Excursions From Genoa Plus Travel News And Views

Why, if it isn’t another one of those posts rounding up what’s new on the site, what’s changed, what’s been happening in the wide, wide world of travel, and what’s caught my interest online!

Site Changes

I’ve made a change to my plugin that lists the tags used on the Tags page. It now also lists the months and years that posts are tagged under so it’s easier to find content specific to a time.

I’ve also paid for an upgrade to the RSS aggregator plugin I use so that the Cruise And Travel Feeds page (edit: now removed) will now also display an image from feeds if it can find one. It’s a shame that some sites’ syndication offerings are limited to short text summaries only. I also deleted a whole load of feed sources as a quick look at them showed they barely if ever updated their content any longer. I’m always on the lookout for new travel-related producers, though, so expect to add to the current list as time goes on.

The image on the home page has been changed and the image used on our Facebook page has been changed to match it. I like to change them up every now and then to keep things looking fresh.

New And Updated Content

Posts covering the day trip we took when our cruise ship was docked at Genoa are now up on the site. We took a cruise excursion that was a boat trip along the Italian coastline to visit three coastal towns.

• Genoa And The Italian Coastline By Boat covers the start of the excursion leaving the port of Genoa.
• The first of the towns or villages we visited was Camogli.
• We then travelled farther around the coast to the largest of the towns, Santa Margherita Ligure.
• The final stop was to the place that probably most people have heard about thanks to its popularity with the rich and famous, Portofino.

I’ve also gone back through some old posts and updated some links here and there; some were pointing to content that no longer exists; some were pointing to people’s sites that simply don’t deserve any backlink love from me any longer. Plus there were some typos. There are always typos. You spot them years after posting and can’t believe you missed them.

Affordable Drinks Package From Princess!?

Wave season is upon us – it’s the period when cruise lines tend to push out promotions, apparently – and in a very pleasant shock to the system Princess have delivered something quite astoundingly good. Starting just before Christmas, Princess will be promoting a sale coupled with a new benefits package with the good news being that the benefits package can be applied separately to already booked cruises and the really good news being that the benefits package is incredibly good value for money. For just £35 per person per day it will be possible to get gratuities, WiFi, and the full drinks package. Considering that gratuities and WiFi – which I’d pay for anyway – runs to nearly £20 per day this effectively makes the drinks package just £15 per day! That’s one hell of a good deal. It will be interesting to see how easy it is to add to existing bookings as has been stated because if this counts as a repricing then that typically incurs a repricing fee on Princess and you can usually only do it once per cruise booking; as we’ve already repriced one of our upcoming cruises that might cause problems. It might not, though. Hopefully, it’ll all go smoothly.

Oh Crap, Not Politics!

I’m afraid so, but I’ll be brief. I’ve made a conscious effort to like a lot of political posts using our travel Twitter account recently. For most people it’s likely they won’t even notice but if anyone’s been looking at Likes or uses a Twitter UI that shows them (I do) then they will appear. The reason is simply that someone who shall remain nameless in the travel world has also been liking a lot of political posts recently. This would be the same someone who doesn’t approve of people posting political things on their travel-related Twitter accounts when those political views are opposed to his. An older, white, well-off man. You can guess what political views a person like that likes. Anyway, think of my political likes as simply evening up the political exposure a little.

Oh, and don’t vote for the Tories. Thank you.

Travel Views

Here’s what I’ve enjoyed reading or watching recently.

2 Nights in Oslo covers a flying visit to the Norwegian capital – a place we’ve wanted to visit for a long time – and includes a very important lesson about travel costs.

Another capital city on our visit list that’s recently been covered in the blogging world is Budapest and this 4-day itinerary is packed full of useful information. Coincidentally, the link in there to the New York Café account was one I’d read separately as well and definitely makes for interesting reading.

How to Get the Most out of Your Visit to the Duomo Complex in Florence, Italy was a good read as we’re planning to visit Florence in the summer, briefly. Our only problem will be working out if we’ve got enough time to do the things we’d like to do there.

In What Exactly Is Visiting Country? the answer given by Jonno is “we need to have had an overnight stay and have visited two separate places at the very least” which I simply cannot agree with. It would mean that as a cruiser I’ve never visited Vietnam. Sure, I’ve been to the Cu Chi Tunnels, wandered around some Cham towers, visited the Imperial City at Hué, and walked around Ha Long after sailing into its famous bay but I’ve never stayed overnight so I’ve never visited. Right. We’ll just have to agree to disagree there.

Moving from general travel to cruising now, Paul and Carole have produced a Marella Speciality Restaurants Review following their recent trip aboard Marella Discovery. Since we were on that same cruise and ate at the same places this was nice to see what they picked from the menus and how they found it. Our own review of dining aboard the cruise ship will appear on this site in due course.

Finally, a video from the Holidays At Sea guys, and one that brings back some fond memories of our own Golden Circle tour of Iceland several years ago.