All at Sea: DCL UK Staycation 20 August 2021 - Pre-trippie

[Gill H]

Well, here’s something I haven’t said in a long time: welcome to my trip report!

We’re Peter and Gill, both seasoned Dibbers. Our last (and in fact our first) cruise was in 2017, when we spent a few days at Disneyland Paris before hopping a train to Barcelona and floating round the Med on the Disney Magic. Here we are on board.

You can read about our adventures by clicking the link in my signature.

This cruise, however, is going to be a bit different. For a start, it wasn’t supposed to happen.

A few years back, we started saving for a DCL cruise to celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary in June 2020. By a somewhat convoluted process, that morphed into saving for a trip to Japan, planned for November 2020. That didn’t happen because … well, if you are fortunate enough not to know why, just enter ‘2020’ into your search engine of choice, because I certainly don’t want to mentally revisit that year.

We did actually celebrate our 25th anniversary, as best we could, with a really nice meal delivered to our house by our favourite local restaurant. Which was lovely … but not the big celebration we’d envisaged.

Anyway, as things stand right now, Japan is planned for November 2022. We also have a DLP trip planned for November 2021 which may or may not happen, and a WDW trip planned for January 2022, which we’re really hoping goes ahead.

So just as we’d resigned ourselves to not venturing further than our local corner shop this year, up popped news of the DCL UK ‘Staycation’ cruises. And with all those holiday savings sitting in our bank account, we couldn’t resist. So just like Disney, we’ve decided that anniversaries can last at least 18 months. So we booked ... as evidenced by our single digit dance!

And we’re about to celebrate our silver wedding in style, sailing out of Southampton on the Magic and spending 3 nights with Mickey and co.

Readers of our previous trip reports may like to know that we’ve now moved from London to South Wales, to look after my elderly parents, and so travel looks a bit different these days. Tonight we celebrated the start of our holiday with a meal at a local restaurant, Illtud 216.

We started with cocktails - an Espresso Martini for Peter.

And an Illtud's Rose for me. This was rose liqueur, sparkling wine and elderflower, decorated with rose petals and a strawberry.

Then came smoked salmon with all the usual accompaniments, for Peter.

I chose the pate.

For our mains, Peter chose steak and kidney pudding.

I chose the curried chicken.

Both nice but far too big! Guess we aren't in cruise-eating mode just yet.

Tomorrow we’ll be getting a train to Cardiff, and from there another to Southampton, where we’re staying at a Premier Inn overnight. Apart from visiting family, this is the first time we’ve been away since September 2019, and boy, are we ready for a holiday.

So I’ll sign off now and invite you to join me later for our travel day. See ya real soon, folks!

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[margyloveswdw]

Woo hoo!