A month ago, in the last of these very nearly regular blog posts summarising recently-published travel accounts and any travel-related news I feel the urge to share with complete strangers on the internet, I remarked that I was hopeful to complete the write-ups of our 2024 Caribbean Princess Transatlantic Cruise before we headed off on our second cruise of the year. Well, here I am, a week away from seeing what Fred Olsen are like when we head off around Ireland, and yes, the cruise travelogues from 2024 are complete! Imagine fireworks here. Picture crowds cheering and hugging one another, tears of joy and relief rolling down their faces. A telegram of congratulations arrives from the King. The local newspaper gets in touch, asking for an interview, but they’re rebuffed politely.
Okay, here’s how that cruise concluded.
After leaving a new port and a new couple of cities for both of us in Morocco, we arrived at another new location on this cruise, Funchal on the island of Madeira. Our second attempt at cruising there, but this time we made it. The weather, to start with, wasn’t great, but we got ourselves to the cable cars and headed up for a rainy view over the city anyway.
We’re fans of street art (and a lot of other art too for that matter), so it was nice to wander around Rua de Santa Maria in Funchal where “The Art of Open Doors” has transformed an area devastated by an extreme weather event in 2010 into something colourful to attract tourists.
We had improved weather to do a little more sightseeing in Funchal and visited the cathedral, discovered some odd connections between Madeira and Poland, enjoyed some nice park areas and sculptures, and, of course, found somewhere to have a few drinks.
A final post for that day includes some photos of the cruise away from Madeira plus the evening’s dinner in the main dining room aboard Caribbean Princess. We’d had a nice time in Funchal and, barring disasters, we’ll be back there later this year with my wife’s parents this time around.
The last port of call before the Atlantic crossing was Tenerife, an island we’d visited before and one which, again, we should be hitting again later this year. When we’d visited the first time we’d headed off on an excursion but this time we wanted to take a walk around and find things for ourselves in the port of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, and this started with a walk along the front to see the Auditorio de Tenerife and Castle of St John the Baptist up close. On the way we learnt some great little nuggets of history.
We next paid a visit to the Palmetum botanical gardens which, as the name suggests, focuses on palms. I won’t pretend we’re palm people, but we do like a nice botanical garden when we’re travelling, and this one on an artificial hill on the coastline at Santa Cruz de Tenerife has some spectacular views over the port city and out to sea.
Our next visits were to a museum dedicated to the carnival and a craft ale bar. Did you know that Tenerife hosts the second largest carnival in the world? File that little fact away to bore someone with like I just did.
That just left a walk back through the city to Caribbean Princess (passing by some tunnels we need to explore next time we visit Tenerife) with some ship-spotting in port, then the sail away from our last bit of land for eight days.
Rather than write the usual travelogue accounts of our eight days at sea (believe me, they’d get very samey, very quickly) I broke the Atlantic crossing into two posts more general in style. The first of those featured photos from aboard Caribbean Princess. It’s a ship class we’re very familiar with and of which you can find many similar photos on this site, but I took the photos and it’s entirely possible that someone other than me might want to look at them.
The second post from our time at sea takes a look at several speciality dining options and other food on Caribbean Princess. We were pleasantly surprised by Planks BBQ on the ship, especially as we’d booked into there with the expectation that we possibly wouldn’t like it at all. Very pleasantly surprised. Also completely stuffed.
And that just leaves one more post to round off this last of 2024’s cruises which is a small selection of photos from the Fort Lauderdale Intracoastal Waterway By Boat tour we took as part of a debark tour and drop-off at the airport in Florida. Unlike a year earlier in Florida when we’d taken an abysmal airboat tour on the Everglades before flying home, this boat tour to see the fancy houses up and down the waterways of Fort Lauderdale was one we’d happily do again.
That’s all the Caribbean Princess cruise write-ups covered but there were also another couple of posts published in the last month. The first of those was one of my filler posts to break up the monotony of the same subject over and over (that sounds a little like blasphemy for cruise fans, to be honest). Tired of ship-based content? Then how about some lovely English countryside photos from near where I used to work in 2010?
