Top Ten (or Five) Time

by | Dec 27, 2024 | Food Experiences

Every year, right about now, I see all these Top Ten of 2024 lists popping up around the interwebs. A few years ago, I decided to get into the act. At first, I did my “Top Ten  Things That Happened” that year as well as my “Top Five Things I Ate,” and of course, my “Top Ten Photos” I took. For the last two years, it’s been just the photos, and that’s what I am going to do for 2024 as well.

This does not mean that there were not ten great experiences or five great meals; it just means that I didn’t take photos of all of them, and I know you are all about the pictures. If I were to list The Top Ten places We Visited in 2024, they would include:

  1. Scotland (especially the Isle of Skye and shooting the puffins on Lunga).
  2. Norway (especially Geiranger Fjord and Tromsô).
  3. Portugal (especially the Douro, Cascais, Sintra and Lisbon).
  4. England (especially seeing Paul and Gail in Leeds and doing the Ted Lasso tour in Richmond).
  5. Spain (especially our days in Toledo and Segovia).
  6. Olympia, Washington (because our kids live there).
  7. Chilliwack, British Columbia (because our best buddies live there)
  8. Vancouver (because we celebrated our 25th anniversary there with dinner at CinCin, one of our favorite places to eat).
  9. Pacific Beach, Washington (because we spent four days with the kids there during our annual beach trip).
  10. Alameda, California (because we had to be in the Bay Area to settle Kathleen’s mother and brother’s estates, and there are two great restaurants and two great attorneys there.).

And if I had to name my Five Best Bites of 2024, it would have to go in this order:

  1. Venison stew at Ardnamurchan restaurant in Glasgow, Scotland.
  2. Grilled chicken and french fries in an unnamed restaurant in Cascais, Portugal.
  3. Pickled walnuts at The View restaurant in Portree, Scotland.
  4. The appetizer plate (especially the chicken) at Banca di Roma in Glasgow, Scotland.
  5. A toss-up between the lemon tortellini at Rancho Capistrano Winery in San Juan Capistrano, California or the tater tots at Bureau 510 in Alameda, California.

See, I am just going to do my Top Ten Photos. Wait! What have I done? I guess you will have to come back in the next few days (before we get to 2025) to see the photos. Keep an eye out.

And now it’s time for our nightly Top Ten…     David Letterman

 

Once again…Let Me Sum Up

by | Nov 5, 2024 | Uncategorized

Whew! We are home, but to be honest, I am still having a hard time remembering what day it is. Hopefully, I will get over that soon. Jet lag is pretty much over, but real life is intruding into my travel life. It’s so much fun (sarcasm here) getting home to more than 200 emails I had been just throwing into a folder in Mail to be read when we were home. Now, I have to read them and respond to them. I want to go on vacation again.

Our trip home was pretty decent. The airports got the wheelchair stuff for Kathleen correct this time. British Airways surprised us with two decent Indian meals on two flights. We stayed overnight at a Terminal 5 hotel (Sofitel) and found that we liked the Terminal 3 hotel (Hilton Garden Inn) we had stayed in last June a lot better. Our flight was on time, our luggage showed up quickly, we looked at the camera in passport control, and we were out of there in less than 15 minutes from when we got off the plane. Our Welcome Pickups guy grabbed us, and with the light traffic after 7:00, we were home in no time. Kathleen was off to bed. I got the mail, watched the Dodgers win the World Series and then hit the hay. A good end to a great trip.

Madrid

Going back to the very beginning, we liked Madrid a lot. We stayed at the Hotel Preciados in downtown. As you may recall, we toured for three full days: one in Toledo (our best day), one in Segovia (another great day), and one in Madrid itself, which could have been better. Read all about those in previous posts. The summary of Madrid was that we had a great time, and we’ve now been there and done that. It’s now crossed off our list, and we won’t be going back. A nice city, but it was no Edinburgh or Amsterdam for us—but we are glad we visited once.

Lisbon with Viking

The next stop was Lisbon before our Douro River cruise. As soon as we got there, we met Marianne, who was amazing. She was not only the person directing our pre-cruise stay in Lisbon but also the Program Director on our entire river cruise. She proved to be one of the best parts of the whole 10 days we spent with Viking. Her laugh, her sense of humor and the fact that she was always UP and always FUN made her someone we will remember for quite a while. More about Marianne later.

Sadly, as you have read, when we were touring Lisbon with Viking, Fatima, the worst guide I have ever experienced, ruined the entire experience for me. Not only would she not shut up, but she insulted me, too.

