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.

There have been seven new travel write-ups since the last of these blogs/newsletters.

Firstly, there’s the concluding post from our two days in the Portuguese capital which includes a stop for a bite to eat and some drinks, some waterfront views, and a farewell to Lisbon with a sail out under the 25 de Abril bridge.

The next day on this cruise took place on my birthday in 2024 and for the occasion we were docked at Leixões, typically used for visitors to Portugal’s second city, Porto. We, however, headed off on an excursion elsewhere, and that started with a visit to the city of Amarante. The impressive bridge over the river splitting the city was the site of an important battle during the Napoleonic wars.

The excursion we were on took us into the Douro Valley and a vineyard to see grapes being pressed after harvest and to taste some port. Our first instance of actually drinking port in Portugal. We don’t like to rush these typically tourist things. Despite a few visits to the country now we’ve also still never had a pastel de nata yet either. Our guide on this trip was horrified when we mentioned this to him.

A short write-up about our time back on board Ventura in Leixões cruise port includes the reaction from fellow passengers upon hearing that our cruise itinerary would be changing for the final port of call. They were not happy. We were overjoyed.

We should have been visiting Guernsey – and I’m sure Guernsey would have been very nice – but the weather forecast persuaded our captain to switch that for A Coruña in Spain instead and we thought that was a great upgrade. The first post of three from the city takes us on a walk towards the Tower of Hercules.

We paid a visit to Aquarium Finisterrae because we like aquariums and we’re easily distracted. If your aquarium has cephalopods then it’s a good aquarium as far as we’re concerned and A Coruña’s aquarium had octopuses and cuttlefish so that’s several thumbs up from us.

The final post from this Spanish port city is also the one that finishes up all the write-ups from our Ventura cruise and it’s mostly a few photographic highlights from the remainder of our walk around A Coruña.

The next set of travelogues that will be posted on the website will be those that cover the final cruise we took in 2024, that being our trans-Atlantic crossing from Rome to Fort Lauderdale aboard Caribbean Princess. A lovely mix of a very interesting port-intensive first week and a very relaxing second week of nothing but ocean.

Back to Ventura briefly, and this week we added the new P&O deluxe drinks package to the cruise we’ve got planned for later this year on that ship again, heading down to the Canary Islands. We haven’t bothered with drinks packages on P&O cruises in the past because they simply don’t work out to be cost-effective for us with our preferences for what we like to drink but a couple of things changed that reckoning. Firstly, the new drinks packages on P&O are a lot better value than they used to be, including Wi-Fi access plus credit towards speciality dining. It brings the package a lot closer in line with the Princess packages although the general drinks range is still a lot more restricted. Secondly, the cruise will have six sea days, including three together right at the start, and we’ll be cruising with my wife’s parents. That’s a combination that’s likely to encourage a little more drinking than usual.

Actually adding the new deluxe drinks package was a bit of a saga. The package didn’t exist when we booked the cruise and the website doesn’t allow you to modify your booking to add it, requiring you to instead phone up. I’m not a fan of talking to people on the phone. I’m even less of a fan of listening to hold music repeating endlessly while the person on the phone finds herself unable to add the package. A case of “Computer says no” here, although one that was clearly more frustrating to the person dealing with me than for me. I’m very understanding of technical issues when people are trying their best so kept saying “It’s fine, don’t worry” while I was receiving an endless stream of apologies and requests to hold again while supervisors were sought. It took 45 minutes, but it’s done now.

We’ve been enjoying Zero Stars on TLC TV here in the UK. Available for free on several platforms and you can watch it on YouTube too. The most recent episode had Roisin and Sara trying out a Mediterranean cruise aboard a Miray Cruises ship. The premise of the show is to see how the two comedians find travel experiences that have received less than flattering reviews online.

It might be a sign of us growing older but we loved the look of the ship and all its weird quirks, and it was good to see that Roisin and Sara had a good time aboard. A very enjoyable series that airs here on Sunday evenings and that’s rapidly become a very good night for travel programmes as we’ve also been liking Rich Holiday, Poor Holiday on Channel 5 while Cruising to the Ends of the Earth on Channel 4 hasn’t really given us much new that many of the other cruise programmes have delivered over the years but it has been nice to see Diamond Princess setting off from Yokohama as it’s reminded us of our own experiences in Asia in 2018.

We’re two months away from our Fred Olsen Borealis cruise to Ireland so we’ve been checking out lots of videos about the ship and the line to get some idea about what to expect. One thing we’ve not seen anyone else do or cover is whiskey tasting (even if Fred Olsen spell it as “Irish whisky” which isn’t a thing) and we’ve got that booked. That should eventually make this site the primary source for information about the event, not that this site is having any trouble attracting visitors. Daily site traffic in the last year has doubled and that was already double what it had been just a couple of years earlier. Must be doing something right.

That will do for this update.

But first, there have been a few new posts published on the website so a quick summary of those is called for. It’s the way I do things here.

Two more posts from our 2024 Iberian peninsular cruise on P&O Ventura have appeared as if by magic. These two cover the start of the second day ashore in Lisbon and the first of those involves a bit of a walk through the Moorish Quarter of the city.

The second post follows our visit to Lisbon’s National Pantheon and includes photos from inside the Baroque building and from its roof over the city skyline and down to the port.

The only other post on the website comes from a visit to the village of Wickham fifteen years ago. It’s an interesting little place near us with a lot of old architecture and a great antiques shop.

Okay, so now to that Ambassador Ambience cruise news.

For a while we’ve been saying that we wanted to return to Asia in late 2028 as it will be our twentieth wedding anniversary and we were out there on a cruise for our honeymoon and again on a cruise ten years after that. The problem has been that we’ve not been wowed by the itineraries that we’ve seen at the time of year we’d be looking to travel with too many concentrating on Japan and the price being somewhat higher than we’d like with no guarantees that world tensions won’t continue to put pressure on those to rise further. We like Japan but a Japan-intensive cruise isn’t what we want. So, Asia is still a place we want to return to but we’ve realised that it’s not going to be anniversary-related.

Enter the scene Ambassador Ambience.

We thoroughly enjoyed last year’s cruise to Norway and we do have a cruise already booked on another of the ships in Ambassador’s fleet, Ambition, for next year (sailing out of our home city to France). We were looking for options for late 2028 this week in the wake of our decision to skip Asia for now when we spotted a very similar cruise to last year’s Norwegian trip. With the cruise being for our anniversary we also took a look at the price for a suite and decided to treat ourselves. The suite perks aren’t fantastic to be fair but the room is larger and it’ll be something fancy for a special occasion.

