The hunt for the perfect cruise

Time for yet another trip into Lancaster. The tyre problem proved to be a false alarm. Electronics gone mad without anything being amiss with the tyre. We were going to pop to a travel agency to get some cruise brochures while we waited for the job to be done. As there was no job to be done, we didn’t bother to hang around & just came straight home instead. We may pop along today. Meanwhile I will search on-line.

So far our cruising hasn’t been wholly successful. We keep telling ourselves if we could keep the best of each company we would maybe have a good holiday & it would have certain advantages.

The advantages are firstly no airport to contend with & the humping of luggage that that involves. If we go from a British port there is usually a wheelchair accessible coach available that can be got on at Lancaster. It would be easy enough to get a taxi to the pick-up point.

Secondly the Fox would have no driving to do. As he gets older he is finding driving more tiring, as well as more difficult & expensive to hire a car, yet we do want to be able to get out & explore different places. A ship moving from port to port, even country to country, should do that.

Thirdly in theory the food should be excellent & plentiful. It went a bit amiss last time & on our river cruise, but on our first cruise it was fabulous.

Fourthly there should be plenty of entertainment on site with shows, concerts, talks, art galleries, cinemas as well as pools, gyms etc. The fact that a lot of these activities don’t do much for us maybe says something about us. Certainly there are usually several bars & a library around. That’s more us.

The cruises we’re looking at go from Southampton, a coach trip away. The Fox is fancying one to Spain, a country we’ve never visited much but one that does appeal to our wheelchair user friend who’d like us to go with them on their first holiday since he became disabled several years ago. I’m fancying the Canaries & Madeira. Both trips involve 4 days at sea for a 10-14 holiday.

We feel we ought to make a longer trip. We’ve only done a week trip. By the time we’ve recovered from the exhaustion caused by the travelling, the getting to the ship & sorting out, it’s time to start thinking about gearing ourselves up for the return trip, never having really relaxed. Perhaps a longer trip would mean we would relax. When we’re overtired we do tend to get hypercritical & maybe that’s part of the reason we’re not yet fans of cruising. We’ll see.

The Spanish cruise involves two consecutive days at sea from & two Southampton. However, once in Spain it goes to a different port most days, the only exception is two days at Barcelona, a place I’ve fancied visiting for some time. It sounds, & looks, fabulous to me with so much to see & do.

The Canary cruise never has more than one day at sea at a time, the 4 days being spread throughout. The Fox is nervous about the latter. He still can’t get over seeing a sign in a shop window when we were in Tenerife which said “No dogs or wheelchairs”. It’s nice to feel less even than a dog! Equally his memory of Lanzarote is blighted by the fact we both went down with food poisoning, being so violently sick the hotel transferred us to another clean room.

We’ve still got one company to look at. I might look at that a bit more on-line today.

A white Monday

It’s a white morning today. The lawns are covered with frost. A couple of acers stand out in their brilliant red autumnal foliage. The winter jasmine is yellow against the fence. The autumn colour is still with us but winter is fast approaching. From the chill today I suspect we’re in for a long hard winter. Mind you I thought that when I saw how many berries there were on the rowans as summer came to an end.

Once more we get back into going into Lancaster. Today we’ve got other chores to sort as well as the hospital. The car has flagged up a warning about the tyre pressure. With a Motability car that means a trip into Kwikfit, the nearest being Lancaster. We’ve also seen on-line a cruise we fancy for next year so we want to get the brochure to look more carefully, again Lancaster.

With this in mind I’ve prepared a quick dinner. Some chicken croquettes. I’ve adapted a turkey recipe. I’m using cooked chicken instead of cooked turkey. I’m not quite sure what it will taste like as it looks as though the chicken may have been cooked with some chilli by the red flecks on the meat. I’m also adding some leftover date & herb stuffing. So it’s going to be quite an amalgam of flavours. Still it means just a quick fry up this evening. Nothing too demanding.

Subconscious sabotage?

I’ve come to the conclusion than our trip to Italy seems too far away to write with any freshness. I had thought I’d tell you about our pleasant stroll along the River Adige in Verona on our final morning there but that will remain something to share between the Fox & me.

The weekend is now upon us. The Fox is feeling more uncomfortable than ever. I’m coming to the conclusion they like him to have a couple of days off treatment in order to recover a bit from the previous week’s treatment. He’s now got up to 53 seconds. We’re just hoping it will work well at the end of the day. There certainly isn’t much sign of it so far.

Yesterday I prepared some diced potatoes for dinner. However, by the evening, we felt too tired & decided to eat out. I hastily put the salmon we’d just bought for today’s meal into the freezer for some time next week & put the thawed leftover roast gammon for yesterday’s dinner in the fridge for today. Then we went off & had some excellent fish & chips at our local village pub.

When we got back the Fox had a look at the potatoes I’d prepared in the morning.

“There’s something wrong with the potatoes. They’ve gone black,” an alarmed Fox cried.  I got up & had a look. Sure enough some of them had black centres.

I could guess what had gone wrong. I’d had a mishap when preparing the potatoes in the morning. Normally for a Ham & Egg Sauté I peel some old potatoes, dice them fairly small, then parboil for 2 minutes, drain them & put them on one side for the evening. This time I had peeled them, put them on to parboil whole for 2 minutes, and drained them. When I did I suddenly realised I hadn’t diced them, so I hastily diced them. As I cut them I was aware they seemed a bit peculiar. The 2 minutes cooking hadn’t been long enough to cook through to the centre of the potatoes. The centre seemed raw. Even more peculiar a starchy goo, which I could well believe would make a wonderful glue, came out of the cut edges.  I then put the potatoes on one side to go cold. Clearly this blackening is what happens if the potatoes aren’t cooked sufficiently before being left. Certainly the black rings seem to go where the raw potato divided from the par-cooked potato. We’ll soon find out whether I’m right. I’ve just pre-prepared another batch of potatoes for tonight. This time I diced before boiling so hopefully all should be well. If not, it’s something to do with the variety of potato. The old batch has gone in the bin. We’re not going to try eating them!

There is a bit of me that wonders if I wasn’t trying a bit of subconscious sabotage. I’ve been feeling really tired with all these trips into Lancaster. So has the Fox. I’ve been wondering if we shouldn’t have a day off cooking & washing up. Even if we’d felt like cooking last night, one look at those blackening potatoes would have made us think of eating out instead.