Well, I’ve finally finished writing up about the Sky Princess Norway and Iceland cruise we took and have started writing up the details of the Island Princess Western Europe cruise we took so I guess that means it’s time for one of my occasional (but becoming more regular) update posts linking to that new travel content and any other related information I’ve got to share.

To start with, the concluding posts aboard Sky Princess. When I wrote the last update I mentioned that there was just one more travelogue to produce but I ended up splitting that into two. When I make my mind up about something I am perfectly happy to change that if the situation warrants it.

In the first of those final write-ups I concentrated on just Photos Of Sky Princess Across Two Sea Days but, far from being just more of the same pictures, these are a little more arty than normal because I decided to wander around with my prime macro lens. If you want to see photos from Sky Princess that aren’t exactly the same as all the other photos you’ll see elsewhere then that’s where you may find some.

Decorative Macro

The very last post from this 2022 cruise covers the food on those last two days because one evening meal took place in the main dining room and one saw us splashing a little extra cash and re-visiting the Italian restaurant on the ship. This gives a way to compare our experiences even if they shouldn’t really be used as any real guide for what you’d actually receive yourself (especially since the Sabatini’s menu has been changed since we took this cruise): Food On A Sky Princess Cruise: Main Dining Room And Sabatini’s Restaurant.

Sabatini's Food

A palate cleanser now before the next cruise posts with some photos of a day out in Hampshire many years ago when we visited Manor Farm Country Park to take our niece to see the animals there and also, for us, to look at the medieval house turned into a wartime living museum now.

Manor Farm Country Park

So now I can start to bring you up to speed with travel posts from our cruise aboard Island Princess in 2022. This was our last cruise of that year so when I eventually finish the write-ups I’ll be able to start on 2023’s trips. Here’s hoping I didn’t take too many of them to incredibly interesting places that will require a vast number of posts to cover. Oh.

This was our first time aboard this particular Princess Cruises ship so the first post in this new cruise travelogue series covers embarkation and the first sea day for some first thoughts about Island Princess, and it also includes dining at the Bayou Café which only Island Princess and her sister ship, Coral Princess, have aboard. I think. Not too many photos of the ship itself to start with but there’s a sea day coming up in the next update I’ll be writing that will cover that aspect of this cruise.

North Sea From Island Princess

The first port of call on our Island Princess cruise was Hamburg, Germany and this was our first time in that country, let alone that port. We don’t often do our own thing in places when we first travel to them but given the amount of time we had in Hamburg (quite a lot) and not really thinking the city tours were worth it as we could get to those places on foot on our own, we did our own thing for a change. The first post covers getting dropped off in the town hall square by the free shuttle bus since it was about to leave and had space on it when we got off the ship. Island Princess In Hamburg.

Hamburg Town Hall

The first place that we wanted to visit in Hamburg was one of top-rated activities according to numerous sources, but I will admit we expected to be entertained there for maybe an hour at most.

Oh boy, how wrong were we!?

Miniatur Wunderland ended up eating up almost the entire morning we spent in Hamburg, and we could have stayed longer. It was fantastic. It’s described as a large model railway but it’s more than that. It’s recreations of places real and imagined with the most incredible attention to detail. It’s a feast for the eyes and ears. It’s set over several floors in several huge rooms and every individual person, every window into a building, every vehicle demands your attention. Just simply superb, and we’ll be back there if we re-visit Hamburg in the future.

Miniatur Wunderland, Hamburg

We next visited St Michael’s Church and it’s from here that the misleading title of this post comes from. You thought I was talking about good things and bad things in Hamburg, didn’t you? Oh no. No, I can only apologise, but we visited this church because it’s historically interesting, that’s true, but you can also buy tickets to head up the tower for views over the city, and also head into the crypt and learn about the people interred there. See: highs and lows. Oh me! That’s such a me thing to do!