We’ll be at sea on a ship we loved for our anniversary and we’ll be hitting three different ports from the previous cruise on Ambience with two of those – Andalsnes and Harstad – being completely new for us. We always like to cruise when there are new ports on the itinerary.

Over 900 days away and we’re booking cruises. What are we like?

Interestingly, we’ll also be in the Arctic Circle late in the year in 2027 too. That one will be aboard Majestic Princess – a first time on her – so it will be fascinating to compare the two cruise line experiences to the same part of the world one year apart. A few different and new to us ports on that cruise too. We know we’ll love both cruises because Ambassador and Princess – though very different – are excellent lines, and nobody can ever get bored cruising to Norway.

With us booking a suite for that Ambassador Ambience cruise this also means we’re going to be cruising with very different cabin types over the next couple of years. Balconies still dominate, of course, because we know what we like but we’ll be in an Ocean View room when we board Fred Olsen’s Borealis in just over ten weeks’ time, then an Obstructed Balcony when we see what Cunard’s Queen Mary 2 is like followed by an Inside cabin for Ambition out of Portsmouth next year.

So that’s now seven upcoming cruises for us to look forward to between now and the end of 2028 (you can always track our cruising plans on our Future Cruises page) and it remains to be seen when or if we can get a cruising return to Asia slotted in or appended to that list.

Now, I really must get around to finishing the photo-processing from the Norwegian Jade cruise and get some more write-ups posted on the site. Just got to stop being distracted by booking cruises.

You didn’t read this to discover just how ill we’ve been, but that’s an explanation as to why there have been no updates on the site at all for a fortnight and why I still haven’t finished processing the photos taken from our last cruise. And I’d like to add, too, that checking a forum for fellow passengers on that cruise we certainly weren’t the only people to come off and get knocked down like this within a day or two of returning. Did we pick something up on the last port of call? Was it the chaotic immigration line? Was it all the people at the No Kings protest we got caught in? Was it San Diego airport? Who knows!?

So, no travelogues to mention, but there is some cruising news because we’ve been keeping an eye on cruise options for the three remaining days of annual leave we’ve got for next year (yeah, sad, isn’t it?) Those options have, naturally, been limited, but seeing whether we could combine those days with a bank holiday somewhere to improve options we spotted a 4-nighter cruise on Cunard‘s Queen Mary 2 over the Easter weekend in March of next year, hitting Rotterdam overnight.

Cunard is one of those cruise lines that we’ve pretty much ignored. They’ve had a reputation for stuffiness when it comes to what you wear, although by all accounts that’s relaxed enough now that we’d not really have a problem with it (I’m not a jacket-wearer, but I always wear dark trousers and a shirt in the evenings so will likely be fine). There’s also the issue, for me, that they’re to some extents trading on their reputation for class and elegance when the reality is that they are little more than an elevated P&O Cruises essentially, and one that charges in dollars aboard just to make the experience not quite so special given the brand’s history.

However, over the next couple of years we are keeping our cruising to Europe to recoup recent travel expenses, trying a few new lines, trying some cheaper cabin types, and there were some good reasons to give Cunard a go finally.

The most important factor for us was that this cruise sails on Good Friday and gets back on the Tuesday morning. I’d have enough time to drive back home for work and not use up any of those three precious annual leave days. Second to that was a temporary promotional price on the official website that undercut all the travel agent prices we could see and meant we could actually get an obstructed balcony for the same cost as an inside cabin which was where we were looking initially. It really is obstructed, too, but there will be daylight and some balcony space should we fancy sitting out and gazing at the lifeboats. Keeping the cost down further was the lack of need to get a drinks package. It’s a 4-night cruise with a necessity to be sensible on the last one anyway coupled with an overnight in Rotterdam where we’d not spend much of it on the ship anyway. Finally, we’re very happy to return to Rotterdam as it’s got lots to still see.

There are still some issues of the Cunard cruise about Queen Mary 2 that we’re a little wary about. With this being over holiday time in the UK there’s more of a chance that there will be families aboard. We’re hoping they’re largely seen and not heard, though. This will also be the ship’s final cruise before a long refit which means we’re more likely (not definite) to have bedding on its last legs, stock issues as the ship winds down its inventory, and perhaps fewer staff members or ones already looking forward to the end of their contracts. Perhaps. We’ve seen this sort of thing before, and none of it may come to pass, but we know how people are and how businesses operate. Finally, we’re not sure just how much there will be to do on Easter Sunday in Rotterdam. Hopefully, enough will be open to keep us off the ship, but even if nothing much is open we can enjoy the architecture and art sculptures of the city so long as the weather is nice to us.

So, as things stand we’ve got six cruises booked for the remainder of this year and next. Six different cruise lines. Two brand new cruise lines for us. Five new cruise ships for us. Not a single repeated port stop on any of those cruises, and seventeen new ports for us to visit. That’s the way we like to do it.

Still have to use up those three days leave for next year, though.

Tradition on this website dictates that I must now summarise the cruise experience while the details are still fresh in the jet-lagged mind because any regular readers of this site’s content will know that the actual write-ups and proper photos are anywhere up to two years away. This gives me a chance to have travel content that includes immediate reactions and feelings plus those more contemplative and verbose look-back-with-rose-tinted-eyeballs ones much later.

I’m going to break this down into sensible sections covering the ship and cruise line first – because that’s what I think most people will be interested in hearing about – then elements of the pre-cruise stay in Peru and itinerary afterwards. For us, when we book cruises, it’s the itinerary that generally sells the cruise to us. We like if we can add in new experiences such as new cruise lines or ships, but that is very definitely secondary.

• Norwegian Jade
• Norwegian Cruise Line
• Embarkation & Disembarkation
• NCL Comparisons & Conclusions
• The Cruise Itinerary
  • Salaverry, Peru
  • Manta, Ecuador
  • Amador, Panama
  • Puntarenas, Costa Rica
  • Acajutla, El Salvador
  • Puerto Quetzal, Guatemala
  • Huatulco, Mexico
  • Acapulco, Mexico
  • Manzanillo, Mexico
  • Mazatlán, Mexico
  • Cabo San Lucas, Mexico

And, of course, always remember that this covers our experience aboard and our thoughts about elements of the time. Your experiences and thoughts may differ, and they certainly should differ since we’re not clones.

Norwegian Jade

Give us a choice between a big, new ship with all the features or a smaller, older ship with all the character and we’ll opt for the latter option every time, and when you’re looking for itineraries that hit interesting ports then you will typically find that older and smaller trumps flashy, new behemoths every time. Jade was launched in 2006 and typically carries about two and half thousand passengers. A great size for us.

