June has arrived which means, for us, that we can now start saying things like “Ooh, next month we’ll be on a cruise!” and it’ll only be to each other so we won’t annoy any of our friends and it’s not exactly news we’re unaware of either but it’s nice to get those giddy little moments of looking forward to travelling somewhere again. We’ve only been back a couple of months from our epic south and central America cruise and that feels like forever ago but it is important to have suitable breaks between trips so that you’ve time to absorb the first one and get used to the drudgery of everyday life once more in order to make the next one feel special again. Also, there is that pesky thing called “paying for all this” that has to be factored in there somewhere.
Anyway, I’ve been busy on the site, updating the landing page image with a fresh and colourful view from when we were in Antigua last year, and of course there have been travelogues posted. All the travel write-ups come from the final cruise we took in 2024 which was aboard Caribbean Princess, cruising from Italy to the U.S. and marking our first (and so far, only) transatlantic cruise trip. As is usual for most of these blog posts/newsletters I’ll now summarise those recent posts.
In the first post of the Caribbean Princess travelogue series I cover the hotel stay in London, the flight, the sheer terror of the car that took us to the port, the chaos at the port, and then some semblance of relaxation aboard the ship on boarding day.
Our first port of call on this cruise was Cagliari, the main city on the island of Sardinia, but we would be spending the day clambering around the Bronze Age settlement of Su Nuraxi di Barumini instead.
We did have a photostop on the outskirts of Cagliari before we got back aboard Caribbean Princess to depart Sardinia and in the evening we discovered that a group of bar staff we’d got on famously with when cruising through the Panama Canal a year earlier were all on the ship too.
Our transatlantic cruise itinerary should have seen us have a sea day then a stop at Málaga (which we were really looking forward to) but in Two Mediterranean Sea Days Aboard Caribbean Princess you will learn that nothing is guaranteed when weather is having a moment. We’ve had ports cancelled for high winds before, but this was a first for us: too rainy to let anyone off.
The final three cruise write-ups on the site all come from our day docked at Casablanca, Morocco. It was a new port for both of us, although only a new country (and continent) for Marie as I’d been to this part of Africa on a family holiday in the 1980s.
We’d booked a full day’s excursion and the first part of that took us along the coast to Morocco’s capital city, Rabat, where we had a fabulous multi-course lunch in a restaurant in the Medina.
After lunch we visited several highlights of Rabat including the Andalusian Gardens within the walls of the Kasbah and the Mausoleum of Mohammed V.
Back in the port city we’d started at we were treated to a short evening driving tour of Casablanca with some stops to take photos of the Hassan II Mosque plus time to shop for souvenirs and fend off sales pitches for carpets.
Surprisingly, given that this transatlantic cruise was sixteen days long, there shouldn’t be too many more posts covering it as the first half was spent in ports – and you’ll have seen that one of those was missed – while the second half was all at sea. I might amalgamate the sea day accounts into one post so that just leaves the islands of Madeira and Tenerife to write about prior to that with the debark tour in Fort Lauderdale at the cruise conclusion to publish.
And then we’ll be on 2025’s trips! I wonder if I can get to that point before we cruise next month. It would be nice to be under eighteen months behind with these posts, even if only briefly.
We’re just over five weeks away from our first proper cruise with Fred Olsen aboard Borealis and we’ve finished booking all the bits we want to give us a proper feel for whether they’re a line we’ll cruise with again. We already suspect we probably will, though.
We’ve booked one excursion for when we’re docked at Cobh and that’s to pop over to Spike Island for a guided tour followed by a rum-tasting. On Borealis herself we’ve booked both a Martini tasting and a whiskey tasting. We’ve also pre-booked an afternoon tea and a meal at the Colours & Tastes speciality restaurant with the Italian night option. And even though you get some beer or wine with lunch and dinner, and even though we’ve got more than one alcohol-based experience to look forward to already, we’ve also splurged on the drinks package just so we know it’s all mostly paid for up front and there will be no (or at least, smaller) surprises at the end.
We were very excited to read in the cruise brochure that Fred sent us that there was a chance we might see basking sharks around the coast of Ireland. Here’s hoping. We’ve seen plenty of dolphins, rays, turtles, orcas, and whales on cruises but a shark would be something new. New is good.
We’ve still got three days of annual leave to play with for next year. It’s looking more likely that these will be UK-based or a European city break given the cruise schedules for 2027. And we’re keen to see what good deals we can get for early 2028. We wouldn’t be opposed to a Caribbean cruise again, hitting different ports as much as possible, flying directly, and avoiding the U.S., possibly round-tripping from Barbados There are possibilities that appeal if 2027’s itineraries are broadly repeated but we’ve not seen all the lines’ offerings for the year after yet.
That will do for this update.