We’ve reached the single digit countdown in number of days until our first cruise of the year but do you want to know who doesn’t care about that? It’s you! However, this is still my site the last time I checked so I’m mentioning it anyway.
It’s time once again to see what new travel posts have been published on the site since the last blog/newsletter update, and after that – as you’ll have guessed from the title – there’s a bit of anguish in the blogging world that needs a bit of paying attention to for some people.
All the recent travel articles you’ll have missed have been from our 2022 Island Princess European cruise and to start off we spent a day in Copenhagen. This was our third visit to Copenhagen and it’s fast becoming our favourite European capital city to visit. On the previous occasions we’d taken tours first elsewhere in the country, then seeing the Danish capital’s highlights, so for this trip we did our own thing. Expect photos, a bit of history, some architectural points of interest, a visit to a museum, and quite a bit of drinking.
As I took enough photos to warrant a post on its own, the next travel item published shows just what it’s like to cruise between Denmark and Sweden on your way north to Norway. There’s not a large gap at all between the countries.
The next port of call for us was Oslo, and this was our second time visiting Norway’s capital. Just like the first time we took an excursion that ate up most of the day so we’ve still not had a chance to really look around Oslo on our own yet. But that’s why you book more cruises. The first part of this excursion took us to see some glass blowing at Hadeland Glassverk. Spoiler: this was not what we had expected at all.
The second part of the tour while in Norway brought us to the utterly enchanting Kistefos Museum and Sculpture Park. Not only did we have great weather for this visit, not only did we see some wonderful pieces of modern art, not only did we have an award-winning art gallery opened up especially for our tour group to look inside, but we got trapped in that gallery too when the security system locked the building down. Everything you’d want to make a trip memorable.
We did have some plans upon our return to Oslo to explore around the cruise port but we ended up on the top deck of the ship, enjoying the sunshine and drinks package we’d sensibly bought, and watching ships coming and going until evening fell and Island Princess set sail from Norway herself. We also managed to catch some views of the Northern Lights over Oslo as we left. Sort of.
A sea day followed and the only photos I took were from the Captain’s Circle event on Island Princess, so only of interest to anyone who’s never seen people sitting at tables before while officers on a ship chat about things.
We’ve been to the Netherlands a few times but the most recent two travel posts on the site account for the start of our day exploring Rotterdam for the first time. We started off with a walk across the Erasmus Bridge to Veerhaven.
And the final update is a walk around Het Park in Rotterdam, a large green space close enough to the Euromast tower to earn it the name Euromast Park as well.
The posts to finish off that Island Princess cruise in 2022 will conclude Rotterdam and see us visiting Blankenberge in Belgium for the first time when we dock at Zeebrugge for definitely not the first time.
To finish off this update, the latest bit of news to bloggers – not just travel bloggers, of course – is that wordpress.com (and I need to stress this: Dot. Com. I’ll mention this more in a minute) have made some nasty little changes recently to blog hosting. That change is to scan all the posts and images they host and sell that data onto companies trying to train large language models (LLMs) to mimic everyone’s content. LLMs is the proper term for what all the snake oil salesmen out there are trying to tell you is AI, but whatever you call it, it’s taking your words and your art and your photos and profiting from it all. And worse: they’ve already done it, but will allow people to opt out after the event. That will involve telling the people who’ve bought your data and trained their models to try to train their models to forget they learnt what they learnt about certain things. I studied neural networks at university – the basis for all these models – and no, this is going to be horrible.
The thing to remember here is that this is wordpress.com and not wordpress.org. The latter are the people responsible for creating the WordPress content management system that many of us – such as me – use. We still like them. The former is a website that allows people to host their WordPress sites. If you’ve got your own domain then this doesn’t apply (well… more on that in a second too) but if you’re hosted on wordpress.com then your content is going to be sold unless (and probably even if) you opt out. Maybe you don’t care. Great. Maybe, though, you earn something from your site and now content in your style can be mass-produced from the imagination of server farms if necessary and completely destroy that. Just something to think about.
There’s the potential that other WordPress-run sites might have their data stolen used without permission too because many people – and I include this site here – use something called JetPack to provide some services and features and that may transmit data too. We wait for confirmation on this, but if that’s the case then obviously the trust relationship with Automattic (the company responsible) will have broken down completely and we’ll stop any further payments to them and see if there’s something that can be done via regulatory bodies to address the damage.
Fun, eh?
Anyway, did I mention we’re off on a cruise soon? I did? Okay then. I’ll probably talk about it in the next update.
Did you go inside the Tivoli? We saw it from the outside only. We’re doing a lot of cruising with Silversea lately, and in December we are going on our first Viking Ocean cruise around the eastern Caribbean. We’re hoping our experience on the ocean-going part of Viking is better than our experience on the river-going part. Taking a Viking river cruise is a lot like visiting Grandma in the nursing home–not exactly an experience fit for people younger than ~85. I took a Silversea cruise around the eastern Med last Dec, which had its itinerary cut short by 2 ports due to the Gaza War. Looks like Red Sea cruises are also off the menu for awhile also, though I’m noticing that cruise sites still list cruises that feature a Red Sea transit.
No, Tivoli was closed when we visited. As I mentioned in the linked post it’s one of those places we think we’d want to spend more time in than we’d get from a cruise visit so we might look at a weekend city break at some point in the future to really do it justice.
Silversea is a bit of a change up from the expedition cruises you’ve tended to do, although still as pricy, or even more so I guess. Surprised at your Viking river experience though as we’ve heard a lot of good things about them from friends and family. Not a line we’ve tried either by river or sea.
I know that Virgin completely changed their plan to relocate ships through the Suez Canal after the Mediterranean season, scrapping the scheduled down under season and replacing with Caribbean itineraries instead. Other lines will definitely follow suit if they can; not an area to book anything in for a few years at least now.
Silversea does expedition cruises too. We did expedition cruises with them to Greenland and Svalbard. We’re on another expedition cruise with them that starts in Male and ends in Singapore; it goes to a lot of out of the way places in the Indian Ocean, like the Andamans. It’s supposed to be really good for seeing lots of coral and wildlife. I’ve found Silversea’s bigger ships to be very nice too, although they aren’t nearly as big as the giants that, say, Royal Caribbean or Celebrity would sail. The good thing about Silversea is that it’s all inclusive, except for one specialty restaurant and if you want to book a private excursion thru them. The bad thing is that it does tend to be pricey: fares start at around $5k apiece for the cheapest cabin and go up from there. When we retire, Hubby & I will likely switch to much cheaper lines to save money. We’ve had good experiences with Celebrity when we sailed with them back in the day. I’ve been looking into Azamara too. Whom we sail with once we retire will depend on where we are living too. If we ex-pat like we are thinking, we may be sailing different lines.
I wouldn’t say my Viking River Cruise experience was *bad* per se so much as we just felt like the whole trip wasn’t arranged with people in our age group with our interests in mind. My mom would love it.