Given that we’ll be soon heading off for the last of this year’s cruises (this coming weekend, thanks for asking) it feels only right and proper that I push out a set of links to the latest travel content published on the site, and cover anything of microscopic interest taking part in the world that’s tangentially travel-related too. It’s what I do.
All the most recent pieces of travel writing have covered what we got up to during our port stop in Stavanger while we were cruising aboard P&O’s Britannia last year for a week along the Norwegian coastline. When you realise that this was one of those occasions where we had no firm plans and didn’t book an excursion (it wasn’t our first time there) it’s quite remarkable that I’ve managed to publish five travelogues out of it, although they are photo-heavy and writing-light for the most part. Great news for you if words tax your brain!
In the first post we arrived at Stavanger and made some tentative plans about what we might do ashore.
We ended up visiting the Printing and Canning Museums in the old part of the city mainly because we’re contrary oiks and we’d been told that we wouldn’t have a good time there. But did we? Well, I could tell you because I absolutely hate those sort of clickbait titles that everyone puts on posts or videos, but I know that your interest in seeing ancient typesetting machinery and cans of sardines is about on a level with my in-laws – the ones who told us not to visit – so there’s just no point. Oh, alright then, we thought it was excellent.
Gamle Stavanger Photos will not surprise you in terms of its content. This is the area of white wooden-faced buildings that cruise ships dock right alongside when they visit Stavanger and we had fond memories of seeing this quaint location at the end of an excursion on our very first cruise to Norway back in 2015 so it was lovely just to see it all again.
Our tickets for the museums we’d already visited granted us access to the Stavanger Maritime Museum too. The exhibitions here included authentic house and office interiors and reconstructions of other businesses associated with the Norwegian maritime industry, and there were some lovely things to see here. Nothing particularly new and exciting simply because we cruise a lot and you tend to find museums favouring maritime and nautical themes crop up in the same locations as ships, but that’s geography for you.
The last write-up from Stavanger covers our stroll along Fargegaten where you’ll find vibrant buildings and loads of street art. We also found a pub! I know! What are the odds!?
Right, that’s Stavanger’s travelogues complete, although there will be one more post from the area in the next round-up because taking photos of the sail-away is something you just can’t stop me from doing.
Approaching the end of the year now and not a lot of travel news springs to mind.
We had been considering Cunard’s Queen Anne as a potential “let’s try Cunard and see what we think” cruise but having just seen several other bloggers report continuing food service problems on the cruise that they all took at the same time, this is still a line that’s fairly well down our list to travel with.
We still don’t have set plans for the seven days we’ve got to play with for annual leave next year and we’ve got to work those around my wife’s work in addition to avoiding school holidays like the plague if we can so our options are a little more limited than we’d like. The prices of cruises is definitely on the up and a lot of trips that we’d think would be no-brainers in the past are now far more questionable in terms of value for money. Princess, we’re looking at you. We’re not tight, but we don’t want to be ripped off. The best cruise match for us at the moment that hits the right price point we’re prepared to meet and includes several new ports is aboard P&O Azura in the Mediterranean. We’d dearly love to try a new line or ship if there was something comparable but as there isn’t and as the itinerary is the most important part, that’s where we’re leaning if we cruise.
If we cruise, that is. The other thing that I’ve started nosing at a bit more are long weekend city breaks; those fly somewhere on a Thursday, spend the night, all day Friday and Saturday there for the best of city and night life, then fly back on the Sunday deals. There are plenty of European countries we’ve not visited before – well, they don’t have a coastline, you see – and there are some good-looking possibilities.
But, we’ve also just seen a river cruise company that really interests us (most don’t) – but has hitherto had absolutely no European presence making booking cruises with them somewhat iffy – has just had stalls out at a travel meeting expo in London, so could they be opening some booking service soon? That would be mighty handy because their itineraries look fabulous, hardly anyone we know knows about them, and that contrariness I mentioned earlier is a large part of the reason we avoid the companies that keep throwing freebie cruises at people.
My middle name is dither.
Only a few days until we head off to Italy to meet Caribbean Princess for the Trans-Atlantic. With only a couple of excursions booked I’ve been spending a lot of time recently looking at things we might do in other ports we visit. There should be a few decent chances for local beers (we are us, after all) and we’re going to see how busy the cable car ride is in Funchal when we get there (if we get there; we didn’t last time we were supposed to go) as the port schedule shows three ships in on that day, plus we’ve got our eye on some Moorish and Roman historical sites on our Spanish stop, and a botanical garden and carnival museum in the Canary Islands. We’ve got a long excursion when we hit Casablanca but we’re not due to depart until midnight so it might be nice to spend some of the four hours at the end of the day seeing what Moroccan nightlife is like. Depends how brave we’re feeling.
Okay, that’ll do for this blog. Hopefully, the next one will be the usual cruise summing-up that I publish just after we come back from any trip, and hopefully it will be full of utter joy and tales of wonderful experiences and not too many encounters with Trump-voters, but we all know it’s going to be hard to avoid the scum. And then the countdown starts for 2025 and a chance to see what we think of Ambassador Cruise Line.