The ship had some interesting decor in places. An area containing a champagne bar, a Martini bar, and a beer and whisky bar all next to each other and close to the second, smaller dining room was a good example. The first two bars were quite stylish with Art Deco touches in places (Art Deco featured in the main dining room too). The beer and whiskey bar and the smaller dining room, Alizar, though, had an aesthetic familiar to anyone who remembers (or still has near them) flat-roofed pubs in Britain from the 1970s and 1980s. Lettering, colours… just lacking thick clouds of cigarette smoke and outright racist conversations. Thankfully. However, she was a very clean ship, all the fixtures and fittings were decent quality, not showing any real signs of age (little bits of absolutely expected rust on sea-exposed areas, notwithstanding). No complaints here.

The layout of the ship took some getting used to. Jade has a very asymmetrical feel to her in places where picking the port or starboard way of approaching a venue made more of a difference than we were expecting. We’ve been on ships before where to approach one dining room you have to come at it from a deck above and that was true of the main dining room, Grand Pacific, where we ate most evening meals. Port embarkation threw us a few times because you’d enter on deck four on the starboard side, for instance, and scan cards, but would need to walk a little way snaking through barriers for the important security (i.e. bottle confiscation) check, and by the time you’d completed that you’d be on the port side without really realising it and sometimes without any clue as to which way was now forward and which was aft. We got lost a couple of times, and we never usually get lost on a ship.

Our cabin was large and spacious and had plenty of charging sockets and USB ports but we immediately realised there was an issue with bedside tables as only one side of the bed had any. The other had a small sofa which could hold certain items on it, but not a glass of water, for instance, with any degree of confidence it wouldn’t get knocked over and spill everywhere. The bed was too soft for our liking but that could just be an older mattress issue. The bathroom on first entering looked decent with a good-sized shower with sliding door, a central section with a sink, and the toilet in its own section to the left that also had a sliding door to it. However, in practice this space didn’t really work. The sliding door to the toilet was more of an encumbrance than of any real use and most frequently was the cause of banged elbows in the middle of the night when trying to use the loo quietly without waking your other half. The sink was oval shaped, projecting out from the main vanity unit and this ate up real estate space in front to the extent that drying yourself after a shower was easier done still in the shower cubicle or out in the room.

We found it difficult to find a quiet spot during the day because the various lounges and bars always seemed to have something going on in them. That might not be the case on a large NCL ship, but we were very glad to have our balcony to escape to. The top deck was quite large and had plenty of loungers around, but we were surprised that the full-wraparound promenade deck which was very wide in places had no places to sit on at all.

The staff were excellent, the service was generally very good, our room steward was superb, the food quality was above average, not excelling, but nothing being bad. The speciality dining experiences were a bit of a letdown to be honest, with specifics when I write the full accounts, so we’re glad we had those included for free as part of the cruise rather than paying for them.

Norwegian Cruise Line

There was a lot to like about the pre-cruise booking experience and the app both ahead of the cruise and while on board, all of which had tons of information and access to all the things you’d need such as daily plans, excursion details, if you had dining booked, etc. One of the best apps from our experience.

Our booking included the Free At Sea unlimited open bar (for drinks up to $15) and, given the length of the cruise, this also included five speciality dining meals. There was also a cruise excursion credit worth $50 per port, weirdly only applied to the lead booking rather than $25 each, but that helped to make the NCL trips comparable price-wise with port-side offerings from the likes of Viator or GetYourGuide. But we discovered one horrible little gotcha that related to excursions booked ahead of the cruise. We booked all our trips with the cruise line and they all went well, had sensible meeting times (for us; we did arrive at the theatre on a couple of occasions where they were calling people for trips that should have met an hour earlier so not sure what happened there), and we had no real issues at all. But one port was cancelled on which we’d had a trip booked and paid for ahead of the cruise on our credit card. Our expectation was that we would be refunded to our credit card but instead we saw a credit applied to our onboard account. Okay, we thought, but at the end of the cruise we’ll get that money refunded if we’ve not spent it. Yeah, not the case at all. In fact, if we’d not checked with someone on the last sea day then it’s likely (unless the staff were wrong, and that’s an issue in itself) that Norwegian would have simply taken our money. We were told by two members of staff that we needed to go to a desk to get our owed money back, not on our card, not in British pounds, but in cash, and in dollars. What use are dollars to people who don’t live in America, are about to fly out from America, and have no plans to visit America again? And exchanging them would lose money. Yeah, we were not happy about this at all.

I’ve mentioned food quality for the ship already because that’s down to the chefs aboard, but for food variety and portion sizes this feels more a line-related thing, likely imposed fleet-wide. The variety was poor, particularly for breakfast in the buffet and evening meals in the main dining rooms. The appetisers barely changed and the featured main courses often were variations on the same theme night after night. The portion sizes were stupidly large, and this was both for general dining and speciality dining. We found ourselves stuffed before dessert most nights, even when trying to leave some room.

The musicians in lounges were of a decent quality and with a reasonable and varied range of styles. We don’t do shows so can’t comment on them from direct experience but others on the cruise reported that they weren’t that impressed.

One thing we’d heard was that Norwegian liked to push sales on everything, hard. Our experience is a bit mixed on this. We were not pressured to buy anything, and if we were to compare our time on Norwegian Jade to other cruises we’ve had then I’d have to say this was the least sales-push-based cruise we’ve ever had. No urgings to visit the spa or pay for tasting experiences or sign up for the higher tier drinks package, or anything at all. However, what we noticed was that daytime activities in particular lacked free options and were completely devoid of staples of other cruises such as talks or interviews. There were no port lectures, no guest speakers. There were lots of wine-tastings, Martini-tastings, art classes, etc., and all with a charge. You could attend dance classes and art talks for free, but that was about the limit of it.

Embarkation And Disembarkation

Embarkation for this cruise was a mixed bag, but there were some logistical considerations here. Lima is not a port from which many ships cruise. Ships may visit – not many, though – but as a turnaround port you might only get half a dozen ships embarking passengers in a year. As such there’s no cruise terminal. We’d expected that we would need to get to a temporary checking-in location near the commercial port of Callao on embarkation day because that’s what other cruises do but there were no details forthcoming on this until just a few weeks before the cruise. What NCL decided to do was have everyone check in at a hotel in the Miraflores district (a tourist-friendly area of Lima) and then get taken by coach to the port (about 30-40 minutes away). This was perfect for us because we had decided to stay in Lima for four days before the cruise and not only were we already booked into a hotel in Miraflores, but we were two minutes’ walk from the check-in location. I know that a lot of people who’d booked hotels near the airport or even the cruise port changed their bookings late on to go to Miraflores instead. There was no access to the cruise port except via the Miraflores hotel.

