The posts categorised as blogs on this site will tend to be round-ups of what else has been published because travel-writing is kept separate. If you want to keep up-to-date with all the new and rewritten visits near and far that we've done then subscribing to the RSS feed or just frequenting the home page of this site is one way to do it but the blog posts here, posted less often, will typically summarise those posts. These summarised blog posts are also sent out as newsletters when written and you can find places to subscribe to them around the site.
If you’re going on your first cruise you might read up about the dress codes on most ships and you might simply accept them in much the same way that you’d accept any rule put in place somewhere you’re not familiar with. If you’ve been on more than one cruise then you might develop the attitude that those rules regarding appropriate clothing when dining especially are things for other people. Don’t be that sort of person. Here’s why.
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Portfolio posts relating to the day on our South American cruise that we spent in Uruguay are now completed. This post update contains links to the individual portfolio entries covering our stops at several sites of interest in Montevideo, our steam train ride through the Uruguayan countryside, and photos from the tango show we witnessed (and participated in whilst drunk) during a wine tasting at a vineyard.
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One of two cruise-based television programmes that regularly air in Britain right now, Cruising With Jane McDonald follows the Wakefield singer and presenter aboard a number of different cruise ships around the world. This review covers my only real gripe with the series, that being the overwhelming positive view of cruising given. I like cruises too but things aren’t always perfect and the people you meet on them certainly aren’t. While I know that Jane is a very upbeat person it would be nice to see some critical viewpoints covered occasionally too. Nothing about this issue takes away from Jane herself, though, and it’s a great show to watch in terms of seeing the various cruising destinations and types of ships available to experience.
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We’ve booked a short break in Amsterdam in the not too distant future and were planning to simply wing it, seeing what took our fancy in and around the Dutch capital’s streets but that was before I discovered the discount card provided by the city’s tourist board. With free entry to museums (you forget that other countries charge entrance fees to their museums in far greater numbers than in the UK), free public transport, a free canal cruise, free gifts, and loads of discounts too I couldn’t pass up this great resource for getting the most out of our short time in the city.
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We very nearly did a Russian river cruise this year but while that didn’t occur some friends of ours went ahead and did something very similar to what we’d planned (but rejected). We’d never done one before (and still haven’t) and the itineraries we could see would mean we’d be able to visit not only St Petersburg but also Moscow. In the end a number of factors came to bear and we plumped for sticking with Princess Cruises but as it turned out some online friends had booked a Russian river cruise for not long after our trip. As a result of that and the pictures and blog posts they’ve put up it’s been interesting to see what we missed and also compare the similar trips and experiences we both had while in St Petersburg.
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It’s coming up for nine years since my wife and I got married and took our first, proper, foreign holiday together as our honeymoon treat to ourselves. I say proper because technically we had taken a day trip to France with a previous company I’d worked at as part of their Christmas gift to the employees. But, our honeymoon was our first trip to foreign soil of any real duration and it involved something other than a channel-hopping ferry. In fact, it involved another couple of firsts for the pair of us and those were our first trip to Asia and our first cruise. It started a bit of a love affair with that latter form of holidaying.
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I swore I’d never have a blog and the archived version of this site still retains that disclaimer in some form but time passes and things change and the period when I wrote about everything and nothing has dissolved to practically nothing itself. In its place is this new incarnation of the site concentrating on travel and photography; originally this was going to be just a showcase for my own pictures and videos taken on holidays around the world but I’ve come to realise there’s no reason not to include discussions about travelling and/or photography in general too. I wondered if I could do this in a shortform way not far removed from annotated link lists but then I remembered that I do like to put words down too; grudgingly, I came to realise that this was the essence of blogging. No getting away from it now, I suppose.
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