Peter's Travel Blog

Today was our final day at sea. We’ve turned the corner by the Cherbourg peninsula and sailing along the English Channel has been nothing short of bliss – in fact, I don’t think I’ve ever known the Channel to be quite this calm and unruffled – it’s been like a millpond! It’s been so calm that soup has reappeared on...

Today, I’ve run my final two classes for this voyage; a roundup of ways to improve the design of people’s paintings – what I like to call my ‘Composition Checklist’. The scene I had them painting was from my first ever cruise ship assignment back in 2006, when I visited Egypt and Libya… the scene was a street in Tripoli,...

It was rough last night. Throughout the night doors banged and crashed, and stuff was strewn across the floor in the morning. The forecast is for the swell (about 6 metres) to continue, not getting any worse, and hopefully decreasing as the day goes on. Today, in the classes, we revisited Perspective, and Contre Jour, with a rural Yorkshire Dales...

You know when things are about to get rough… they close the deadlights! Those are the shutters that cover the portholes in case of adverse weather conditions. Cabins that have windows (ours has portholes) have large wooden covers that have to be bolted securely into place; they were systematically working their way down the ship installing the covers this morning,...

Today, we arrived at our final port-of-call for this cruise (discounting Tilbury, of course, where we will be disembarking on Sunday), Ponta Delgada in the Azores. Tracey and I had been given tour escorting duties, which we expected, and didn’t mind at all since we’ve been here quite a few times before. The excursion we’d been give was ‘Sete Cicedes,...