Check-in at the cruise line’s hotel was easy and quick because we had all the documentation to hand (passports, boarding pass, and ESTAs) and we were given a bus number. 23 as it happens. They were calling bus number 17 while we sat down and about five minutes later they called bus 18. We had a bit of wait ahead of us but no worries, we thought, until an NCL person wandered around then walked up to us. “What bus number are you?” “23,” we said. “No, I think you’re 18,” she replied, and swapped our bus numbers over. Lovely, and we saw a few other couples suddenly see this and come hurrying to her to see if they could get the same treatment.

That part of embarkation was great. At Callao, though, we stood in line waiting to board the ship for over an hour, a large part of that in full sunshine. Jade only has two entries and one was being used to load luggage. The buses were turning up every five minutes and disgorging 50-60 people and for some reason it was taking an age to get on the ship. Not even sure why as when it was our turn it was a matter of seconds to scan our card, push our carry-on items through the scanner, then hand over our passports and receive a receipt for them, although we did hear some people complaining and demanding to know why they had to hand passports over and there were a lot of different nationalities of cruisers aboard so that may have been the cause of the delays. The elevators were being sensibly controlled by a member of staff only allowing people to move up a few levels where they could find more elevators in order to keep the travel times between floors flowing.

Disembarkation was a nightmare. A perfect storm of problems hit here and it started with San Diego insisting on on-board immigration rather than doing this ashore in a terminal. That caused a delay in setting things up on the ship and getting clearance to start the process.

The next problem was entirely of NCL’s doing because they’d sent around conflicting information about the disembarkation process and exacerbated that with announcements on the morning of departure that they then had to clarify as they were equally open to interpretation. Effectively, half the ship thought we could all pass through immigration at any time then wait for our luggage tag to be called to exit (and they were likely the correct half, as it turns out, and we wish we’d done that) while the other half thought they had to wait for their luggage tag to be called then pass through immigration and leave (which is how we and others read it). Then you had some people thinking they didn’t need to pass through immigration at all because the announcements started by saying that those with walk-off colour tags could leave immediately via deck 4, only for a follow-up announcement to then say “well, when we say leave, we mean after you’ve passed through immigration, so sorry, back up several decks for you lot.” It was chaos. We were supposed to be called to leave at 08:00. When we joined the queue – half an hour after that point having still not heard our tag being called but feeling we needed to consider the time now for our upcoming flight – the queue for immigration started midship on deck 6, stretched to the front, went up a flight of stairs to deck 7, stretched the entire length of the ship on deck 7 then doubled back on itself to midship deck 7. It took us over 90 minutes to get off the ship, and this was already 30 minutes later than we’d been due to leave.

And the third part of the perfect storm of the disembarkation debacle was that by this time all the roads around the port had now been closed off for a No Kings protest march (the reason for which we agree with, but oh, the timing couldn’t have been worse). The queue for the transfer buses was about three hundred people deep but nobody was going anywhere as the police had sealed off all the entrances and exits. Taxis couldn’t drive in and out either so even calling an Uber first required us to traipse our luggage outside the port, then several blocks over to find somewhere we could get picked up from. Easy to find as it was where everyone else was now congregating and looking at phones. It was about another 40 minutes before our driver got through all the traffic and arrived and yes, we made it to the airport and through the check-in, bag drop, security, and to boarding with just five minutes to spare for our flight. Stress levels through the roof.

NCL Comparisons And Conclusions

So, there were things we liked about our first NCL cruise experience and things we didn’t. As you’d probably expect.

If you’re a glutton then the food is a plus point as the quality and the quantity were definitely in the better half of food experiences we’ve had on cruises, although if you prefer a bit of refinement then the quantity and variety let it down a little. There were a decent number of varied speciality venues, especially given the small size of the ship – a steakhouse, Italian, French, sushi, teppanyaki, and a Brazilian churrascaria – but had we paid for any of these then we’d have been disappointed with the only barely elevated dining experiences from the main dining room. Comparing the food with what we’ve had on other ships then we’d say that NCL was far superior to Celebrity (sorry, they’ve been dreadful for us) and just edged out P&O, Marella, Ambassador, and MSC overall. Princess, HAL, and Virgin are better, though.

Drinks range and quality, plus the service in bars and the staff everywhere in general were all excellent.

We liked the more casual attitude on Norwegian Jade with regards to what people wore, and not having to pack a tuxedo for a long flight was a big bonus.

Daytime activities and entertainment weren’t great but we’ve always made our own entertainment anyway so this wasn’t a deal-breaker for us, although we know people for whom this is important.

The app was excellent, and one of the best, if not the best, that we’ve used on a cruise.

Lack of information on the ship (not related to details of your own cruise on the app), and lack of clarity on occasions was bad. That said, I can’t remember the last time I got off a ship and thought that the information presented was good. This seems to be an area where cruise lines really need to improve.

The basic internet was a dreadful throwback to ye olden tymes. For our cruise package we received 300 minutes of internet, so we had to monitor how long we were on and make sure to log out after a quick look around. There was, of course, a paid option for fast, unlimited internet, but we had 300 minutes each and didn’t want to pay needlessly. This would have been okay (ish) were it not for certain throttling limits on the package. Browsing was fine, using social media was fine, and that’s all we really wanted to do, but I ran into an issue with Instagram trying to continually upload a reel and fail, even after removing the video file. The only solution was to delete the app and reinstall it, which I thought would take a couple of minutes. No. Downloading the app from the store used up almost a sixth of my whole cruise’s allocated time on the net as the speed from the store was apparently living its best life in a retro land of dial-up internet. So, if you pay for the fast net then I’m sure it’s fine, but the included option has some horrible restrictions that can make for anything but a relaxed cruising experience.

The situation where money you owe the cruise line is taken from your credit card automatically at the end (as you’d expect) but money the cruise line owes you requires you to queue and be handed that money physically in a useless currency format or risk losing it completely is appalling if that is truly the way it works fleet-wide. We had and still have our doubts about the legality or veracity of that, but this is what we were told twice on board by staff members. Hated that.

The itinerary was excellent and gave us plenty of chances to do the things we love to do when we travel. We enjoyed loads of architecture and street art, craft ale in most of the countries, bought soaps, bookmarks, and shot glasses nearly everywhere (it’s what we do), visited several museums, and got to see historical ruins from tribes associated broadly within the Inca, Maya, and Aztec (Mexica, really) peoples. It had all the things that make travelling worthwhile for us.

Would we cruise with Norwegian Cruise Line again? They wouldn’t be our first choice, but as I’ve already mentioned that it’s the itinerary that drives us then they’re certainly in the reckoning and particularly so since they do run some interesting trips that other lines don’t. Our Lima to San Diego via a host of countries we’d not visited before is a prime example. We shall definitely be keeping an eye out for NCL cruises in the future.