Our Douro River Cruise

OK, this is what you have been waiting for—how was the cruise? In a quick word, it was awesome. We love river cruising. We really didn’t discover how much we liked it with our Christmas Market cruise on the Danube last winter because it was so darned cold. So, if you have done a Christmas Market cruise, go back and do a warm weather cruise like the Douro and see what you missed.

One of my absolute favorite things about this cruise was seeing the cruise. By that, I mean that on our Danube cruise, most of the movement on the river was accomplished either at night when we were asleep or during the day when we were on an excursion. My absolute favorite part of our Douro River cruise was sailing on the river. I think I mentioned in a previous post that I could do this cruise again and never get off the ship. Seriously, my favorite days were the ones where we spent the majority of the time sailing on the river and watching Portugal go by.

Shore Excursions

Don’t get me wrong, the shore excursions were just fine. If I had to rate them, I would put Salamanca, Spain as #1 because it was like going back to what Europe used to be in the early 2,000s before over-tourism started. I also enjoyed the short visit to Castelo Rodrigo. I mean, the castle was nice, but the best part was that it was brief. We sailed most of the day and then did about a three-hour excursion to a somewhat interesting place. Probably my third favorite was the second half of our first day when we visited the Mateus Palace. What snoozer. But the second half of the day was to visit the Sandeman winery, where they make their wonderful port wine, and be shown around by a guide who really knew what she was talking about and made the tour fun. That was it. The rest of the days, the excursion was either blah (Favios), or we didn’t go (Lamego).

The ship/boat

I really have yet to spend any time discussing the ship itself. Unlike the Viking Longship, we sailed on the Danube, the Douro River boats (you can put a boat on a ship, but you can’t put a ship on a boat, and I think you could put a Douro River boat on a big ocean-going vessel) are smaller due to the smaller locks they must get through. So, instead of carrying up to 190 passengers like the Danube boats do, the Douro River boats carry a maximum of 106, and ours only had 99. That makes so much difference. It’s much more intimate. You get to know most of the crew because there are only 36 of them. And they all do all sorts of jobs. One of our favorite people onboard was Mitra. His official title (on his name tag) said, “Bar Chef.” He was the best bartender on board, and he really kept things going in the lounge. But he was also the sommelier in the dining room and helped out waiting on tables or restocking the buffet as well. Our favorite server in the dining room, Ovi, not only served us dinner but also was the crew member who walked us to our stateroom on embarkation to show us how everything worked. She often worked in the lounge serving drinks. The lady got around.

Embarkation/Disembarkation

Speaking of embarkation…those of you who have suffered through a three-hour embarkation as we did in May 2023 to get on Koningsdam in Vancouver or anything like it will LOVE embarkation on a river cruise. Especially this one. Since we had spent two days with Viking in Lisbon before we boarded the boat, they had everyone on one of four “luxury motor coaches,” and they staggered their morning departures, which meant that each of the “luxury motor coaches” made it to the ship about 15 to 20 minutes apart. So when we arrived, we went up the gangway, and they asked us our names. We were escorted (us by Ovi) to our stateroom, and our luggage arrived minutes later.

Disembarkation was just as efficient. We were given a list of when every stateroom would be getting off (we had been asked in advance how we would be leaving the ship) and told to put our big luggage out in the hallway outside our rooms 15 minutes before we would get off. Then, at our appointed time, we got up and got off. Simple as that. It really pays to be on a smaller boat.

Our stateroom

Our stateroom was a suite. There, I said it. We splurged and booked a suite. It wasn’t that much more, but it got us some things we really wanted. The first was an actual extra room. We had both a living room and a bedroom. Not to mention a walk-in closet and a smallish bath (smaller than on our Danube cruise). So when I would wake up really early, I could sit in the living room and work on photos or on a new post without waking up Kathleen or needing to get completely dressed and go to the lounge.

The other reason we LOVED this suite was…free laundry. Yes, folks, we could send out as much laundry as we wanted, and it was included. On our Danube cruise, we had sent out a few things because we had already been in Lisbon for a few days, and then we did Prague and Nuremberg as a pre-cruise extension, so when we got on, we needed to have some things washed. But the prices were OFF THE CHARTS! As I recall, I got one pair of jeans, two pairs of socks, and two shirts, and it cost me $20. On Viking Torgil, we got to the ship with lots of dirty laundry from four days in Madrid, two nights in Lisbon and a single suitcase each. We immediately sent out all our dirty laundry (they gave us two really nice-sized bags to send it out in) and had it back early the next day. From that point on, I pretty much sent out laundry every day. Whatever I wore the day before, send it out! And it got to the point where it would come back on the same day.

