The completion of write-ups about a cruise warrants a blog update (or newsletter if you’re reading this that way) and that’s what this is, so prepare your eyeballs and short term memory for a few images and descriptions of the sort of travel content that some critics have described as “excessively long sentences with way too many pictures for anyone to appreciate” in a cruelly accurate manner.
Before the cruise articles there has been one of my patent pending filler posts just to break up the monotony of travel content since the last of these blog updates. Jump into a time machine and head back to 2012 to see what the nearly-annual International Kite Festival in Southsea looked like that year.
Spoiler: pretty kitey.
Three posts from our penultimate port stop at Rotterdam in the Netherlands aboard Island Princess in 2022 are up next.
The first is a look at the stunning piece of architecture packed with incredible design pieces that is Huis Sonneveld. This was one of those “spotted it on the map and figured we’d pop in” sort of places that ended up being absolutely enchanting. Helped by some fabulous audio guides, this was the highlight of our visit to Rotterdam.
Some pictures of the walk through Rotterdam back towards the ship, passing plenty of street art sculptures and oddly-designed buildings finishes off our time ashore in this Dutch port city.
The final post from the day in Rotterdam on Island Princess mostly covers photos from our balcony as the cruise ship made its way down the Nieuwe Mass and towards the North Sea. What was fabulous about this from my perspective was that the sun set during this and all the lights of the buildings along the water’s edge came on transforming the apartments and industrial areas into something quite magical and not the sort of thing you normally see from a cruise ship at all.
The final port of call was a familiar one to many cruisers out of the UK: Zeebrugge. For the first time we decided not to head towards the popular tourist spots such as Ghent or Bruges or even Brussels, but instead took a bus from the port to the seaside city of Blankenberge where we had a walk along the shore and onto the historic pier before an ankle injury got the best of us.
Getting back on the ship a little earlier than we’d wanted meant I had a chance to take some photos around the interior of Island Princess while it was a little quieter than normal.
And finally, the sail away from Zeebrugge and sad heading towards home that signalled the cruise had come to an end.
Not only do those set of posts conclude our Island Princess cruise in 2022, they also conclude all the cruise posts from 2022, and that means just one thing…
Cruise travelogue content from 2023 is imminent!
Wow!
And it’s only March of the following year!
And that means that if I start writing up and posting travel content from the first of those cruises – P&O Azura in the Adriatic – before April starts, then I’ll technically – and likely very briefly – be less than a year behind in the travelogues. Likely very briefly because I’ve just remembered how port-intensive that cruise was. And how many photos I took. And the one after that. And then there’s Alaska which is going to be hefty. And that’s before the Panama Canal transit. And my filler posts (patent pending). Oof. Anyway, I shall enjoy the feeling of kinda, sorta, arguably catching up while it lasts, no matter how fleetingly.
We’re on the countdown clock to the second cruise of the year, and a “proper” cruise, no offence to the long weekend on Aurora we just had. It’s snobby to say that a cruise that only hits one port doesn’t really count as a proper cruise, especially since there will be people who save up a long time for that sort of experience and might have the time of their lives – and I hope they do – but I simply mean that a cruise of that duration and with just a single stop like that is more of a break than a cruise in my opinion. It’s not quite enough time to fully soak into the feeling of being away and to be thoroughly miserable about returning to work after, no matter how enjoyable, welcome, and often desperately needed it is.
Regal Princess around the UK is next up for us. Of the ports on the cruise, only Belfast is one we’ve docked at before, so we’re looking forward to Cobh and Dublin in Ireland (especially Marie, as she’s never been to Ireland before), then after the Belfast call it’s Greenock (for Glasgow, although we’re heading to Falkirk and Stirling on that day), then up to Lerwick in the Shetland Islands, down to Invergordon, then to Queensferry for Edinburgh, and finally to Le Havre in France.
Lerwick is a late change. It was changed yesterday, in fact. It was supposed to be Kirkwall on Orkney and we’d had a trip booked to see Skara Brae but yesterday morning we woke to news that “for operational reasons” Regal Princess was no longer able to call at Orkney and had replaced it with Lerwick. A big disappointment and we assumed it was just our cruise affected but that wasn’t the case as we heard from my in-laws who will also be cruising a nearly-identical itinerary in August who’d been told the same thing. For some reason, Regal Princess and Princess Cruises won’t be calling at Orkney this year. No idea what, though.
With our Skara Brae trip cancelled – and, naturally, that’s the one thing we really, really wanted to do on this cruise – I got to work to see what alternatives on Shetland there were. Cruise excursions aren’t available yet (probably understandably given the short notice) but a check of other cruises hitting there gave us some idea of what would be on offer and the pricing. We didn’t like the look of any of them and the distance to points of interest to us on Shetland coupled with a spotty public transport system there left us with few choices that we liked, so decided to do something we’ve never done before: we booked a trip with a local company in Lerwick for the day of our visit. I wanted to do it quickly because it’s a boat ride out around some of the islands doing some wildlife-spotting, and the boat only seats twelve. I expect it to sell out quickly once other people find they are in the same, er, boat as us. We’re hoping, given the location and time of the year, that we’ll see puffins nesting, and there’s a small chance that we might see orcas too.
Regardless, after that we’ve spotted there’s a pub in the town that serves locally-brewed ale so no prizes for guessing how we’ll be finishing the day in Lerwick.
Right, that should do for this update. The next one of these will most probably contain posts from Azura in the Mediterranean, Malta, and maybe even some of Croatia, depending on how many travelogues I write before thinking they need summarising like this, unless there’s some big travel news to mention.