The Cruise Itinerary

With the cruise starting from Lima on a Wednesday and flights from the UK being the way that they are we would have had to book the Tuesday before off anyway for travel time just to get to the airport, so for one extra day of annual leave allowance taken off – the Monday – we could actually fly in to Peru’s capital on the Saturday instead and have more time to explore. And that’s what we did.

We stayed at the El Pardo Lima in Miraflores and it was a great choice for location and overall quality, featuring a shallow swimming pool on the tenth floor and handy restaurants and bars attached to it as well as no shortage of locations in very close proximity.

During our time in Lima we spent the first full day visiting the historic centre, and this happened to be International Women’s Day too so there were lots of activities going on. We visited the catacombs and had a great experience not shared by many other people there with our guide that I’ll write up about in the main articles much later. We also found a great bar for cocktails there and in the evening walked past groups of dancing people to get to the fountain show that we’d seen once before many years ago but lost all the video footage to.

On the second day we walked to an archaeological site near the hotel for a fantastic guided wander around it, then took an Uber to the Larco museum for a great time there too. Ubers are a fantastic way to get around Lima and ridiculously cheap. You could pay as little as three or four quid for a drive that takes 30 minutes through the traffic and we made sure to always tip the maximum amount after any drive because it was seriously too cheap for us to feel comfortable with.

Our final full day in Lima involved a walk to the nearby Barranco district – still a fairly decent walk away, but along the clifftops from Miraflores – and there we enjoyed the street art and architecture for which the area is famous and which are things we enjoy everywhere that we go.

Salaverry, Peru

This was the only cancelled port on the cruise. The cruise as a whole featured an absolutely calm Pacific Ocean, except for Salaverry which had a very shallow port that turned the flat sea into rolling waves. We were rolling about in bed ourselves in the early part of the morning as the ship was approaching the port and we could tell that it was never going to get in to dock safely.

Manta, Ecuador

We didn’t like the look of any excursions here so just decided to go for a walk along the shoreline and to make sure that I bought a proper Panama hat. They come from Ecuador, not Panama, in case you didn’t know. I don’t really wear hats as brims tend to get in the way of using my camera but figured I’d regret it if I didn’t.

Amador, Panama

We were docked at Amador for this but took an excursion that brought us to the Chagres National Park to visit the Emberá people at Parará Purú. This involved an exhilarating dugout canoe ride to their village then some entertainment in terms of talks and songs and dances with food laid on from the tribe. After, we had time to buy some crafts from them, and overall it was a fabulous trip with some unforgettable singing. We were particularly pleased because we’d tried to do this trip back on our 2023 Ruby Princess cruise but we’d not been allowed to dock then due to civil unrest in the country.

Puntarenas, Costa Rica

Our third time visiting this port in Costa Rica and we split it between an excursion followed by time in the port. The excursion included some folk dancing by kids (and the youngest girl was having the best time of her life doing this so was an utter joy to watch), then a boat ride to see lots of different birds and loads of crocodiles, including one 6 metres in length just a few metres from the boat edge.

Acajutla, El Salvador

Our excursion here took us first to Joya de Cerén, a Mayan site of a town buried in volcanic ash around 600 CE. It’s referred to as “the Pompeii of the Americas”. We then went to another archaeological site, this being San Andrés.

Puerto Quetzal, Guatemala

We booked a “free time in Antigua Guatemala” trip here as the old capital of the country was quite some distance away. Antigua Guatemala was a beautiful place, nestled between three volcanoes, subject to earthquakes (hence some ruins and no buildings over two storeys in height), and full of colour and character. We hit a few ruins of buildings then went to see the main square and the arch that everyone takes photos of before being surprised by finding two craft ale microbreweries that we were obliged to visit, drink in, and buy merchandise from.

Huatulco, Mexico

No excursions interested us here so we braved the heat and humidity for a walk to the nearby town of La Crucetita before returning to the port area, mostly for a bit of a bimble about, but also to grab a nice large margarita at a beach bar. When in Mexico, and all that.

Acapulco, Mexico

We headed off on a tour to see Tehuacalco, a huge archaeological site of the Yope people known for their strong warrior prowess who while being surrounded by the broader Aztec empire were never conquered by them. The site included pyramid temples and a Mesoamerican ball court, and our tour group had the entire place to ourselves (except for the dozen armed guards) as it was technically closed for the day. Fabulous place.

Manzanillo, Mexico

Our tour here was described as a visit to see colonial architecture and have lunch. It started with a visit to Colima where there were some colonial buildings and a good museum visit. We then had a stop at La Campana archaeological site which our guide had described as fairly modest but which we discovered was quite vast. Low, pyramidal structures, but loads of them and spread out over a huge area. In fact it was the largest pre-hispanic population centre in western Mexico. A short ride from there brought us to the pretty town of Comala for a lovely if chaotic lunch. Less colonial than we’d expected but the ruins were far better than we’d been led to believe.

Mazatlán, Mexico

This ended up being my favourite Mexican port city. We walked – despite seemingly never-ending offers of taxi rides near the port – and hit a lovely public square near the cathedral before making our way to the beach on the western side of the city. We’d not expected to love the beach area this much but it had lots of sculptures, a wonderfully cooling breeze, and we even saw a cliff top diver performing. We visited a small but very interesting museum after that then planned to visit three microbreweries we could see in a line on the route back to the ship. In fact we simply stopped at the first one because we had the rooftop garden to ourselves, the beers were great, and there was a cat. We just couldn’t leave.

Cabo San Lucas, Mexico

We’d been here once before when we’d taken an excursion inland to see another town entirely so we decided to walk around the place this time around. We’re not sure what the big appeal of Cabo is, to be honest. I think we’d probably book a boat trip next time as there wasn’t a lot to see that wasn’t bars or restaurants or souvenir shops, but we did eventually find Baja Brewing to satisfy more craft ale desires.

Aside from the high stress involved on the final day just getting home it was a wonderful holiday with enough relaxation between the numerous, sometimes a little strenuous, always very hot port stops of interest for us. The pre-cruise stay in Lima was excellent and we’ll have to do that sort of thing more often if annual leave from work allows it. The cruise line and ship weren’t the greatest but they were absolutely good enough, and the itinerary and all it allowed us to do and see were just superb. Full details of everything to come somewhen in the distant future.

As usual, there will be a little note about any recent developments or points of interest in the general travel or cruising world, or at least as it affects us, at the end. There won’t be much. We’re in that lull period at the start of the year where nobody’s really got a lot of news to share.

