The Caribbean is an area of the world we’ve not been to on all our cruising unless you count the little bit of sailing through it from Colombia to Florida we did last year, and we don’t so you shouldn’t either. The primary reason we’ve steered clear of the Caribbean is pretty well-established on this site but just to remind anyone who doesn’t know then it’s the perceived lack of historical and cultural attractions in the area and the fact that we’re not beach people.
Right or wrong, when we’ve looked at Caribbean cruise itineraries the pictures have almost exclusively featured golden sand beaches and when we’ve looked at the blogs and videos of people we know who’ve been to the area then beaches have featured a lot when they haven’t just been of the “We just got off the ship and wandered around for a bit” variety. We know there has to be more to these island destinations than that but it’s always been a part of the world that we’ve thought “we’ll get around to one day” as there have been more places of more obvious interest to us elsewhere.
Well, that day has arrived. In the future. Late next year, to be a little more accurate.
We were on the Princess Cruises website over the weekend arranging for some gifts to be delivered to the stateroom of my wife’s mum who will be cruising around the UK during a big birthday next month. And once we’d done that I did a bit of browsing, and that’s when I spotted a cruise that ticked off a few things from our imaginary list:
- A cruise over the Halloween period for the second time, which would mean a chance to re-use the costumes we bought for our previous one.
- Halloween also happens to be our wedding anniversary so spending it on a ship in another part of the world is always better than spending it closer to home.
- A cruise in the Caribbean (well, duh!) which would finally allow us to say we’d been there, and since we haven’t been there before then it would mean all new countries and ports. Ten of them, in fact!
- A cruise on the final Grand-class cruise ship we’ll have not cruised on by then. We’ll be cruising on Caribbean Princess later this year, and that will leave just the original ship of the class, Grand Princess, which just so happens to be the one cruising in the Caribbean in October of next year.
That full list of destinations (the map isn’t 100% accurate) is:
- Puerto Rico
- St Thomas (US Virgin Islands)
- Sint Maarten
- Antigua
- St Lucia
- Barbados
- Tortola (British Virgin Islands)
- St Kitts
- Dominica
- Grenada
We’ll be starting and finishing in Puerto Rico, so flying in and out of there, but will also have a stop in there midway as these cruises tend to run as week-long affairs on alternating itineraries. The only repeat will be Barbados and the second of those will fall on Halloween (and our wedding anniversary) itself.
We’re going to try to not think too much about what we might actually end up doing in each of the ports yet as it’s all still fifteen months off and we’ve got a few big cruises to get through first, but at some point we’re going to have to look for excursions and points of interest in all those new locations and we’ll have to try to filter between the people describing certain places as “like heaven on Earth” and others describing the same place as “an absolute tip I didn’t feel safe in”. Of course, even though we’re not beach people, we will still try to make sure we experience one, somewhere, maybe to dip our toes in the sea at least. It almost feels rude to go all that way and not do so.
To conclude this blog or newsletter update, and carrying on from the last post, the ongoing thinning out of travel content and checking for dead links, etc. is almost complete. That’s my way of saying there are still forty articles to check over, then I’ve got to go through the blog posts to see if any of the photos I’ve deleted from the travelogues were being used in those posts and replace them if they were. However, it won’t be too long until new travel write-ups commence. I promise.