If you would like to see photos of the suite, you may have to wait. I suddenly realized when we got home that I had never really taken any pictures of the suite. I had a couple (the bedroom and bathroom) but missed the living room. But never fear; you will be able to see a whole bunch soon because Mike and Cathy had the same type of suite we did, and Mike always does an awesome job of taking ship/boat/stateroom photos. His review of the cruise with all those photos should be out soon (HEY MIKE—is the review done yet? ?). When it is done, I will post about it, and you can find it right here at www.thepreismans.com. In the meantime, here are a few photos I took of our room.

The Food

Everyone wants to know about the food on a cruise. We have found that Viking does a “fine” job of food on its ocean and river cruises. By that, we mean we like the food. It’s not gourmet, and it doesn’t hold a candle to Oceania. But our most memorable meals on this trip came when we were off the boat (lunch in Toledo and lunch in Cascais come to mind).

On board Viking Torgil, we had a wonderful British chef named Michael Bee Venet. I say he is wonderful less for his culinary skills than for his wonderful personality. Every night, he would preview the meal at our pre-dinner destination talk. He was hilarious. He also regularly stopped by everyone’s table. At breakfast, he would often come around with a special baked good and serve it to us himself.

But we thought his food was oversalted. Sometimes, it was just finishing salt. Some soups were fine when you got down below the surface, but those first three spoonfuls were very salty. We also thought the food was better at the beginning of the week than at the end. It wasn’t bad, just not as good. On a scale of one to ten, it was an eight when we started and a six when we finished.

By the way, when you take a Douro river cruise, you eat all your meals in the dining room. It is totally casual. I think we only saw anyone in anything dressy twice. OMG— people wore shorts in the dining room. We wore jeans and tennis shoes. On our Danube cruise, there was a small buffet area at the front of the boat, but not on the smaller Douro boat. It was the dining room or hunger.

All in all, the food was good and plentiful, and we had nothing to complain about…or wait! I want to complain about the bread. It was too good. Seriously, it may be the best bread I have had on any cruise. Delicious—and I ate way too much of it. Oh, and there were fewer veggies than we would have liked as well. Kind of like our ocean cruise on Viking Venus in June; there was a lot of red meat, which we try to avoid at home. Here’s a gallery of some dishes we ate on this trip. I will try to tell you where we ate them, but if you like great food, check them out. All were shot with my phone, so feel free to look at them on yours. Remember, you can click them to enlarge them and scroll through. I’ll start with some photos of where we all ate.

I almost forgot the “Steve Test.” For those of you unfamiliar with the Steve Test. I call this the Steve Test because my brother Steve came up with it. I think it’s brilliant. This is the entire test: If you eat in a restaurant while traveling, and if that restaurant is near you once you get home, would you go there again? If it were in your hometown, would we eat there regularly? For this trip, the places that passed the Steve test were Clandestina in Toledo, the Lebanese restaurant behind the TimeOut Market and a few of the meals on Torgil, but the ultimate A+ on the Steve Test went to the Chicken restaurant in Cascais on the day we toured Sintra. I know my brother believes it’s the best chicken he has ever had.

Entertainment

If you have been reading my stuff for a while, you know we have kind of given up on shows. Besides, they really don’t have shows on river cruises. However, they did have some great entertainers come on board while we were in ports, and Mike will have photos of those, I am sure. He can stay up later than we can. But I did want to mention two of the best entertainers I have ever seen on a ship—river or ocean.

The first is not really an entertainer but a server in the restaurant. He was kind of in charge of singing Happy Birthday to anyone celebrating one. He also was a total clown. He has a great voice, but what really makes him GREAT is his face. He can turn it into the absolute funniest looks you have ever seen. Here are a few shots of our buddy Agus doing his thing.

He was so special that I am going to try to add a video I took of him. If it works, it’s right here. IT WORKED!

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The other amazing performer on the ship was our wonderful, incredible, marvelous, fantastic Program Director, Marianne. We had heard that she was going to sing one night after dinner in the lounge. We were both pretty tired, but I persuaded Kathleen to go, and were we ever glad we did. She was all those adjectives I put up above and more. It might be the best show I have ever seen on any ship or boat. For sure, it was the most fun. And now that I got the Agus video to load, here’s a little bit of Marianne’s show.

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Besides being the best Program/Cruise Director we have ever sailed with (35+ cruises), she is one of the nicest and most caring people you will ever meet. We would take a cruise she was on just to sail with her.

