With the publishing of the travelogues covering our 2024 cruise to Spain and Portugal aboard P&O Ventura now complete it falls to tradition to link to those last few posts in one place – here – so that newsletter subscribers in particular can decide if there’s anything they’d like to see more details about. As usual there will then follow any other travel or website news I think may be worth sharing and for a change there are no new cruise bookings to announce.
There have been seven new travel write-ups since the last of these blogs/newsletters.
Firstly, there’s the concluding post from our two days in the Portuguese capital which includes a stop for a bite to eat and some drinks, some waterfront views, and a farewell to Lisbon with a sail out under the 25 de Abril bridge.
The next day on this cruise took place on my birthday in 2024 and for the occasion we were docked at Leixões, typically used for visitors to Portugal’s second city, Porto. We, however, headed off on an excursion elsewhere, and that started with a visit to the city of Amarante. The impressive bridge over the river splitting the city was the site of an important battle during the Napoleonic wars.
The excursion we were on took us into the Douro Valley and a vineyard to see grapes being pressed after harvest and to taste some port. Our first instance of actually drinking port in Portugal. We don’t like to rush these typically tourist things. Despite a few visits to the country now we’ve also still never had a pastel de nata yet either. Our guide on this trip was horrified when we mentioned this to him.
A short write-up about our time back on board Ventura in Leixões cruise port includes the reaction from fellow passengers upon hearing that our cruise itinerary would be changing for the final port of call. They were not happy. We were overjoyed.
We should have been visiting Guernsey – and I’m sure Guernsey would have been very nice – but the weather forecast persuaded our captain to switch that for A Coruña in Spain instead and we thought that was a great upgrade. The first post of three from the city takes us on a walk towards the Tower of Hercules.
We paid a visit to Aquarium Finisterrae because we like aquariums and we’re easily distracted. If your aquarium has cephalopods then it’s a good aquarium as far as we’re concerned and A Coruña’s aquarium had octopuses and cuttlefish so that’s several thumbs up from us.
The final post from this Spanish port city is also the one that finishes up all the write-ups from our Ventura cruise and it’s mostly a few photographic highlights from the remainder of our walk around A Coruña.
The next set of travelogues that will be posted on the website will be those that cover the final cruise we took in 2024, that being our trans-Atlantic crossing from Rome to Fort Lauderdale aboard Caribbean Princess. A lovely mix of a very interesting port-intensive first week and a very relaxing second week of nothing but ocean.
Back to Ventura briefly, and this week we added the new P&O deluxe drinks package to the cruise we’ve got planned for later this year on that ship again, heading down to the Canary Islands. We haven’t bothered with drinks packages on P&O cruises in the past because they simply don’t work out to be cost-effective for us with our preferences for what we like to drink but a couple of things changed that reckoning. Firstly, the new drinks packages on P&O are a lot better value than they used to be, including Wi-Fi access plus credit towards speciality dining. It brings the package a lot closer in line with the Princess packages although the general drinks range is still a lot more restricted. Secondly, the cruise will have six sea days, including three together right at the start, and we’ll be cruising with my wife’s parents. That’s a combination that’s likely to encourage a little more drinking than usual.
Actually adding the new deluxe drinks package was a bit of a saga. The package didn’t exist when we booked the cruise and the website doesn’t allow you to modify your booking to add it, requiring you to instead phone up. I’m not a fan of talking to people on the phone. I’m even less of a fan of listening to hold music repeating endlessly while the person on the phone finds herself unable to add the package. A case of “Computer says no” here, although one that was clearly more frustrating to the person dealing with me than for me. I’m very understanding of technical issues when people are trying their best so kept saying “It’s fine, don’t worry” while I was receiving an endless stream of apologies and requests to hold again while supervisors were sought. It took 45 minutes, but it’s done now.
We’ve been enjoying Zero Stars on TLC TV here in the UK. Available for free on several platforms and you can watch it on YouTube too. The most recent episode had Roisin and Sara trying out a Mediterranean cruise aboard a Miray Cruises ship. The premise of the show is to see how the two comedians find travel experiences that have received less than flattering reviews online.
It might be a sign of us growing older but we loved the look of the ship and all its weird quirks, and it was good to see that Roisin and Sara had a good time aboard. A very enjoyable series that airs here on Sunday evenings and that’s rapidly become a very good night for travel programmes as we’ve also been liking Rich Holiday, Poor Holiday on Channel 5 while Cruising to the Ends of the Earth on Channel 4 hasn’t really given us much new that many of the other cruise programmes have delivered over the years but it has been nice to see Diamond Princess setting off from Yokohama as it’s reminded us of our own experiences in Asia in 2018.
We’re two months away from our Fred Olsen Borealis cruise to Ireland so we’ve been checking out lots of videos about the ship and the line to get some idea about what to expect. One thing we’ve not seen anyone else do or cover is whiskey tasting (even if Fred Olsen spell it as “Irish whisky” which isn’t a thing) and we’ve got that booked. That should eventually make this site the primary source for information about the event, not that this site is having any trouble attracting visitors. Daily site traffic in the last year has doubled and that was already double what it had been just a couple of years earlier. Must be doing something right.
That will do for this update.