The exciting news if you’re me – and luckily for me, I am – is that I’ve finally finished writing up all the cruise travelogues from our Ruby Princess cruise through the Panama Canal. Exciting enough just to finish up a travel series like that, but doubly so because that means the end of 2023’s cruising and I’ll next be jumping ahead to March 2024 for the next set of write-ups – a short trip to the Netherlands aboard P&O’s Aurora – which will bring me under eighteen months in arrears on cruise travel accounts. That’s very nearly up-to-date for me.
As usual, then, this post will summarise the recently-published travel articles on the site and as you can tell from the title of this blog, it was a bit of a mixed bag.
I broke the visit to Cartagena, Colombia into five parts as we had a very full day and absolutely wonderful time there. Bit hot, mind.
Approaching Cartagena, Colombia just shows a few photos of the city skyline on the approach, with an emphasis on the Bocagrande district’s skyscrapers. We wouldn’t actually be visiting this part of Cartagena during our day there, concentrating on more of the historical areas.
The first part of our full day excursion in Cartagena involved a visit to Castillo San Felipe de Barajas, an impressive fortress with an interesting design, and something we were glad to get out of the way early in the day before it got even hotter.
We then had some time in the historical centre of the Walled City of Cartagena involving some guided elements then some free time. The colours and architecture were fabulous and we had a wonderful encounter with a local and some Colombian “coffee”.
Our excursion continued with a visit to a church, a museum, and a short folk dance show. The church, or rather the priest for whom it was named, was the most interesting of those elements.
We’d had a wonderful time in Cartagena and it didn’t finish with the end of the tour because just inside the port security zone we discovered a park housing hundreds of animals, mostly birds. It was only accessible to cruise passengers and was a lovely surprise. This concluding travelogue about Cartagena also includes more views of the city as the sun went down and our ship departed plus some images of an 80s deck party as night fell.
The penultimate piece of content from this Ruby Princess cruise covers the final two days aboard, both spent on the ship as she crossed a rocky Caribbean Sea on her way to Florida. One of the highlights was a crew tug of war competition and we were so happy with the winning team as we’d chatted with most of them on the cruise and would do so again a year later when we met most of them on another ship.
And that brings us to the final post in the travelogue series, our arrival at Fort Lauderdale and our Everglades excursion that was an absolute shambolic way to conclude a cruise and arguably quite humiliating to one of the passengers who joined us.
That’s the end of the cruise write-ups but regular readers will know that I often break up the stream of travelogues with random accounts of other trips or events from over the years, and two short, very local pieces of content have also been recently published. The first of those was a chance to get some fresh air at Lee-on-Solent on a gloomy Monday in 2011. Gloomy photos too, but it has reminded me that there is a hovercraft museum there that we really should make the effort to visit one day.
The second post covers a brief visit to a place about fifteen minutes’ walk from our house and that’s the birthplace and home of Charles Dickens. Well, home for a few years anyway. It’s a lovely little townhouse decorated in the Regency style and also houses the couch on which the author died which rounds off his complete life quite well.
I mentioned in a previous blog post (or newsletter if you subscribe to these things) that we had our eyes on a cruise aboard Ventura for next year that would coincide with our wedding anniversary and also be around the same time as the fifty-fifth wedding anniversary of my in-laws. We’d intended to cruise with them before the pandemic uprooted everyone’s plans and they’d not been interested in cruising in the interim until we persuaded them to try a Regal Princess cruise last year for one of their big birthdays. That certainly reignited the love of cruising within them so when we sounded them out about joining us on Ventura next year they jumped at the opportunity. We booked soon after and gave them the details so they could book with their own travel agent. It’s actually been lovely to see just how excited they are for it even though it’s not until the end of October 2026.
It’s a thirteen-night cruise with an itinerary that sees us spend the first three days at sea before consecutive days visiting Madeira, Tenerife, La Palma, Gran Canaria, and Lanzarote. Then a couple of sea days ahead of A Coruña and one more sea day back to home.
For us, we’re looking forward to La Palma and Gran Canaria simply because we’ve not been to them before. For my in-laws it’s Madeira and a chance to ride the cable car they’re most keen about as the last time they visited the island they were with another couple who don’t like heights. They also developed a taste for Madeira, the drink, and like the idea of getting some more from its home.
The price we’re paying works out to £114 per person per night and that’s on a balcony – a big one because these Grand-class ships have great ones on deck 10 – so fabulous value and a nice, roughly 50/50 mix of sea days and port days which suits us nicely. A big difference to the two big cruises we’ve got coming up before then with only two sea days on a two-week cruise in the Caribbean in a few months, then just four sea days on a seventeen-night cruise from Peru next year. My in-laws will be in the cabin next to us.
Finally, I did still have two days of annual leave to use up this year, but the use of the past tense there is deliberate as we have done something impulsive and we’ve now got some plans sorted for a short break later this month. Something cheap and cheerful. More details on that in a later blog write-up when we actually do it although I’ll be undoubtedly posting about it on Instagram during the occasion.