Tag Archives: cruise

Home – at last!

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Magellan

For the last fortnight we’ve been cruising around the Baltic on Magellan and I have to say it was about a week too long for me. I was really desperate to get home after we had visited St Petersburg, but we had three more stops after that. Mind you, one of those stops was to Stockholm, a place I hadn’t been before and I was very pleasantly surprised by how beautiful it is.

I found the actual cruise to be rather boring, but I did manage to read six books, some of them chunky classics too. Unfortunately just about everyone on the ship ended up with a cold which developed into a hacking cough – including me and Jack, I’m still not feeling great. The air conditioning just about guarantees that any lurgy is liberally shared around everyone. On the plus side – despite having five course dinners – we both managed to lose weight! The food is another aspect of cruising that I didn’t enjoy. Most people seem to feel that as they’ve already paid for the food they’re determined to eat as much as they possibly can. It’s really off-putting.

Otherwise the highlight of the cruise was St Petersburg – as expected. We took loads of photos, well, Jack took most of them but at some point I’ll be using them in blogposts soonish. Meanwhile, I was so glad to get home and so impressed with the lush green growth since I had last seen my garden, I had to take a photo of it.

my garden

People have often commented on how green it is and I must admit that I’ve always taken it completely for granted but after having been surrounded by a grey Baltic and even greyer North Sea for two weeks – and what was worse – absolute flat calm all the time, I now appreciate my garden even more than I did before.

my garden

I love a good rough sea but Neptune seems to go to sleep as soon as I get on board a ship!

Honfleur in France

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Our last port of call on that cruise we went on in October was Honfleur in France. It’s north western France and the weather was very similar to British weather as it tends to be in that area. In fact we had to go into a shop and buy ‘une paraplui s’il vous plait’ – yes the rain was coming down in buckets! That was the only bad weather we had the whole cruise. Luckily we had taken most of our photos before the deluge.

aharbour 1

aharbour 4

But Honfleur itself turned out to be a wee gem of a town, very ancient as you can see.

old building 2

The town is just a very short walk from where our ship Black Watch was berthed.

aharbour 7

aOld building 3

aOld building 5

Some of the houses are very chocolate boxy and others are in dire need of some tender loving care, the one below looks scarily dilapidated!

aOld Building 6

And the house in the photo below is where the composer Erik Satie was born.

aOld Building 8

Sadly it was a Monday again and although most of the shops were open, because Honfleur’s economy must be massively boosted by the cruise ships that visit – the second-hand booksellers obviously didn’t think it was worth their while to open on a Monday. I was SO ANNOYED because I was dying to get in there and get in amongst those books. I wasn’t bothered that they were in French. I would have bought that old copy of Gulliver’s Travels if it had been open and I could see boxes full of old Tintin books in there.

abookshop

Some women press their noses up against jewellery shop windows but with me it’s the bookshops – or chocolate shops!

I’m sure you know who Erik Satie was but just because I love this piece of music by him I’m putting it on here. Gymnopedie.

Porto in Portugal

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Back to the cruise and from Ferrol in Spain we sailed on to Porto in Portugal. For the first time we had to navigate a foreign transport system and were a bit daunted as of course neither of us spoke any Portuguese. But it couldn’t have been easier, the ticket machines were simple to operate and we couldn’t believe how cheap the tickets were. It was only 3.40 Euros for our two return tickets for a journey of around twelve miles or so. The tram was very clean too. I felt quite ashamed when I thought about how expensive public transport is in Britain.

metro 3

Porto is a very hilly city and when we reached our destination we had to walk down into the city centre, I was very impressed with the buildings but the first thing that took my fancy was the pavements. How grand they are – a type of marble I think or granite – but in lovely designs, they’re works of art.

paving

Porto railway station is also very grand, the photo below is of a tiled scene depicting the history of the city. There was a First World War exhibition on in the station hall with very interesting photos of Portuguese soldiers at the front. In my ignorance I hadn’t even realised they were involved in that war!

Buildings 3 Station 1

aBuildings 5 Station 3

Below is a photo of part of the station ceiling.

abuildings 7 Station ceiling

I think the building below might be the city hall.

Buildings 1

It’s a really vibrant city and we would definitely like to go back there for a holiday some time as you can’t do the place justice in the five hours or so that we had there. The people were very friendly and keen to try out their English!

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There was some sort of mini festival going on in this area in the photo below, those olive trees are actually growing on rooftops. The weight of it all must be incredible but there were people going in and out of the shops underneath.

roof top olive groves

After that we walked down to the river, and that will be my next post on Porto.

Ferrol, Galicia, Spain

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Back to the cruise, and we had about five hours in the port of Ferrol in Spain, sometimes called El Ferrol. The town is a short walk from the docks and I think we were the last people back on board as we ‘did’ the town in two chunks, going back to the ship for lunch. We did have coffee and churos in a cafe in Ferrol, as we hadn’t tried churos before, we weren’t that impressed with them.

Anyway, we realised that the time had come for the Black Watch to set sail, but we were still in the port.

Bing bong The captain was speaking and the upshot was that they hadn’t been able to get the fuel ‘bunkered’ fast enough hence the delay.

an impromptu deck party 2

The good news was that an impromptu deck party was going to take place at the stern! The weather was gorgeous so we made our way to the blunt end of the ship where Jess Belleza and the Black Watch Band were in full swing.

impromptu deck party

Honestly it was like something out of a Cliff Richard film, I had the weirdest sensation of unreality. A couple of the dancers were jigging away in the shallow end of one of the pools and having a great time too by the look of it. Of course being an absolute cynic a large part of me was thinking that the extra time docked in Ferrol meant more money being paid out by the Fred Olsen cruise line. I’m fairly sure that the whole thing was got up to push the sales of sangria and help to pay the extra port charges – but heigh-ho it was good fun. The music must have been blasting all over the town of Ferrol, a rude awakening for some still having a siesta maybe.

jet skis

All too soon the ship was ready to sail, we found it interesting that despite the fact that they use oil for the fuel they still use the term ‘bunkering’ for the storing of it, as it was when they used coal for the fuel.

The jet skiers were dancing around in the bay, all adding to the sense of celebration.

Then we sailed past ancient fortifications. It’s a very historic area and of course England and Spain were at daggers drawn during Tudor times, so they put on a bit of a show for us, pretending we were the old enemy and seeing us off!

fortifications

There’s a chap in this photo somewhere, done up in medieval uniform and shooting at us – several times, he was thoroughly enjoying himself, boys will be boys!

Castle San Filipe 5

The ship visiting seemed to be a big occasion for the locals and some of them had been lining the harbour as we left, taking videos of the Black Watch and the nutters on it all madly waving. We were sad to leave Ferrol, the weather was fab, much hotter than usual for mid October and we hadn’t had a drop of rain, quite unusual apparently, and I can believe that as the place is very green.

harbour outlet

On we sailed down Spain’s Atlantic coast with the water still disappointingly calm and on to Porto’s port Leixoes.