Back in 2024 we tried MSC Cruises for the first time and there’s another post on this site which summarises that not-too-pleasant experience. You can hunt it down using your skills and the tools available on the website’s menu if you’re super keen to know about that. Although, I will say that we subsequently had a vastly improved experience so maybe ignore that post. What wasn’t covered at the time was what we got up to in Cherbourg and that’s now been addressed. Spoiler: not a lot, because it’s Cherbourg. But we did visit a museum because we’re cultured and whatnot.

The remainder of the travel posts recently added to the site all come from the start of a cruise taken aboard P&O Ventura in September 2024. It was a cruise with some bang average food, unmemorable entertainment, but some lovely time ashore, and the shore elements are why we booked the cruise, after all.

The cruise started with a sea day so expect a brief account of sea day activities – which for us aren’t worth mentioning and are barely worthy of photographing either – but mainly the food and drink on Ventura we had, including speciality dining and the premium afternoon tea offering.

Our first port of call was new for us and this was Santander. We spent absolutely no time exploring Santander, however, as we had an excursion booked for the day to check out the architectural delights of a couple of nearby towns. Architecture, art, and history are the things we cruise for. And beers of the world of course. You can’t forget those. We began with a visit to Comillas to take a look around one of Gaudí’s earlier works, El Capricho. It’s a fabulous building.

From early Art Nouveau to somewhere decidedly more medieval-looking next when we looked around Santillana Del Mar.

There wasn’t time to look around Santander after that trip to the nearby towns but we enjoyed the view of it from the balcony and it looked like a place we’d like to explore at some point. Given that there’s a direct ferry link from our home city of Portsmouth to Santander you might wonder why we’ve never done that before. Reasonably expensive and inconvenient sailings would be the answer there.

We had a sea day and more speciality dining on Ventura next.

Three posts conclude this round-up of new travel content, and they’re all from the city of Vigo. This is a place we’d cruised to before on Ventura but on that first occasion we’d taken a tour – we often do on a first visit – while this time around we set off on foot with only a few points of potential interest to hunt down.

In the first post from Vigo we decided to hunt down some art and architecture – see, I told you that’s what we like doing on cruises – which included some street art, a museum of modern art (not to everyone’s tastes but we usually find things to enjoy), and the main attraction for us, a piece of modernist architecture with strong Streamline Moderne Art Deco about it.

There’s a good viewpoint to be found in Vigo at the Fortress of El Castro where you can expect to look down on your cruise ship. Of course, this does mean making your way up here and Vigo is quite hilly. We made it, though.

The final post just shows off some of the scenery of the sail away from Vigo, and it largely mirrors a post that was published when we visited this same port three years earlier.

Regarding next month’s cruise on Norwegian Jade we’ve had confirmation of the name of the driver who will be meeting us at the airport when we land in Lima, and walking through an airport to find the person holding your name up on a board will be a whole new experience for us. We’ve never felt so fancy-pants.

We’ve also completed the check-in for the cruise already, and we’ve picked up some spending money. We’ll be in Lima for four days before the cruise so we wanted some money for sundries as well as tipping our driver, and there’s a bar we’re interested in visiting (suppress your shock!) that apparently does the best Pisco Sour but only takes cash. Additionally, guides we’ve read about Antigua Guatemala suggest that money is advisable as credit/debit card payments may not be widely used in the city, and US dollars aren’t generally accepted. We also picked up some Mexican Pesos as we’ll be visiting five ports there and, again, the more southern ports are more likely to feature local cash only. Finally, having physical money gives us more of an incentive to spend it locally and that’s always a good thing to do if you’re a considerate cruiser.

After we get back we’ll have to wait until July to cruise again but that will be with Fred Olsen. New line for us. Naturally, even though we haven’t started our upcoming cruise yet we’re already digging into write-ups and videos about what to expect on Borealis. It’s just what we do. It’d be nice to see more general experience blogging write-ups and videos because there are only so many ship tours you can watch (one) but we’ve no control over what content other people produce. Yet.

Anyway. There probably won’t be another round-up post before we set off on our South and Central American cruise adventure so the next blog update like this on the site is most likely going to be immediate thoughts about our newest cruising experience. Everything crossed that it’s all super-positive.

Sandra and Chris were younger than us but keen users and abusers of Twitter before the great fucking racist business-moron twat that is Musk ruined it all, turning it into something that those of us with a conscience had to get away from. We connected on this opinion. We also connected through similar humour and the geography that tied Sandra’s early years in Gosport with our own in Portsmouth. When we dispersed to other social media places we lost immediate contact with this couple we had much in common with but we still kept in touch, more sporadically.

We first cruised with Sandra and Chris aboard Regal Princess in the post-pandemic period, getting back to cruising season. I remember we all had to sit apart when entering the cruise terminal and we’d spotted the pair of them in seats so sat in front of them but still masked and separated for sensible reasons. We’d tried to catch their attention on the way in but failed, yet Chris had apparently determined who we were afterwards based on some mystical intuition and told Sandra that we were those people from Twitter. We met up aboard and realised that the online chats barely touched the surface. We were all kindred spirits. Left-wing, tech-savvy, intolerant of those who’d put their images over everything else, loved the same things, hated the same things. Good people.

We cruised together – unplanned – on Scarlet Lady out of Portsmouth that same year and that was eye-opening. There were other cruise bloggers aboard and they all knew Chris and Sandra. And they all treated them like second-class people. We were horrified and angered by what we witnessed. We spent almost every spare moment with this amazing pair and we saw others that we knew online act like our friends didn’t exist. Sandra absolutely loved cruising to her very core and there were people she knew online who knew this but didn’t want to post photos of themselves with her because she didn’t look right for Instagram. She shrugged this off but we were sitting there and we could see how much this hurt her inside. We had to carry the fury for her. Those people who were there know who they are. Sandra was so nice she could try to forgive and forget, but we absolutely fucking couldn’t and don’t. We will never forgive how those people she considered online friends treated her because it didn’t suit their own image.

Sandra was better than us.

Sandra took her love of cruising to the Cruise Critics website after Twitter to make a fresh start while we headed off to the Fediverse but I’m so pleased we all stayed in touch. Online connections are tricky and maintaining them after migrations trickier still. Many of those who knew her wouldn’t have known of her coma, her inability to walk, her home renovations to make life easier for her on the road to recovery, her plans for this year to come, her expectation and hope to see an eclipse at sea.

Those plans came to nothing all of a sudden, but we know those plans were things that brought her so much joy. We are utterly devastated to lose Sandra. This pales to nothing compared to what Chris and their families have gone through. We will miss Sandra so much.

But wait! There’s more!

There’s also more British Isles cruising news after the round-up of previous British Isles cruising travelogues in the form of details of a new cruise booking we’ve made for this year.

It’s all gone British Isles crazy around here!

