It’s been awhile since my last post. Travel restrictions during the COVID era resulted in the cancellation of several trips, but we’re catching up now.

I didn’t blog during our last two excursions: a trans-Atlantic cruise to England and traveling around Cornwall, Wales and the Cotswolds in 2022; and a photo safari to Kruger National Park in South Africa in 2023. Maybe someday I’ll write about those adventures.

The current trip is our second trans-Atlantic “repositioning” cruise, this one to be followed by a circumnavigation of Iceland by car on the Ring Road.

We learned from our friends, Bill and Emily, that the cruise-ship companies significantly discount their rates every year when they move their fleets from South Florida to Europe in the spring, and then when they return to America in the fall. It’s a great alternative to flying across the ocean, and not much more expensive.

At any rate, this trip began on April 7 from Port Everglades in Fort Lauderdale aboard Holland America’s cruise-ship, Nieuw Statendam.

The cruise lasted a total of 14 days, consisting of: two days at sea; one day in Bermuda; six days at sea; then one day each in Cork (Ireland), Guernsey (British Dependency), Le Havre (France) and Dover (England); before disembarking in Rotterdam (Netherlands).

Total cost per person for an exterior suite with balcony, including all meals and onboard entertainment, was $1,899 (exclusive of taxes, port charges, gratuities and drinks).

Most of our fellow travelers were retirees. There were only two kids aboard out of around 2,500 passengers. On sea days, I enjoyed reading and working out in the gym while Dale took spinning and exercise classes and knitted, her most recent hobby.

In Bermuda, we rented scooters and drove around the island, a hair-raising experience, given how congested the roads are. But it did allow us to see the island outside of Hamilton, the main city.

We opted not to spend time on any of the hidden beaches, but they were enticing.

The Nieuw Statendam is only a little over five years old. It’s 975 feet long and we cruised at about 16 knots most of the way. Our stateroom was on deck 8, amidships, probably the most stable part of the ship. The boat is so huge, though, that we almost never felt any motion. I don’t think a single person ever got seasick.

I can’t say that we’ve become “cruisers,” that is, people that enjoy cruise-ship vacations to the Caribbean, etc. We look at these repositioning cruises as a means of travel. Flights across the oceans leave us exhausted, and often sick, whereas traveling by sea lets us gradually adjust to the timezone changes and arrive at our destination ready to go.

And it is nice to visit a few sites during the transit. Here’s our first stop on the other side of the Atlantic. Cork, Ireland (the port is actually Cobh).

And here’s our second stop, the isle of Guernsey in the English Channel. We anchored offshore and were ferried to St. Peter’s Port.

We didn’t spend much time in Le Havre, although we did go ashore for lunch and a walk around town.

Similarly, we spent the day walking around Dover and wandered through Dover Castle, high up on a hill overlooking the town, the white cliffs, below.

We disembarked in Rotterdam and took a bus (arranged through the cruise line) to Amsterdam to catch an Iceland Air flight to Reykjavik, the capital of Iceland.

As we flew over the English coast, I marveled at the Hornsea 2 project, the world’s largest offshore wind power generation facility, consisting of 165 wind turbines, each having 266-foot long blades. If you look closely, you can see a bunch of them in this photo – all those white dots:

The BBC reports that the project generates enough electricity to power the city of Manchester and covers an area four times that of Liverpool. It’s a pretty amazing engineering feat, regardless of how you feel about the economic wisdom of it.