by Ben Willmore | Jan 13, 2014
After spending two days exploring Morocco, we sailed through the Strait of Gibralter toward our first Spanish port: Cádiz. Cádiz is the oldest inhabited city in the Western World, so we were excited to explore some old buildings and historic Spanish squares. Instead of doing a cruise excursion here, we went off exploring on our own, which was easy since the ship docked right in town. (It was so close to town that it literally looked like it was nestled in with the rest of the buildings!)
We started off in a big, beautiful square that was mostly occupied by the Cádiz Cathedral, which was huge. We took photos inside and out and then wandered around the surrounding cobblestone streets, which were lined with loads of old buildings and full of local vendors in some areas. Walking through the local market, it was incredible to see how different and new-looking it seemed compared to the one we had visited two days earlier in Casablanca.
Most of the historic part of Cádiz is surrounded by water, and one of the places we visited was an old fortress that jutted out into the water and overlooked part of town. Right by the fortress, on the water, was a nice little tapas restaurant and that’s where we stopped for lunch, using their wifi to connect to the rest of the world for a while. A tapas lunch in Spain overlooking the water… not bad, right?!
As with many of the rest of these posts, I’ll tell the rest of the story in pictures. After Cádiz, we would sail to Valencia and explore another Spanish town. More to come…
by Ben Willmore | Dec 27, 2013
After we boarded the Crystal Serenity in Lisbon, we eventually set sail for Madeira, which is about 500 miles south of the mainland of Portugal. Madeira is known for its relaxed way of life and of course, its famous port wine. It took two days of cruising before we arrived at the port in Funchal, which is the main town on the southern coast of the island. We did an excursion in Madeira, which is a tour that’s organized by the cruise ship. Over the course of our trip, we tried to choose excursions that looked the most photographically promising. Our day started with a cable car ride up a large hill to a historic church that looked over the town of Funchal. Then we got to go on toboggan rides, Madeira style, in order to get down the hill. This sounds nuts, but the “toboggans” are essentially large baskets with seats in them. There are ropes attached to either side and your two “pilots” run along side the toboggan, steering you down the street with these ropes. We then spent an hour touring one of the island’s botanical gardens and finally ended up at a winery in town to taste some of Madeira’s famous port. After all this, we still had time to walk around town, exploring and shooting. As with all of these cruise port posts, I’d rather give you more visuals and less text to describe the experiences, so below are a bunch of photos I shot in Madeira. Above is a video that Karen made documenting our day. To see her blog post on Madeira, click HERE.
Next stop: Lanzarote! More to come…
by Ben Willmore | Dec 23, 2013
Hi All! Karen and I are finally stateside again after a month of travel via cruise ship. I gave a little overview of the trip in my last post, but now I want to start sharing lots of the fun images I shot on this adventure. First stop: Lisbon!
Our ship, the Crystal Serenity, would be departing from Lisbon and we decided to fly there a few days early in order to explore the city a bit. This was both of our first times in Portugal so we wanted to try to get a good taste of it. We spent most of our time exploring on foot, walking around the main areas and letting ourselves wander toward any potential photo ops. We enjoyed shooting in all the narrow, cobblestone streets lined with brightly-colored buildings and laundry hanging from the windows. We also spent a lot of time in the Castelo de S. Jorge National Monument, which is essentially a giant castle. And of course we couldn’t visit Portugal without getting some of the local flavor, so we found ourselves at the Port Wine Institute, sampling some 5-year-old, 10-year-old, and 20-year-old port. As an unexpected bonus, we also ran across the Portuguese Beer Museum, which was just hilarious because I have a way of running into beer-related things while we’re traveling.
So without further ado, here is a visual recap of our visit to Lisbon:
Karen has her own post on Lisbon, and you can read that HERE. Our next stop was Madeira, which is an island about 500 miles south of Lisbon. More to come!