The penultimate Scottish port of call for our Regal Princess cruise was Invergordon, which fans of strongman competitions will know is the home town of the Stoltman brothers, but we spent most of the day in Inverness instead, and Inverness was simply lovely. When you’re travelling you do sometimes just get a feel for a place that says “I could live here” and Inverness fits that bill for us.

I had enough time after our trip to Inverness to take a quick stroll through the far smaller Invergordon, largely to seek out some of the street art we’d seen as our bus had passed through a couple of times earlier in the day. It was just me as my wife had had enough of walking by this point.

We’d originally planned to hop on a train to Edinburgh when we anchored off South Queensferry for the final Scottish port on our cruise but this was a Sunday and we’d been disappointed once already on this trip with how much had been closed in Dublin a week earlier so we ripped up our plans, decided we’d leave the capital for a better look some other time, and did our own thing in the port instead, which started with a little exploration of this very pretty place.

We booked a boat tour while we were ashore, and it was one that took us out under the Forth road and rail bridges, and to the island of Inchcolm in the estuary on which a medieval abbey and a lot of angry, nesting seagulls were located. The island and abbey were fantastic. We had an absolutely wonderful time on this tour… right up until the boat was late coming back to pick us up. No, this wasn’t an official excursion, and no, we couldn’t just call a taxi. We might have panicked a little bit.

Just two more posts complete the 2024 Regal Princess cruise around Britain, and the first of those, taking place on the last of the very few sea days we had, mostly just features pictures of the dinners we ate aboard. Look, forasmuch as there are people who mock those who photograph their food there are always people interested in seeing the pictures too. The photo below, though, features the Red Hat Society members gathering for formal night photos. They were quite a lot of fun on this cruise.

The final post of the cruise takes a look at the things we saw when we wandered around Le Havre, generally picking directions at random based on quick perusals of the phone map with no real planning ahead of time. We ended up loving this French city because the art and architecture absolutely aligned with the sorts of things we appreciate. Le Havre is somewhere we have to get back to.

The only other small write-up on the site is non-cruise-related and that’s mostly showing off the grounds of Oakley Hall in Basingstoke which we briefly visited for a birthday meal a few years ago. Are you a fan of lichen? This post has lichen.

That’s all the British Isles cruising that we’ve done, so now it’s time to look ahead to some British Isles cruising that we’re going to do because we finally decided to go ahead and book that cruise we mentioned in the last blog/newsletter. You remember that.

You don’t remember that.

We only had five days of annual leave left to play with for this year as a huge chunk of time is allocated to the big cruise coming up next month and a decent-length one towards the end of the year too. But now, smack bang in the middle of that intervening period we’ve bitten the bullet and booked our first Fred Olsen cruise. Well, first Fred Olsen cruise that actually cruises.

We’ve seen a few people we know hopping aboard this line recently and most of those cruisers are people we trust enough to know that if they enjoy something then we probably will too. It has been interesting to us to see that a couple of years ago there was a big push to get aboard the big, new, shiny, all-the-bells-and-whistles cruise ships from the big lines but Fred with her smaller, older vessels seems to have become popular suddenly. I’m not sure where other bloggers are concerned if this is a lot of promotional work going on – we ignore any of the sponsored cruising reviews as much as possible – or just some good deals and itineraries a little different from usual. Certainly, for us, it was the latter reason.

We’ve booked a week in an ocean view cabin aboard Borealis (the balcony prices on these older, smaller ships push them out of the comfortable price range, particularly when it’s a short cruise and you’re not really cruising anywhere terribly glamorous) and we’ll be travelling around the west coast of Ireland, dangerously close to where a lot of my family live. We’ll be sure to not tell them we’re in the area, though, because we’d like to explore instead. You can see the route below.

We’ve been to Cobh before, and that was on that Regal Princess cruise that I’ve just finished writing about. That cruise has also been the only time my wife’s visited Ireland so she’s about to see some more of the country that a solid half of my DNA comes from.

The only other ports are Killybegs and Galway which will be new to both of us. We’re not currently planning to do any trips as we don’t really know what will be offered yet, but the combination of Galway being decent-sized and us already getting some good scenic cruising means it’s only Killybegs that has us wondering what there is to do. I’m sure we’ll find something.

It’s going to be a cruise to see what the Fred Olsen experience is like on a new ship for us while also visiting some new ports. We’ve been aboard a Fred ship before but that was just a single party night. We’d enjoyed the food and drink, and the staff had been great, though, and what we’ve seen from recent travel accounts suggests that it’s all still good. We’ve splurged on the drinks package, although drinks with meals in a similar way to river cruising is now standard anyway with Fred. A few of the lines that target the older demographic seem to do that.

Nothing else newsworthy in the world of cruising springs to mind, so I’ll draw this post to an end here now.

Our first Scottish port of call on the cruise – and, indeed, ever – was at Greenock, the port for Glasgow, which we completely ignored and headed off on a Princess Cruises excursion instead. That first brought us to Stirling and gave us a little bit of time to look around Stirling Castle. We fouled up a bit here because there was a part of the castle – its rooms – that we completely missed as being open so our wander around the historic building, as nice enough as it was, could have been better. Our fault.

Our excursion count on this Regal Princess cruise was low as they were frighteningly expensive but the reason we’d taken this particular trip during our day at Greenock was not to see the castle but to simply take a ride on the Falkirk Wheel. It’s such a fabulous piece of engineering and the article doesn’t do it any justice whatsoever.

We’d had plans we were really looking forward to for our visit to Orkney but Orkney was swapped out for Shetland instead so we made new plans for Shetland and, on the night before, those plans were torn up too because the local company we’d booked with had found a fault in the boat we were due to ride on. As it turned out this was a blessing in disguise because we arrived at Lerwick in thick fog and would’ve had a trip in a white void otherwise. We pinpointed some places to explore on foot and set off.

One place near Lerwick we were really keen to explore was the Broch of Clickimin, an iron age building with a purpose that still baffles archaeologists. We have a deep fondness for looking around ruins and delving into history and the architectural methods of ancient times and this was a great spot to visit.

The remainder of our time on Shetland was spent walking more of Lerwick’s streets, visiting the local museum, a fort, doing some shopping, and hitting some pubs to try some locally-brewed ales. All the usual stuff you’d expect from us, to be fair.

The last of the posts from our visit to Shetland is a short one featuring a few photos of our tender back to the ship in the fog, what we ate aboard Regal Princess, and some aurora sightings overnight as we started to cruise southwards towards mainland Scotland again.

There are still two more Scottish ports to be covered in our cruise travelogues with Invergordon (for Inverness, and we look around both of those) next followed by South Queensferry (for Edinburgh, which we skipped to take a local boat trip to an island instead). Hopefully, they’ll all go up on the site over the next few weeks.

