It had been a stressful night on Saturday, the train strike had caused issues getting Raffy to the dog sitter’s, and Jane wasn’t able to drop him off until after 8pm, which meant that our travel plans of driving down to Southampton were postponed until this morning and all the pre-departure checks were more than a little fraught. We departed at 07:30, heading down to New Milton where the car was going to be left with Jane’s Dad for the duration. The drive down was uneventful, and we were in New Milton before 10am and the bags transferred to John’s
Category: Port Days
Today’s Daily Programme can be found here… We’re in Cadiz today, a city we’ve visited many times, and we love it but there’s an issue. I’m full of a cold, probably the first proper cold since COVID, and I feel terrible so after a late breakfast where we were alone at our table, we headed into Cadiz with the sole intention of finding a Farmacia, luckily there’s a couple dotted around Cadiz. Actually there are probably more Farmacia than bars. I wanted some COVID lateral flow tests, as we’d neglected to pack any, some Lemsip or the Spanish equivalent and
Today’s Daily Programme can be found here…. Another night and another slightly better sleep, I woke at 07:45 just as we were docking at the port of Heraklion in Crete. This is an unscheduled replacement for Mykonos where forecasted high winds made the tendering there unsafe. There’s a slight problem this morning, Jane has a slightly scratchy throat, which may be down to the Air-con, but may equally be my lurgy. Although I never had a scratchy throat. I went to breakfast alone with instructions to bring back a Bircher muesli and some honey, I got half of the order correct,
I slept much, much better, admittedly waking early at 06:15, to find we were already at dock in Piraeus. The view today wasn’t so nice, with the Cruise Terminal opposite. We’ve been to Athens a few times and Jane needs to get some more laundry out of the way, plus three consecutive days out may be a bit tiring given I’m still getting over my cold. I was all set to head to do the laundry again before breakfast when she decided that I wasn’t to be trusted. How am I ever going to be able to get my little
Today’s Daily Programme can be found here… It was bright and sunny this morning and when I opened the curtains of the stateroom we were already in Santorini. I’d have said moored up, but as the bay at Santorini is 400 meters deep, I think that is beyond our anchor chains, apparently we are holding station using the engines. I’m now pretty much back to health, I’m sleeping well and only have the occasional cough which is good. Our trip today is another late one, we have to meet up in the Queens room at 12:45 so we decided to
Today’s Daily Programme can be found here… We’d had a massive electrical storm overnight, to be honest I’d not noticed a thing and slept right through it, but Jane said it was spectacular. When I finally woke it was a lovely morning with beautiful views over Argostoli. The early shore excursions were already on their way off the ship and it wasn’t yet 08:00. We were going to have a stroll around Argostoli in the morning as we hadn’t had any excursions booked, so it was a leisurely potter before going for breakfast. We were docked right in town so
Today’s Daily Programme can be found here… We had a busy day ahead of us as we’d decided to take an excursion in Cagliari. I had really fancied a walking tour around the city, but the only walking tour was a hike up Devil’s saddle and I really didn’t fancy that so we opted for the Ancient Sardinia one which was a trip to the Roman ruins at Nora, about 30 kms West of the city. We had a tour time of 09:15 and the Daily Programme said to meet at the dock at 09:05. This meant a reasonably early
Today’s Daily Programme can be found here… You could tell we were no longer in the Mediterranean when I woke at 3am, the ship had started to move about quite a bit, this was no longer a millpond we were on. I went back to sleep and when I woke I found we had already arrived in Lisbon and were alongside the cruise terminal. The day wasn’t looking too promising with regard to the weather, it was already very cloudy and I could feel spits of rain on the balcony. We hadn’t any excursions planned for the day, rather, we
We’ve finally arrived back in Southampton, breakfast was early and due to close at 08:00, so I had set my alarm for the first time since leaving and after one last shower we headed up to the PG restaurant for one last time. We’d been to see the Grills concierege regarding our late departure time and he’d assured us that once the announcement came that the luggage had been off-loaded then we could depart the ship, but when we got down to the gangplank, he was there controlling the departures and insisted that we couldn’t depart until our colour was
We’re back on Victoria for the first time since our Western Med cruise back in 2018, and back in Britannia for the first time since the post Covid “Cruise to Nowhere” in 2021. We took this short cruise because we needed three more days to reach the Diamond loyalty tier and we are off on another QV cruise in a couple of weeks and the extra benefits provided by being diamond would be welcome. Because this was a short cruise my theory was we wouldn’t need much luggage so it would be a good time to try getting the train