Three cruises!? What’s that about! Well, it’s about me not being able to come up with anything better to describe this latest travel post round-up and recent cruising news blog update (or newsletter for subscribers). The three cruises referred to are the one for which new travelogues have been published since the last update and the two short cruises we’ve been on since then too. Yeah, that’s right, two cruises. Short ones. Really short ones.
First up, as usual, here are the latest travel write-ups you’ve almost certainly missed.
There have been six posts put up covering the start of last year’s British Isles cruise aboard Regal Princess, and these posts take us from Southampton and past the first two Irish ports.
In Sea Days, Red Hats, And Speciality Dining On Regal Princess you can expect to read about… well, let’s see if you can guess. It’s possibly only the “Red Hats” bit you might not really be aware of.
Our first port of calls was Cobh, Ireland but it didn’t turn out to be a great day to visit this port on the southern coast of the country for a couple of reasons.
Sail away views from Cobh weren’t particularly spectacular on account of the weather but we did spot something that might be worth coming back to visit on the way out of the port.
Cobh hadn’t been too impressive, although it had been nice enough and for my wife it had been her first time setting foot in Ireland so she was happy enough to achieve that, but we had higher hopes for interesting activities when we hit Dublin for a short tour and some free time. Yeah, this also wasn’t the best day to visit the Irish capital.
We did have a better time (albeit too much of it) at Powerscourt Estate and Gardens which is where we headed off later in the afternoon.
The last of the travel write-ups about Ireland on this Regal Princess cruise has a few shots from the tender boat heading back to the ship at Dún Laoghaire and thoughts as to why we might need to explore this suburb of Dublin more should we return one day.
There’s been one other post added to the site since the last update and that’s one that finishes off a 2014 trip to Devon with some pictures from inside the fabulous Exeter Cathedral. Some wonderful memorials, history, and architecture there.
Before I get on with some brief notes about the two short cruises we’ve been on there’s been a small change made to the website that I like, but which nobody else probably does, and that’s that the tags pages now show a map highlighting all the posts tagged that way. So, for example, if you wanted to take a look at all our travel write-ups where I’ve mentioned or taken photos of a bridge then not only do you see the list of posts, but now there’s a zoomable, clickable map of all the posts too. See all the places we’ve visited (and got around to writing about) in Norway. Where in the world have we seen waterfalls? And so on.
Okay then. So, we’ve been on two short cruises since the last write-up.
The first of those was a two-nighter aboard MSC Virtuosa. Now, I know that when we first did an MSC Virtuosa cruise last year – a two-nighter party weekender – we said nope, never again, not out of the UK. And I know that when we spent a week on MSC Virtuosa a couple of months ago we said hang on, lovely, the week is a great time, still wouldn’t do a two-nighter party weekender from the UK though. I’d like to say right now that technically we held to that because it wasn’t the weekend, but yeah, we’re impulsive basically and I wouldn’t trust any of our promises ever.
Effectively we had two days of annual leave to use up, the price was fabulous, we knew we liked the Champagne Bar and wanted to go see if our French bistro was open in Cherbourg again, and it was a chance to say hello to Gav and Luke (known online as the Cruise Monkeys) since they were aboard. Everything we wanted to do was achieved. The bar staff remembered us and kept us well-lubricated (well, it had only been a month), we had a nice chat with the guys, we had a nice chat with the bistro owner again (and were left in charge of it for a while, but were paid in free beer to take home with us; true story), and the only blot on the landscape was that I took a tumble down the stairs at the end of the night when I should really have just taken the lift back from the nightclub. Medical staff were involved, a wheelchair was required, and my bruises and scrapes haven’t quite all faded yet. I mean, who can leave a scab alone, anyway?
The second cruise we were on was even shorter in duration, lasting about eight hours in total. This past weekend, as mentioned in the last update, we headed off for a cruise around the Isle of Wight aboard the world’s last seagoing paddle steamer, Waverley. We’d tried to do this three years earlier – see Cruise: Paddle Steamer Waverley – but mechanical problems put a stop to that. This time, however, we had success, we had lovely weather for it, we had wonderfully choppy seas for the first part of it, and we met and chatted with some fellow “proper” cruise lovers from along the coast who it turned out we had a huge amount in common with. It wasn’t a perfect day because we needed to tender to and from Waverley in the cruise port using the local ferries from near Gunwharf, and marine traffic in Portsmouth Harbour ended up causing all sorts of bottlenecks, including a very lengthy delay at the end of the day as we needed to wait for Azamara Journey to get out of our berth. When ships leave late there can be knock-on effects.
Full write-ups of both of those cruises will appear in time, but I wouldn’t hold your breath for them.
The only other thing to mention is that we’ve sorted out flights for next year’s Peru to San Diego cruise, with the latter flights being the most problematic to work through in order to make sure we’ve enough time for the connections. So stressful, but it’s the sort of thing I need to be absolutely certain about for peace of mind and not just leave in the hands of a travel agent. We’d originally considered a hotel day-pass and some time to explore in San Diego at the end of the cruise but the general atmosphere in America right now doesn’t encourage that sort of thing if you’re the type of person who can’t turn a blind eye to what’s going on over there.
And with just 38 days now until we’re off on our Caribbean cruise (hopefully, weather-permitting, all that jazz) I’ll bring this update to an end.