Hamburg From St Michael's Church Tower

The weather impacted the next part of our admittedly vague plans in Hamburg so our final post from our first visit to Germany simply saw us try out local beers in a pub then a craft ale bar. Oh no, Mark, you poor things! How did you cope!? Very well, thank you. We chatted to some very friendly local people. Although there is a warning in there about German attitudes to smoking and payment that might be worth paying attention to. Drinking In Hamburg And Leaving Germany On Island Princess.

Bar Oorlam, Hamburg, Germany

That’s got newsletter receivers all caught up with the latest content in order to decide if there’s anything worth reading in more detail, provided an update through the WordPress update mechanism for dashboard searching, and published a new link post hub for those perusing the web in whatever searchable form it ends up becoming in the future too.

Actually, I’m mocking searching here but the truth of the matter is that traffic on this site is surprisingly high now; it’s well over doubled since last year and I’ve received a steady stream of emails from Google congratulating me on reaching new clickthrough records for the last six months. Several thousand people read terrible travel content just like this every month now.

In case you’re wondering what I’ve been doing differently then the answer is: nothing. I still do things that the experts frown upon, such as providing loads of different ways to get to the same content (the portfolio listing, the tags grouping, the blog summary posts (like this one)), and I rarely if ever link to anything I’ve posted on social media any longer. Sometimes you’ve got to just keep doing what you’ve been doing. Although, maybe it’s just because I’m posting a little more frequently as I suddenly realised not long ago that I was in danger of finding myself years behind on travel write-ups.

Who knows?

In just over five weeks we should be off on the first of this year’s cruises, trying out P&O’s Aurora for the first time but spending a day and a half in Rotterdam for our second visit there. The first time that we visited Rotterdam was on our Island Princess cruise that I’ve just started writing about, so at the time of publishing that’s not currently on the site, but we had a great time there, heading off to a couple of parks and visiting a modernist house in the Dutch Functionalist style that was truly astonishing.

Huis Sonneveld

With our next visit to the Dutch city involving a full day, an overnight, then a departure in the afternoon of the following day we’ve been looking for inspiration for other things to do in Rotterdam. I know that I’m going to be fairly happy with the wide range of architecture around because I was last time, but we wanted to do things too.

Let me tell you something about a lot of cruise bloggers: they like to do the same things as each other.

I do understand that popular tourist attractions are popular for a reason so I also understand that Rotterdam’s food hall and the cube houses nearby are going to be worth a look. We didn’t on our our first visit but that’s what that second morning in the city is set aside for on our upcoming cruise. But it’s almost impossible to find anyone that’s done anything else but those two things, and some of those people have been to Rotterdam on more than one occasion so there’s really no excuse.

It’s puzzling to me because a lot of cruise bloggers like to visit places and get their reviews and pictures and videos out as soon as possible to capture clicks and perceived influence for whatever rewards it is they’re seeking. For those people it feels to me that they’d be better off going for something niche or doing something unique that stands the test of time instead of simply getting involved in a time-constrained war to determine who’s got the most recent travel account of a specific place out for those all-important eyeballs before someone else comes along and does the same thing.

I suppose it call comes down to whether you’re blogging for you and posterity, or whether you’re blogging for what you can get out of it all right now. I also suppose that this world encourages the latter approach.

Obviously, we don’t do any of that, but that’s not the reason that we tend to seek out things other people aren’t doing. We’re just utter contrarians a lot of the time. If everyone’s doing something then we probably won’t. But, if I’m being sort-of-nice for a moment, perhaps I can say that if I’ve seen what something is going to be like through the eyes of many people then there’s less of an attraction in seeing it for myself and more of an appeal in going off the beaten path to find a fresher-feeling experience.

Anyway, we have some plans for Rotterdam.

Well, it’s not a proper blog until you’ve rambled on and put down your stream of consciousness for all the internet to see without any care whether it makes sense or should even be expressed, but now that that’s done I’ll wrap this up until the next update.

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