My Proposition……

After following my late father-in-laws blog from his  Grand Voyage of South America the Amazon River & Antarctica and then discovering there are lots of other amazing cruise blogs on the internet, I felt really inspired to have a go at compiling my own and this website is the result.

In 2010 encouraged by the need to create I set up my very first blog on Blogger.com and although it wasn’t anything too special it was the first tentative step. I was able to choose colours for backgrounds, fonts and page layouts and I ended up selecting the colours that you still see today.

So after taking the plunge and with 3 cruises lined up that year, I set off in the hope that I would be able to locate lots of free WiFi hotspots and in turn bring my family along on our little excursions. I had hoped the acquisition of a Blackberry Bold 9700 would hopefully make this easier to do as well. The intention was that I would be able to post regular updates when we were out and about on our travels, and because the Blackberry had the capacity to connect to Wi-Fi, data & take photos along with being very easy to carry around it seemed to be the perfect solution.  The Blackberry’s first excursion was on the Costa Serena and was really more of an experiment to see how it all worked. Unfortunately the free WiFi wasn’t as plentiful as I had hoped  so I ended up using some of my data package. Needless to say I almost managed a post a day albeit very brief ones. I was now well and truly hooked.

Wanting to improve on what I was already doing and to make posting easier I made the switch to WordPress and decided to self host making use of a hosting package already in use. I found this to be much more efficient way of posting photos and writing posts as everything can be done off line using the phone App and then its just a case of logging on and sending. Even the resizing of images is taken care of by the App which help with the uploading.

In 2012 I took it all a step further and purchased a proper domain name and changed the theme to the current one which has proved to be very successful.

6 July 2014

I thought it was time for a brief update with this page as things seemed to have evolved somewhat since I first posted this. As you will have read above I used to post from my phone which was OK at the time, however I was never happy with the pictures it produced so over the passage of time and and as new technology has become available I now find myself  equipped with several gadgets which include an Asus Transformer (Eee Pad), a Nexus 7 tablet,  a Samsung S6 phone and a much better camera with which I can send photos from using a Eye-Fi card.  I now treat myself to an onboard internet package and do a single post a day which is much easier to do. I tend to sit and compile my post at intervals during the day on the tablet and then in early evening before dinner I select suitable photos to add, I then finish off the days post before publishing to the web, the later part of the process done from the comfort of the cabin. Its altogether a much better way of posting and I think that the end result is much improved from my earlier efforts.

If you are a regular visitor and enjoy what you see, I hope that you will continue to pop in every now and again to keep up with what we are doing.

Happy Cruising

Mike

CRUISES TAKEN

and waiting for……………

Costa Serena [Asia from Hong Kong), 21 Nov – 5 Dec 2025] ~ [14 nights]

SHIP VISITS

Eurodam [Southampton, 28 June 2008] ~ [Ship Visit]
Prinsendam [Royal Portbury, 21 July 2011] ~ [Ship Visit]
MSC Opera [Southampton, 24 June 2012] ~ [Ship Visit]
Celebrity Eclipse [Southampton, 29 Sept 2012] ~ [Ship Visit]
Oceania Marina [Dover, 7 June 2014] ~ [Ship Visit]
ms Rotterdam [Southampton, 27 Sept 2015] ~ [Ship Visit]
Queen Mary 2 [Southampton, 18 Oct 2015] ~ [Ship visit]
ms Koningsdam [Portland, 20 Sept 2016] ~ [Ship Visit]