Last year we took a cruise with Ambassador Cruise Line, boarding Ambience in London for a trip up to Norway into the Arctic Circle. It was an absolutely fabulous cruise on what we both think is the ship with the most beautiful lounges of any ship we’ve cruised on, although you’ll have to take my word for it at the moment because the write-ups are still a few cruises behind that one. Anyway, as you might be able to guess from the title of this post we’ve decided to repeat the experience – albeit not for a while – and there will be details of that below.
But first, there have been a few new posts published on the website so a quick summary of those is called for. It’s the way I do things here.
Two more posts from our 2024 Iberian peninsular cruise on P&O Ventura have appeared as if by magic. These two cover the start of the second day ashore in Lisbon and the first of those involves a bit of a walk through the Moorish Quarter of the city.
The second post follows our visit to Lisbon’s National Pantheon and includes photos from inside the Baroque building and from its roof over the city skyline and down to the port.
The only other post on the website comes from a visit to the village of Wickham fifteen years ago. It’s an interesting little place near us with a lot of old architecture and a great antiques shop.
Okay, so now to that Ambassador Ambience cruise news.
For a while we’ve been saying that we wanted to return to Asia in late 2028 as it will be our twentieth wedding anniversary and we were out there on a cruise for our honeymoon and again on a cruise ten years after that. The problem has been that we’ve not been wowed by the itineraries that we’ve seen at the time of year we’d be looking to travel with too many concentrating on Japan and the price being somewhat higher than we’d like with no guarantees that world tensions won’t continue to put pressure on those to rise further. We like Japan but a Japan-intensive cruise isn’t what we want. So, Asia is still a place we want to return to but we’ve realised that it’s not going to be anniversary-related.
Enter the scene Ambassador Ambience.
We thoroughly enjoyed last year’s cruise to Norway and we do have a cruise already booked on another of the ships in Ambassador’s fleet, Ambition, for next year (sailing out of our home city to France). We were looking for options for late 2028 this week in the wake of our decision to skip Asia for now when we spotted a very similar cruise to last year’s Norwegian trip. With the cruise being for our anniversary we also took a look at the price for a suite and decided to treat ourselves. The suite perks aren’t fantastic to be fair but the room is larger and it’ll be something fancy for a special occasion.
We’ll be at sea on a ship we loved for our anniversary and we’ll be hitting three different ports from the previous cruise on Ambience with two of those – Andalsnes and Harstad – being completely new for us. We always like to cruise when there are new ports on the itinerary.
Over 900 days away and we’re booking cruises. What are we like?
Interestingly, we’ll also be in the Arctic Circle late in the year in 2027 too. That one will be aboard Majestic Princess – a first time on her – so it will be fascinating to compare the two cruise line experiences to the same part of the world one year apart. A few different and new to us ports on that cruise too. We know we’ll love both cruises because Ambassador and Princess – though very different – are excellent lines, and nobody can ever get bored cruising to Norway.
With us booking a suite for that Ambassador Ambience cruise this also means we’re going to be cruising with very different cabin types over the next couple of years. Balconies still dominate, of course, because we know what we like but we’ll be in an Ocean View room when we board Fred Olsen’s Borealis in just over ten weeks’ time, then an Obstructed Balcony when we see what Cunard’s Queen Mary 2 is like followed by an Inside cabin for Ambition out of Portsmouth next year.
So that’s now seven upcoming cruises for us to look forward to between now and the end of 2028 (you can always track our cruising plans on our Future Cruises page) and it remains to be seen when or if we can get a cruising return to Asia slotted in or appended to that list.
Now, I really must get around to finishing the photo-processing from the Norwegian Jade cruise and get some more write-ups posted on the site. Just got to stop being distracted by booking cruises.