The end of the month feels like a good time to whip out one of these round-up posts covering all the latest content published on the site since the last one. Quite often this sort of post would also mention that we’d booked another cruise because we are somewhat obsessed, but no, I can assure you up front that we haven’t and we aren’t likely to now for quite a while as we’re fully booked-up through 2027 and mostly booked-up in 2028 and really, really want to try to book something else a little more last-minute in 2028 (despite potential pricing rises) as we do keep seeing options late that we wish we’d known about before using up all our annual leave. We’ll see how that plan goes.
So, almost all the recent content on the site has come from our 2025 cruise aboard Ambassador Ambience up into the Arctic Circle. It was an absolutely wonderful introduction to cruising with Ambassador, so much so that we’ll be trying Ambition early next year out of Portsmouth, then late in 2028 we’ll be treating ourselves to a return to the Arctic Circle on gorgeous, gorgeous Ambience, but this time in a suite. We think Ambition as a ship won’t wow us quite as much as the unique and gorgeous (have I mentioned she’s gorgeous?) Ambience, but we expect the service and friendliness aboard to be as good.
The only new article published on the site that’s not cruise-related is Portsmouth Photos: Southsea To North End. This is a set of pictures taken in 2014 on the walk home (we live in North End) from Southsea where a mini-festival had been taking place in a road closed off to traffic in order to showcase local business and musicians. It’s a very random set of photos.
To the cruise content.
Following on from our visit to the Jugendstil Centre in Ålesund we went for a walk around the main island of the city, Norvøya, in a fruitless search for an open museum but a successful visit to a cracking brewery. Norway does breweries well. More on that later.
On the evening of our sailaway from Ålesund we also dined in one of the speciality restaurants aboard Ambassador Ambience, Sea & Grass. Nothing to fault with the meal, but set menus have limited return appeal. That said, there’s every chance we’d go again just because that’s what we’re like.
Trondheim turned out to be a city with an awful lot to see and do, and we didn’t cover half of it on our visit. We started with a trip to the Trondheim Art Museum, which has a lot of modern pieces – so be aware of that if you’re the sort of person who doesn’t really appreciate them – but also works from people such as Edvard Munch and Charles Rennie Mackintosh. So nice to see them up close.
A short walk from the art museum in Trondheim there was the impossible-to-miss cathedral, and one of the ticket options to visit it included nearby archaeological and royal regalia museums too. No prizes for guessing what we did. Trondheim Cathedral And Nearby Museums.
We finished our day in Trondheim with a walk back to the ship through the city centre (we’d taken the shuttle bus before we realised how easy to get around Trondheim it would be) and this walk included a stop at a craft ale bar which we stayed in for a few because it was raining and because the beer was nice, and certainly not because the staff were friendly. More miserable staff it would be harder to find.
A very brief post with very few photos covers a sea day aboard Ambience on the way to the next stop. We ate, drank, read, and played trivia. All the things we like to do. Not much else to say, although some of the distant, snowy, Norwegian landscape was lovely.
Three posts covering our day in Tromsø round off the recent travel posts on the site. We finally hit lots of lovely, deep snow. We see it so rarely in Portsmouth and that’s only going to get rarer still as the Earth burns up.
We do like an aquarium so we started our time in Tromsø with a trudge through the snow to the northernmost aquarium in the world, specialising in Arctic sea life.
The only other thing we really did in the city – not a lot is actually open in winter and we didn’t want to risk an injury with too much walking around – was visit the northernmost brewery in the world, or, more specifically, the city’s oldest pub which was next door to it and did a huge range of ales. We stayed for many, and they were wonderful. Norway does breweries well. I’ve mentioned that before. We also enjoyed several pieces of public artwork in the form of sculptures near the theatre: a dog with a tail that wags when performances start, and these delightful concrete oddities.
The last post follows our short walk to the shuttle bus followed by some sailaway views from Tromsø. We did also spot the Northern Lights for the first time on this cruise. Faint, but they were there. We’ve been lucky enough to have seen them many times over the years now.
At the end of next month (October) we’ll be off on our final cruise of the year, treating ourselves to nearly two weeks on P&O Ventura down to the Canary Islands and back, with my in-laws along for the ride for the first time. It should prove to be an interesting experience. Depending on how many articles I write up in the meantime will depend on whether there’s another of these summary blog posts before we leave or not, but one giving immediate thoughts and feelings from the cruise itself should be appearing in mid November, anyway.
Our Ventura cruise will depart on Halloween (our wedding anniversary too) and we’re in two minds as to whether to dress up for it or not. We have costumes that we’ve worn on a couple of cruises now, so that’s not an issue, but this will be the first on a British ship (the others were both Princess) and it almost doesn’t feel right. Then again, the costumes don’t weigh much and we’ve got no real limits anyway because we’re not flying so they might as well get packed, regardless.
Speaking of Princess, they’ve just upped the daily price for drinks packages (coming into effect mid-October for new cruises) although this won’t affect us as both our planned cruises with them – Majestic Princess to Norway next year, then Sky to the Mediterranean in 2028 – already have the Plus package locked in.
Only the most minor of changes to the site to report, and those mainly involved with removing unnecessary plugins and replacing their functionality with old-school HTML. If you’re producing a plugin for a site and you start to add “AI” “features” then just, no, stop, please. It’s all crap, it’s so inefficient, it’s all built on stolen content, it’s all taking money from actual creators and putting it into the pockets of the already-rich. This site, like all sites, is getting hammered by scrapers looking to rip off content. I’m probably lucky in that personal travelogues aren’t so easy to fake and of less interest to most summarising agents but it’s just so relentless and non-consensual. Am I occasionally inserting fake facts into my posts to poison the results? I couldn’t possibly comment. I’ve said before that if you use “AI” content then I think less of you, but if you use “AI” content then you probably don’t care what I think.
A moan to conclude. That’s so me, and that, I think, will do for this update.