Category: Spirit of Discovery

Today, we arrived at our last port-of-call before home; Lisbon, the capital of Portugal. I think it’s fair to say that over the years, after many repeated visits, we’ve seen most of what Lisbon has to offer (or, at least everything that we’re interested in). Our plans for the day, then – such as they were – were very modest,...

You know it’s a slow day at sea when the birders can’t agree on whether the small bird seen fltting around the balconies and the Promenade was a Grey-tailed Wagtail or a Warbler. I blame it on the Captain telling us that we’d be passing through the Strait of Gibraltar at 9am, raising expectations of an increase of oceanic wildlife....

Today, we arrived in Cagliari (pronounced ‘cal-ee-arr-ee’), in Southern Sardinia. Originally, we were cooking up big plans for this port stop; looking at a couple of nature reserves some distance away from the ship; walkable, and accessible, possibly in conjunction with a bus or taxi ride, if necessary. These plans changed when we realised that it was only going to...

This was our second sea-day, between Croatia and Sardinia, where we are due to to arrive tomorrow morning. As an added attraction, today was billed as ‘Scenic Cruising’, which started with us passing through the Messina Strait, a narrow channel of water that separates the Southern tip of Italy from the island of Sicily. Our passage was early, picking up...