My first time heading over the northern border of England was back in 2010 when we had a small break in Dumfries and Galloway. My wife had been a couple of times before with her parents. When it comes to cruising, though, which for the last decade and a half has been our preferred method of seeing the world, it was only 2024 when we finally hopped off a ship at a Scottish port. That was aboard Regal Princess undertaking a British Isles cruise and several travelogues covering what we got up to have recently appeared on the site. Some very recently. I had a bit of a break when it comes to writing over the Christmas period but I seem to have found the urge to get down in internet print some vague details and pretty photos of our travelling exploits once more.
Our first Scottish port of call on the cruise – and, indeed, ever – was at Greenock, the port for Glasgow, which we completely ignored and headed off on a Princess Cruises excursion instead. That first brought us to Stirling and gave us a little bit of time to look around Stirling Castle. We fouled up a bit here because there was a part of the castle – its rooms – that we completely missed as being open so our wander around the historic building, as nice enough as it was, could have been better. Our fault.
Our excursion count on this Regal Princess cruise was low as they were frighteningly expensive but the reason we’d taken this particular trip during our day at Greenock was not to see the castle but to simply take a ride on the Falkirk Wheel. It’s such a fabulous piece of engineering and the article doesn’t do it any justice whatsoever.
We’d had plans we were really looking forward to for our visit to Orkney but Orkney was swapped out for Shetland instead so we made new plans for Shetland and, on the night before, those plans were torn up too because the local company we’d booked with had found a fault in the boat we were due to ride on. As it turned out this was a blessing in disguise because we arrived at Lerwick in thick fog and would’ve had a trip in a white void otherwise. We pinpointed some places to explore on foot and set off.
One place near Lerwick we were really keen to explore was the Broch of Clickimin, an iron age building with a purpose that still baffles archaeologists. We have a deep fondness for looking around ruins and delving into history and the architectural methods of ancient times and this was a great spot to visit.
The remainder of our time on Shetland was spent walking more of Lerwick’s streets, visiting the local museum, a fort, doing some shopping, and hitting some pubs to try some locally-brewed ales. All the usual stuff you’d expect from us, to be fair.
The last of the posts from our visit to Shetland is a short one featuring a few photos of our tender back to the ship in the fog, what we ate aboard Regal Princess, and some aurora sightings overnight as we started to cruise southwards towards mainland Scotland again.
There are still two more Scottish ports to be covered in our cruise travelogues with Invergordon (for Inverness, and we look around both of those) next followed by South Queensferry (for Edinburgh, which we skipped to take a local boat trip to an island instead). Hopefully, they’ll all go up on the site over the next few weeks.
As is often the case I’ll break up the constant stream of past cruising and general travelling in chronological order with random posts of other trips from the last few decades. A couple have been published since the last of these summary blog posts.
Firstly, there’s a few hours spent looking around Brighton Lanes and the Pier back in 2012, something we did to kill some time ahead of a wedding event being held in Surrey that evening. We used to visit Brighton quite often as it’s just along the coast, but it’s been a while now.
The last of the filler posts also dates to 2012 and it features some photos and details about a bit of a walk around the Greenwich area of London the day after we’d been to see Marilyn Manson and Rob Zombie at the O2. One of the things I like about digging out old groups of photos and publishing a short write-up about them is that memories come flooding back of some wonderful experiences but also it reminds me that there are some places we could really do with returning to as there’s so much there to see, and Greenwich is a prime example of this.
There have been some minor changes to the site recently but you’ll likely not notice them even if you’re a regular visitor. A regular visitor! Ha, I kill me!
Comments now won’t feature avatars to remove one unnecessary third-party call, tracking, and generation and I can’t imagine they’ll be missed by anybody. That’s a few microseconds shaved off every page load. And I’ve finally got around to installing a page cache plugin so the site overall should be a little faster now. I don’t know for sure whether that last change has been the driver for more traffic recently but site visitors are significantly higher since mid-December now. Search engine algorithms and the start of a new year and thoughts of booking holidays already might also be the reason there, of course, but there’s a definite increase over this time last year too. An awful lot of people are clearly looking for the new Princess Cruises ships that have copied names used by older ones that we’ve cruised on and that’ll teach Princess not to think of something original.
We’ve not booked any new cruises for a while now which is kinda shocking. Still umming and ahhing over a Fred Olsen one but nothing committed yet although we do still search for interesting cruises around the world all the time. Naturally, none of our plans feature America in them and, quite frankly, you’d need to have your head read if you were thinking of booking any trips to America in the next few years given the fascist chaos there, cowardly leadership responses, and chances of embargoes, sudden disappearances, financial collapses, visa upheavals, price instability, or civil or trans-continental wars breaking out at a moment’s notice. Are you sure your travel insurance will pay out if the US forces a declaration of war with Europe? Have we really watched the world’s major superpower with a constitutional protection to allow its citizens to keep tyrannical governments in check devolve like this so quickly that this is even a genuine possibility?
And finally, nicer news. P&O have released details of new drinks packages including Wi-Fi (at last) which aligns them a lot more closely with Princess Cruises now. We’ve got a cruise booked with them for later this year and we’ll have the opportunity to add this package after payment and before boarding so it’ll be good to check the drinks menu prices and range around that time just to see whether it’s going to be worth it for us. Six sea days in a twelve-day cruise already suggests it might be.
That’ll do for this update.