Enough time has passed and enough travel articles have been published since the last of these combination blog round-up and newsletter posts for it to warrant another one, and that’s just what this is. As is almost always the case with these occasional summarisation posts I’ll start with what’s new on the site before sharing some thoughts or details about anything else going on in the travel or blogging world.

The write-up of the 2023 cruise aboard Azura to the Adriatic has reached a conclusion with the final two posts from that series now published. First up is the sail away from Dubrovnik with some departing views of the Croatian coastline that we only saw for the first time on this cruise.

The last post on most cruise travelogue series is often a sea day with some final thoughts and that’s also the case here: Azura Adriatic Cruise Conclusion. This was a great itinerary that allowed us to see several new countries in Europe.

That was the end of the first cruise from 2023 on Azura, a ship we were very familiar with, and the second cruise was also with P&O Cruises but this time on Britannia, the fleet’s flagship, and a ship we’d not cruised on before this. For this first time experiencing Britannia we hopped aboard for a week to Norway‘s fjords to visit some new ports and revisit some old favourites.

The first part of the new cruise travelogue series covered Britannia’s embarkation day in Southampton.

We’d booked something a little special for the first night on Britannia and that was to have dinner and be entertained by Chesney Hawkes in the Limelight Club, and that gets its own little write-up with some photos and video of the evening.

The latest post from this Britannia cruise series then covers the relaxing day on the North Sea en route to Norway. With Britannia being new to us it was a chance to see how she was laid out and what we thought of the style of the ship, and we also treated ourselves to an afternoon tea. This post also contains some video of the evening’s entertainment by P&O’s house band, Pulse, on a 1970s-themed night.

That’s all the travel-related content from the site since the last blog, but there was one of my historical filler posts (just to break up the mostly cruising-based articles) published too featuring a few photos from one of the many times that our home city has hosted a Thai Food and Craft Festival.

So, what else is new, if anything?

Not a lot, to be honest. We’re deep into that “oh crap, have we forgotten anything?” phase just ahead of our next trip which at the time of writing is a little over three weeks away. Heathrow on the Saturday, then a stupidly early flight to Rome on the Sunday, taxi to the port, boarding Caribbean Princess fresh from dry dock, then off to Sardinia to see a Bronze Age settlement, Malaga with no set plans, a full day on an excursion in both Rabat and Casablanca, and a couple more play-it-by-ear days in Madeira and Tenerife before the long and hopefully very relaxing Atlantic crossing to Florida, a quick boat tour in Fort Lauderdale, then the flight back home.

The Facebook group for that upcoming cruise suggests it could be a lot of fun with plenty of organised meet-ups already, mainly games-playing, but also an embarkation get-together which we’ll be heading to and a cabin crawl that’s arguably interesting from a blogging perspective but I haven’t decided upon yet. We may not be the youngest of that group from the active profiles I’ve seen, but we could be in the bottom half dozen. That’s the joy for us of the longer cruises.

We’ve still got a week of leave for next year to play with and we’ve still not made a decision on that. The best time for us to use it looks to be around July and the best options abroad that we’ve seen are land-based (what!?) and in hot places (oh boy!) so we’re still looking for other possibilities. We haven’t even ruled out visiting some places in the UK as we’ve got friends dotted around in areas we’re not that familiar with who might pretend to welcome our company. The UK’s so bloody expensive, though, and we do like to get value for money. We shall continue to ponder.

Away from travel just to finish, we’re keeping a close eye on the ongoing series of very public temper tantrums and decidedly Elon-like, petulant, frankly embarrassing behaviour from people who really should know better at the top of the WordPress hierarchy right now. Given how much time I spent this last year going through to clean up this site I’d hate for it to get to the stage where I might need to consider migration off the platform now.

Anyway, that’s all for now, until the next one.

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