To Sum Up

How much did we enjoy this river cruise? For the first time in more than twenty years (since we took our first Panama Canal cruise on Celebrity’s Infinity in 2004), we don’t have an ocean cruise booked, and we don’t think we will take one in the foreseeable future. We have booked a Chobe River cruise in Africa, a Columbia River Cruise, and a Great Lakes cruise, but that’s it. We can’t think of anywhere that big-ship ocean cruises go that we still really want to see. We aren’t saying we wouldn’t go if friends wanted to go together, but we have been there and done that just about everywhere ocean cruises go. I guess we are now river cruise people.

WAIT! I almost forgot the best part of the entire trip—getting to travel once again with Steve, Jamie, Mike and Cathy—our October gang. We will all do it again next October when we cruise the Columbia River between Washington and Oregon.

No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.    —Heraclitus

Back to Europe next week…

by | Oct 3, 2024 | Uncategorized

It’s been a while, but I wanted to let you know to get ready for a plethora of posts as we leave for Europe a week from today. I know—we are going to Europe again. In our defense, when we were there in June, we were just up north in Scotland, England and Norway. This time, we will be heading south to Spain and Portugal.

Last October, we sailed on Oceania’s Vista from Montreal to Miami. On that trip, we were joined by our good friends Mike and Cathy from Wellington, Florida, my brother Steve and his wonderful bride Jamie from San Juan Capistrano, California and our good buddy Jocelyn Hartwell from Chelan, Washington. Sadly, Jocelyn won’t be joining us for this adventure, but the six of us (Mike, Cathy, Steve, Jamie, Kathleen and I) will all be back together. (Just an aside, Mike and I were talking about three months ago that we should always vacation together in October, so next year, we are cruising the Columbia River, and in October 2026, we will cruise the Great Lakes.)

As I mentioned, a week from tonight, we will board British Airways flight 48 from here in Seattle, non-stop to London Heathrow, where we will have about three and a half hours to either rush or relax (depending on how late our flight from Seattle is) before we head south to Madrid, Spain. Although we have been to Spain before, all our visits have been on the Mediterranean coast, where we have visited Tarragona, Barcelona, Málaga and Valencia. But this will be our first time in Spain’s capital.

We are in Madrid from October 11 until the 16th. During our stay, besides seeing Madrid, we will go on day trips to Segovia and Toledo. Since we are traveling with the king of shore excursions and tours, Mike Preisman, we will be on some of the best tours in all of the Iberian peninsula.

After five full days in Madrid, we will catch a plane to hop over the mountains to Lisbon, Portugal. From the time we land there and for the next ten days, we will fully enter the world of Viking River Cruises. We will spend two nights in Lisbon and then board a “luxury motor coach” for a ride north to Portugal’s second city, Porto, where we will board the Viking Torgil for a six-night cruise up and then back down the Douro River. From the riverboat, we will do excursions to Salamanca, Spain, as well as Regua, Barca d’Alva, Pinhão and Lamego, Portugal. (See the map above–you can click on it to enlarge it) We are sure to have fun, food and a great time!

After we are off the cruise in Porto, we are taking a private airporter-type coach south and back to Lisbon, where we will spend another four days at one of our favorite hotels—Hotel Portugal (really original name ?). On the 29th, we will board a flight back up to London Heathrow, where we will spend the night at an airport hotel before flying home the next day. So this means we are gone from the 10th to the 30th! It will not be quite as long as last June, but it will still be long enough for us to have a great time.

This post tells you only a bit because I plan to blog as often as possible. So get ready for another bunch of posts with photos. Of course, as always, my posts will be totally dependent on Wi-Fi. That means good coverage when we are in hotels and, who knows, what we will get on the boat.

In Spain, the dead are more alive than the dead of any other country in the world.  —Federico Garcia Lorca

 

The Lights of Budapest

by | Dec 19, 2023 | Photography

This is the first post of this trip that I am writing from our own living room. We flew back yesterday on another nightmare of a day of flying (a birthday I won’t soon forget). It is 2:43 am, and of course, I am still on Budapest time, where it is almost noon. But I shouldn’t complain because jet lag is always easier to handle at home. I will get into our flight day as soon as I am more coherent, but I will say that it was another bad one and that we will never fly through or to Charles DeGaulle Airport in Paris again. If we have to go to Paris (we are not planning on it), we will fly to Amsterdam and take the train.