Last month, our local port – which is ten minutes’ walk from our house – held a free community open day that we attended. You had to apply for tickets online but there was no cost involved and on the day we got to wander around parts of the port not usually accessible to visitors, board a ferry, yacht, and bunkering vessel (so cool) for a look around, engage with loads of maritime groups who’d set up information stalls, and have a quick harbour tour past the warships and historic vessels by boat too. A fabulous few hours in glorious sunshine.
Whew! I have been busy!
That’s all the fresh content covered so now onto cruise news for the future, and details of not one, but two new bookings.
If you’ve been reading any of these blogs recently – it’s okay, I don’t expect you to have – then you’ll know that we’ve been on the lookout for something to eat up three remaining days of annual leave available for next year. Finally, we’ve managed to find something.
I’ve already mentioned that at the time of writing this we’re a week away from our first Fred Olsen sailing which will be a week around Ireland on Borealis with a couple of new ports for us up on the north west coast. We don’t know if we’re going to like Fred as a cruise line, but we’ve taken a punt (that’s an old Irish currency pun there, free of charge) that they’re actually as good as people say, and because it’s been a while since we’ve been to Belgium too we’ve booked a three-nighter to Zeebrugge for early next year, again on Borealis. It’ll be an overnighter at the port so we’ll have a good opportunity to really make the most of our time ashore for once. An inside cabin since it’ll be January and nobody in their right mind wants a balcony on the English Channel in January. Should be a nice, fun little break, and Belgium’s got some great soap shops we can stock up at.
We last visited Belgium in 2023, the second of two cruises that hit there in about a year. Prior to that, in 2017 and 2018, over the space of eleven months, we visited Belgium not only for the first time ever, but also the second, third, and fourth times too. It’s a very close and convenient port for cruisers from the south of England, and we seem to visit it in bursts. I mention that as we come to the second new cruise we’ve just booked.
Surprise! It’s Belgium again!
We were talking to a friend recently and he happened to mention that his wife was going to be taking their daughter on a three-night, mummy-daughter cruise at the end of August. We’d just been looking at things to do right at the end of August as we have a bank holiday in there, and a three-day stay at a nearby Warner Hotel was what we were considering. For some reason we’d not spotted that there might be a cruise at around the same time so we looked into it and realised that P&O Ventura would be cruising to Belgium for the same three days we’d been considering. Not only that, but it was only about £15 per person per night more expensive if we booked an inside cabin. We’d have to add some parking in Southampton in there, of course, but even still, the comparison wasn’t really that close. Accommodation-wise, Warner would have a small lodge with balcony overlooking a small garden while Ventura would be inside, so a land-win there. However, both offered breakfast, dinner, a swimming pool, and entertainment, but Ventura offered multiple pools, multiple options of entertainment, plus lunch and numerous other meals too. And the sea. And Belgium.
So, yes, we’re now going to be going to Belgium twice in just over four months after not visiting for over three and half years. We’ve decided not to tell our friend and her daughter that we’re going because it’s obviously supposed to be a chance for them both to spend some time together and we don’t want to intrude unnecessarily or put any pressure on them to want to hang out. If we see them aboard then we see them aboard.
This does now mean that our next four cruises will be a Fred Olsen Borealis sandwich with double P&O Ventura filling. Weird how these things happen. After that, though, it’ll be four new cruise ships and one new cruise line to treat ourselves to.
The next blog post (or newsletter, for those who use or have used the subscribe option on this site) should appear in about two weeks and will give our thoughts fresh from our first Fred Olsen cruise and a summary of what we got up to on our trip around Ireland. In the meantime I’ll be starting the write-ups from our 2025 cruises very soon and that will begin with our superb Ambassador Ambience cruise into the Arctic Circle on a successful hunt for the Northern Lights.