Whoa!
Not the Northern Lights! You mean… the Southern Lights!
No. I mean a cruise on P&O’s Aurora, a ship built a quarter of a century ago. We cruised on her last year. Four nights round-trip from Southampton with an overnight stay in Rotterdam. Southern Lights!? The Aurora Australis!? Are you mental? We don’t have that sort of money.
Yes, even though it’s only been a couple of weeks (well, not even that) since the last of these blog round-ups of the latest travelogues and photo posts from the website, because I’ve rattled through the short cruise we did in March last year aboard Aurora and managed to push up a couple of posts from other trips or photo-worthy events over the years too I figured it was worth throwing together another one of these summaries so that everyone not familiar with RSS readers and with perhaps just a passing interest in our history of travel or photos can see what they’ve missed without being overloaded with links. And pictures. Don’t forget the pretty pictures.
Enough barely-disguised blather to pad the text content of this post out. Let’s see what’s been recently published.
In the first of the travelogues it’s embarkation day and a day at sea on Aurora with dining at the Indian speciality restaurant, Sindhu, and the more casual Glass House dining venue. Bit of an unhelpful maître d’ at one of those.
We’d been to Rotterdam before and on that previous occasion we’d had a look at plenty of art and architecture. Mixing it up a bit for this return visit to the Dutch city we first headed over to Rotterdam Zoo and discovered it was a lot bigger than we’d guessed. We ended up cutting short that visit simply to get something else in on the day.
We’d actually intended to visit a museum and bar near Delfshaven but with how long we’d been at the zoo we were running short on time that the former would be open by the time we got there so contented ourselves with just a walk around this historical and picturesque part of the city. We then decided we’d head elsewhere for a drink.
The place that everyone heads to when they visit Rotterdam is the area with the market hall and the Cube Houses and it’s there we finished off our full day in the city with some food and drink in a craft ale bar in the evening at Binnenrotte Square.
We returned to the square in the morning to actually pick up some food to take back home with us but with the weather not being too pleasant we decided not to do anything else so next it was time to cruise back along the Nieuwe Maas and return home.
That cruise coverage was short and sweet, wasn’t it? That final post has some of our thoughts about what we thought about Aurora in general for cruising.
Now for the filler posts. First up, from 2013 is something I’d missed when covering some of the other places we visited when we based ourselves at Weston-super-Mare in 2013, and that’s some of Weston-super-Mare itself from the first day there.
And finally, from all the way back in 2011 and a short walk my wife and I took over the back of Portsdown Hill which overlooks our home city of Portsmouth.
I don’t like to just leave it at what’s been published and as luck would have it I do have a little bit of cruise-related news to impart. Three years ago we hopped aboard the last seagoing paddle steamer in the world, Waverley, for a cruise around the Isle of Wight. That didn’t work out. Engine trouble turned our circuit of the island into a trip to Yarmouth on it and back, but we still had a lovely time. Next month we’re going to try again, and as it will happen very close to my birthday we’re going to pretend it’s a birthday present cruise for me even though we don’t do birthday presents or celebrations since we’re miserable gits.
Next week, Portsmouth will host the latest of Virgin’s cruise ships, Brilliant Lady, but not in a full cruising capacity. Instead, invites have gone out to travel agents and travel bloggers (who pay for such access through CLIA fees) for a bit of a PR day on the ship, obviously showing it off, letting everyone take photos, giving everyone a meal and some entertainment, then telling them to go and write super-positive things or make super-positive videos or book super-positive people on cruises. My understanding is that people aren’t staying aboard overnight, but I only know that from some cruise blogger friends who are being put up in a hotel so that might not be true of everyone. I.e. some of the bigger names might get special treatment.
I’m very pleased to say that when I heard about all this I did think about posting something online like:
“Have a great day aboard Brilliant Lady and make sure to write down plenty of notes about all the things that are different on her from the other three ships in the fleet. The back of a postage stamp should do.”
But luckily for me I’ve decided to only post that here where nobody can see it. As you can probably tell I’m not impressed with what I see as simple cloning of cruise ships with not the slightest indication that the company is listening to feedback. That swimming bath tub on the top deck? Yeah, still there. The entertainment? Yeah, all the same acts. The food? Pretty much all the same menus again (not quite, but still). The layout? The deck plans look identical. Maybe Brilliant Lady will have her own feel aboard that makes her stand out but I seriously doubt it.
I did talk to someone who’s been on Scarlet, Valiant, and Resilient and she said that she’s probably done with Virgin now as she’s experienced everything they have to offer at this point. We felt the same way after our second short cruise and we’ve heard nothing since to make us consider seeing whether anything is different for ourselves.