Port #2: Madeira

by | 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…

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Port #1: Lisbon

by | 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:

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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!