As is often the case I’ll break up the constant stream of past cruising and general travelling in chronological order with random posts of other trips from the last few decades. A couple have been published since the last of these summary blog posts.

Firstly, there’s a few hours spent looking around Brighton Lanes and the Pier back in 2012, something we did to kill some time ahead of a wedding event being held in Surrey that evening. We used to visit Brighton quite often as it’s just along the coast, but it’s been a while now.

The last of the filler posts also dates to 2012 and it features some photos and details about a bit of a walk around the Greenwich area of London the day after we’d been to see Marilyn Manson and Rob Zombie at the O2. One of the things I like about digging out old groups of photos and publishing a short write-up about them is that memories come flooding back of some wonderful experiences but also it reminds me that there are some places we could really do with returning to as there’s so much there to see, and Greenwich is a prime example of this.

There have been some minor changes to the site recently but you’ll likely not notice them even if you’re a regular visitor. A regular visitor! Ha, I kill me!

Comments now won’t feature avatars to remove one unnecessary third-party call, tracking, and generation and I can’t imagine they’ll be missed by anybody. That’s a few microseconds shaved off every page load. And I’ve finally got around to installing a page cache plugin so the site overall should be a little faster now. I don’t know for sure whether that last change has been the driver for more traffic recently but site visitors are significantly higher since mid-December now. Search engine algorithms and the start of a new year and thoughts of booking holidays already might also be the reason there, of course, but there’s a definite increase over this time last year too. An awful lot of people are clearly looking for the new Princess Cruises ships that have copied names used by older ones that we’ve cruised on and that’ll teach Princess not to think of something original.

We’ve not booked any new cruises for a while now which is kinda shocking. Still umming and ahhing over a Fred Olsen one but nothing committed yet although we do still search for interesting cruises around the world all the time. Naturally, none of our plans feature America in them and, quite frankly, you’d need to have your head read if you were thinking of booking any trips to America in the next few years given the fascist chaos there, cowardly leadership responses, and chances of embargoes, sudden disappearances, financial collapses, visa upheavals, price instability, or civil or trans-continental wars breaking out at a moment’s notice. Are you sure your travel insurance will pay out if the US forces a declaration of war with Europe? Have we really watched the world’s major superpower with a constitutional protection to allow its citizens to keep tyrannical governments in check devolve like this so quickly that this is even a genuine possibility?

And finally, nicer news. P&O have released details of new drinks packages including Wi-Fi (at last) which aligns them a lot more closely with Princess Cruises now. We’ve got a cruise booked with them for later this year and we’ll have the opportunity to add this package after payment and before boarding so it’ll be good to check the drinks menu prices and range around that time just to see whether it’s going to be worth it for us. Six sea days in a twelve-day cruise already suggests it might be.

That’ll do for this update.

Well, I’ve been busy both with work – that’s that thing that some of us need to do in order to pay for trips – and with processing photos from the Caribbean cruise we were on last month, and the truth is there was a little bit of post-cruise blues that’s sapped a lot of inspiration but which is hopefully lifting now. Not quite enough to pick back up from the 2024 British isles cruising travelogues I was in the middle of just yet but enough to want to write something. And I do have some news that I haven’t shared yet so let’s just see if this kickstarts the writing habit again.

We have another cruise booked, making use of one of two future cruise deposits with Princess Cruises that were close to expiring. As I write this the other one has just expired and been refunded, which is something I never thought would happen with these things as we’re always booking trips, but that’s what happens when a cruise line pushes a brand new ship we couldn’t care less about heavily and ignores the itineraries to new places and novel experiences that are what we’re after.

So, looking ahead to October 2027 – yep, nearly 700 days away which is also fairly shocking for us – we’ve booked ourselves on Majestic Princess heading up to the very top of Norway for some possible aurora-spotting and definite landscapes to be wowed by. We haven’t cruised on Majestic before (and have only seen her once on our cruises which was when we visited Alaska in 2023) which is part of the appeal because she’s got a unique layout in the Princess fleet with her sanctuary pool and club space arrangement. We normally book forward around deck ten on ships but we’ve shifted higher to nearer that pool area for convenience – it’s an indoor pool and we like a swim – and because higher angles are often more spectacular where Norway’s concerned.

The itinerary only adds one port we’ve not cruised to before – Molde – but does include an overnight in Tromsø and we very much enjoyed Tromsø earlier this year (especially its brewery) so that’s attractive to us too. And we like to make sure we hit Norway every few years because it’s just so damned pretty.

Our future cruising plans are looking a little sparse for us with just the two in 2026 to look forward to and two in 2027 as well.

• March, 2026 – Norwegian Jade – Peru, Ecuador, Panama, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico.
• October, 2026 – P&O Ventura – Madeira, Tenerife, La Palma, Gran Canaria, Lanzarote, Spain.
• April, 2027 – Ambassador Ambition – France, England, Guernsey.
• October, 2027 – Majestic Princess – Norway.

2027 is likely to fill out a bit more but we’ve got very little left to play with in 2026 as that first cruise is eating up three weeks of annual leave on its own. That said, it should be fantastic.

We’ve finished planning for that Norwegian Jade cruise – our first with the cruise line – and we’re really excited about everything we’ve got lined up. We’ve booked into a 5-star hotel in Lima for four days ahead of the cruise (not much more than the single night we had in Puerto Rico at an okayish location) and we know we like Lima anyway so this will give us a great chance to do some exploring locally there. Looking forward to looking around Barranco and we’ve got breweries and historical sites all mapped out already.

We’ve got planned sightseeing and excursions lined up too on most of the eleven port stops and we should be visiting ruins from five different cultures of South and Central America while also satisfying other historical, architectural, artistic, and brewery-based loves of ours. We’re particularly looking forward to Antigua Guatemala as it looks utterly gorgeous nestled among volcanoes.

We’re really hoping we like Norwegian Cruise Line and Jade as some of their older ships do some fabulously interesting itineraries that other lines don’t seem to come close to matching (well, not affordable lines anyway). The ship looks to have a great variety of bars and restaurants and the itinerary and its length should mean the demographic aboard will suit us well.

Our waiting game right now is for the late 2028 Asian itineraries to start appearing so we can see about a twentieth wedding anniversary cruise back in the region where we had our honeymoon. Until we know that and know the sort of cost we’re looking at we’re being a bit cautious with cruise-booking right now. We haven’t completely ruled out a river cruise in China just to be a bit different and have our eyes on one particular company who post some decent stuff online but they don’t seem to have any European-based agents to work with at the moment that gives us some pause.

So, barring a lottery win don’t expect any new booked cruises to be mentioned in these blogs for a while but hopefully I will soon get back to covering past travels on the site once more before long.