. We have our eye on an expedition cruise up the West African coast with Silversea, though. It goes to something like 12 countries, including some really out of the way ones like Sao Tome and the Ivory Coast. I’m hoping I can go on that because there’s a chance to see chimps in one of Ivory Coast’s national parks and Hubby will have already gotten to see chimps in Gombe NP next year without me. So must catch up. Depending on what happens in the fall, I may be doing a US national park road trip in the spring. The trip also includes the Canary Islands and Morocco. Don’t think it hits Madeira, though.
We’ve been looking at some African itineraries for 2026 onwards, but I have to admit that Silversea are way outside our justifiable price range. We’d love to try them, obviously, but we just can’t justify that price per person per day compared to other lines. There aren’t a lot of lines that do interesting African itineraries but we were looking at Norwegian here, and elsewhere, as they do a few different ports which appeal to us.