Hello everyone,
It’s been a while again, I did mostly intend to do some posts while I was at sea but it didn’t quite work out that way. A lot of that is down to where my own headspace was (it’s improved now) when I disappeared. Some of it down to enjoying the cruise as well. Sometimes you really do need that time away from the world to get centred again and do a little reset.
Advent ? Here we are :
There we are, I’ll hopefully find something suitable for you every day. Like I’m not going to drop 12 days of cruise all at once :-D. Little X Wing there for day 1, with little Ellardy there for scale. The cruise turned into a bit of a Dwagon On Tour with the pictures. The little fella wasn’t in all of the pictures but was definitely in a lot of them. Let’s see …
This time around, it was the Mystery Cruise with Fred Olsen, going from Southampton to Portsmouth and 6 ports in between. We’d find out where we were docking up when we arrived (although there were niceties with international shipping conventions that meant we could find out early). There was much speculation as to where we were going … Some thought we might head East to south Scandinavia (my theory). Others were looking south.
We headed south in the end, although that did lead to a couple of uncomfortable crossings of the Bay of Biscay. It’s not a forgiving place for shipping :-D. So I spent the first day and a bit being quite uncomfortable from a combination of not having my sea legs and my own metabolism and psychology ganging up on me. (I unconsciously don’t do a number 2 unless I trust the place and it takes a couple of days to get that unconscious trust – it’s silly and I don’t know why it’s in my head!)
That’s us in our second port of Ferrol in Northern Spain. This’ll be a quicker kinda intro overview for the cruise. I’ll go into each port separately in later ports.
The whole thing about cruising is that the ship will go from port to port, where you’ll see new things at each place. And then you can retreat back and be extremely well looked after when you’re back on board. And we were very well looked after by Fred’s people.
There’s a certain etiquette that each cruise line will go by. Hurtigruten were very casual. Fred’s ship was a bit more formal than that but still somewhere you could happily relax as a casual person that doesn’t really do formal stuff. Other cruise lines are more formal, like I won’t include Cunard on my samplings of the different cruise lines because I think they’re Too formal.
I have to admit that I was rethinking my life choices on the first Wednesday, when I had the bloating and the sea sickness from crossing the Bay of Biscay. But managed to reset my head (and body) during the first port visit on the Thursday.
So – cruise as a whole : really enjoyed it. Wanting to go back on a cruise as soon as I can get away with it. Probably not with Fred’s people just yet … however I would happily recommend them to people looking at a good company to go on any holiday with. (I’m just wanting to sample everyone’s offers but there is a tempting August 2026 solar eclipse cruise …)
The excellent customer service started when preparing for the cruise, I think I commented before that it was making me happy seeing the details steadily come in through the post. And that continued on board with my cabin being looked after by the lovely MT (hello MT !) and our dining table in the main restaurant was being looked after by a chap from India who, true to form for me, was a lovely guy and super polite. They’d be asking me about what I was seeing and I think they were being as invested in the adventures of the Little Red Dwagon as everyone else who was seeing me suddenly bounce off somewhere to set up a picture.
It was a genuinely fun time.
I won’t go into it too much more here outside of a little : people can look really fine on the outside when they are definitely NOT fine. I needed a chance to get out of the world for a little while and the cruise let me do just that. Whereas a hotel trip can be … good while you’re cozy, there’s still the travel involved. A cruise handles all the travel for you, plus the crew are wonderful people. It makes for a lovely time and, as it was last year, just what I needed.
We were looked after incredibly well. Food was great, I could always have something compatible with my curious requirements. (I’m find with fish but have trouble with steak these days) And I really enjoyed being able to wander around the decks, including doing circuits of the Promenade deck looking out to the sea and the view we were getting from the open part of the upper deck.
I think that’s it for me for this post, have a lovely evening everyone. I’ll be aiming to do an advent post every day, so more cruising posts interspersed with other things like gaming, reading and the music. I haven’t got a theme in mind this year, I did that a few times over previous years and I think it burned me out on the blog posting a fair bit. Maybe doing 3 themes in a post every day was a bit much.
Still, time’s turning, hope you all have a good holiday season and you get the chance to be able to look after yourself :-).