As I’ve been in the writing mood again recently and as I’ve both posted enough travelogues to warrant a summary update post – which is what this is – and I’ve finally completed the write-ups of our 2024 cruise around the British Isles aboard Regal Princess, you get this blog absolutely free of charge, no questions asked, and delivered to your inbox too if you’re one of the weirdos who subscribes to such things.
But wait! There’s more!
There’s also more British Isles cruising news after the round-up of previous British Isles cruising travelogues in the form of details of a new cruise booking we’ve made for this year.
It’s all gone British Isles crazy around here!
The penultimate Scottish port of call for our Regal Princess cruise was Invergordon, which fans of strongman competitions will know is the home town of the Stoltman brothers, but we spent most of the day in Inverness instead, and Inverness was simply lovely. When you’re travelling you do sometimes just get a feel for a place that says “I could live here” and Inverness fits that bill for us.
I had enough time after our trip to Inverness to take a quick stroll through the far smaller Invergordon, largely to seek out some of the street art we’d seen as our bus had passed through a couple of times earlier in the day. It was just me as my wife had had enough of walking by this point.
We’d originally planned to hop on a train to Edinburgh when we anchored off South Queensferry for the final Scottish port on our cruise but this was a Sunday and we’d been disappointed once already on this trip with how much had been closed in Dublin a week earlier so we ripped up our plans, decided we’d leave the capital for a better look some other time, and did our own thing in the port instead, which started with a little exploration of this very pretty place.
We booked a boat tour while we were ashore, and it was one that took us out under the Forth road and rail bridges, and to the island of Inchcolm in the estuary on which a medieval abbey and a lot of angry, nesting seagulls were located. The island and abbey were fantastic. We had an absolutely wonderful time on this tour… right up until the boat was late coming back to pick us up. No, this wasn’t an official excursion, and no, we couldn’t just call a taxi. We might have panicked a little bit.
Just two more posts complete the 2024 Regal Princess cruise around Britain, and the first of those, taking place on the last of the very few sea days we had, mostly just features pictures of the dinners we ate aboard. Look, forasmuch as there are people who mock those who photograph their food there are always people interested in seeing the pictures too. The photo below, though, features the Red Hat Society members gathering for formal night photos. They were quite a lot of fun on this cruise.
The final post of the cruise takes a look at the things we saw when we wandered around Le Havre, generally picking directions at random based on quick perusals of the phone map with no real planning ahead of time. We ended up loving this French city because the art and architecture absolutely aligned with the sorts of things we appreciate. Le Havre is somewhere we have to get back to.
The only other small write-up on the site is non-cruise-related and that’s mostly showing off the grounds of Oakley Hall in Basingstoke which we briefly visited for a birthday meal a few years ago. Are you a fan of lichen? This post has lichen.
That’s all the British Isles cruising that we’ve done, so now it’s time to look ahead to some British Isles cruising that we’re going to do because we finally decided to go ahead and book that cruise we mentioned in the last blog/newsletter. You remember that.
You don’t remember that.
We only had five days of annual leave left to play with for this year as a huge chunk of time is allocated to the big cruise coming up next month and a decent-length one towards the end of the year too. But now, smack bang in the middle of that intervening period we’ve bitten the bullet and booked our first Fred Olsen cruise. Well, first Fred Olsen cruise that actually cruises.
We’ve seen a few people we know hopping aboard this line recently and most of those cruisers are people we trust enough to know that if they enjoy something then we probably will too. It has been interesting to us to see that a couple of years ago there was a big push to get aboard the big, new, shiny, all-the-bells-and-whistles cruise ships from the big lines but Fred with her smaller, older vessels seems to have become popular suddenly. I’m not sure where other bloggers are concerned if this is a lot of promotional work going on – we ignore any of the sponsored cruising reviews as much as possible – or just some good deals and itineraries a little different from usual. Certainly, for us, it was the latter reason.
We’ve booked a week in an ocean view cabin aboard Borealis (the balcony prices on these older, smaller ships push them out of the comfortable price range, particularly when it’s a short cruise and you’re not really cruising anywhere terribly glamorous) and we’ll be travelling around the west coast of Ireland, dangerously close to where a lot of my family live. We’ll be sure to not tell them we’re in the area, though, because we’d like to explore instead. You can see the route below.
We’ve been to Cobh before, and that was on that Regal Princess cruise that I’ve just finished writing about. That cruise has also been the only time my wife’s visited Ireland so she’s about to see some more of the country that a solid half of my DNA comes from.
The only other ports are Killybegs and Galway which will be new to both of us. We’re not currently planning to do any trips as we don’t really know what will be offered yet, but the combination of Galway being decent-sized and us already getting some good scenic cruising means it’s only Killybegs that has us wondering what there is to do. I’m sure we’ll find something.
It’s going to be a cruise to see what the Fred Olsen experience is like on a new ship for us while also visiting some new ports. We’ve been aboard a Fred ship before but that was just a single party night. We’d enjoyed the food and drink, and the staff had been great, though, and what we’ve seen from recent travel accounts suggests that it’s all still good. We’ve splurged on the drinks package, although drinks with meals in a similar way to river cruising is now standard anyway with Fred. A few of the lines that target the older demographic seem to do that.
Nothing else newsworthy in the world of cruising springs to mind, so I’ll draw this post to an end here now.