In the meantime, I will give you the photos of Budapest at night that I promised would knock your socks off. After spending three and a half days there I can say with total certainty—this is the most photogenic city I have ever had the pleasure of visiting—and it’s at night when it really shines. On the first night, we were in port. I was going to go out after dinner and take pictures, but with the sun setting so early and it getting really dark by 5:00 pm, I went out before dinner. It was truly a photo walk I will remember. You are going to see 25 photos in the gallery below. I took 346 on that early (very cold?) evening walk. Well, enough narrative; here are the photos. Don’t forget; if you click the first shot, you can then scroll through with your arrow keys or by swiping…and PLEASE…don’t look at my photography on a phone. Please…

There is nothing like walking that riverbank at night. Every single place you look, you see something you HAVE TO TAKE A PICTURE OF! What an amazing place to be a photographer. I sometimes wonder if the people who live in Budapest end up getting jaded by these views. I am sure they do, but I hope they don’t. I hope I wouldn’t.

Editor’s Note: My plan is to do two more posts about Budapest (we were there for three days), one about our flight day and then do a summary of the cruise, what we loved and what we didn’t like so much. And I have been getting some questions. So I will try and answer those with the follow-up. I really want all this wound up before Christmas, but that will depend on three things: a cut/crack I have developed on my ring finger that makes it really hurt to type (you never realize how much you use any individual finger while typing until you hurt one). How much time do I sleep versus writing as I finish up with jet lag? And how much time it takes to get ready for Christmas?

Photogenic is a stupid, nonsensical word, but it is also a great mystery.   —Blaise Cendrars

 

Tarragona not Barcelona—it all worked out!

by | Sep 26, 2022 | Photography

When we first booked this cruise with Viking, the itinerary finished in beautiful Barcelona. About three months later, we received a note from Viking that we would NOT be docking and spending an overnight in Barcelona. We would instead be docking and spending the night in Tarragona, a (we researched) small, industrial city south of Barcelona. (You can see how far apart they are above.) That kind of ticked me off because I was really looking forward to being able to wake up on the ship and then go for my pre-dawn photo walk and still be able to sleep on the ship that night.

We later learned that Viking had to switch because even though Barcelona is a HUGE port for cruise ships, there were going to be so many there over the two days (Friday and Saturday) that she would not have been able to stay for three full days. She needed four days tied up at a pier because we would have two days there (arrived Friday morning, disembarked Saturday morning) and then the cruise that followed ours would need the same (embark on Saturday afternoon, sail late on Sunday). Viking just could not take up a berth in Barcelona for that long. So that’s why we wound up in Tarragona.

In hindsight, I am so very glad that we did because it turned into one of my favorite photographic experiences on the trip. And I almost missed it once we were there. I almost missed it because we had tickets for the Viking-included excursion called “A Snapshot of Tarragona,” and when we got up, we just weren’t sure that we wanted to go. After being on the road since August 29, we were pretty much done. Kathleen wanted to just stay on board and pack, but she encouraged me to go ahead and take the excursion. I still (up until 15 minutes before it left) had not committed myself to go. But go, I did.

The first thing to note about leaving the ship was that it was docked a VERY long way from the gate to the port. In other words, this was NOT a port I could have walked out of. And then, once you got out of the port, it was a long way to the city. To say it was a very long way is an understatement. When we got on the “luxury motor coach,” we were then driven for about 30 minutes, and we were still in the port. It is a HUGE industrial port, and we were moored all the way out as far as you can get before still being at sea. And the road out of the port had what seemed like continuous speed bumps that the “luxury motor coach” could not go over quickly. Once we were out of the port, it was another 20 minutes before we were off the coach at the edge of downtown.

At this point, I am beginning to think that I made a mistake in coming. Viking was running shuttles all day long, about every 15 minutes, so I knew I could go back whenever I wanted. Our guide for the day was another guide that seemed to be paid by the word. She walked us around some Roman ruins (as much as I love Italy, if I never see a Roman ruin for a few years, that will be OK with me), which were pretty cool, but they didn’t really hold that much interest for me. I have so many photos from my Tarragona day that I will put the Roman ruins and what we could see from them here. Don’t forget, if you click the first shot, you can then scroll through with your arrow keys or by swiping…and PLEASE…don’t look at my photography on a phone. Please…

What did grab my interest were explosions and gunshots going off about three blocks away. We had been told that there was a Catalunya-wide festival going on that weekend (Catalunya is the “state” that both Tarragona and Barcelona are in) so we were pretty sure that this was what we were hearing. We could also see fireworks and a parade at the end of those three blocks. Here’s what I saw when I looked down the streets and then walked around to do some more investigating.

No, I did not get to see the human pyramids in Tarragona. To show you the photo above, I took a picture of a picture. But we did get to see one being built on Sunday in Barcelona. We weren’t able to see one built in Tarragona, because around noon, it started to rain, accompanied by quite the thunderstorm, so they were canceled for Friday. After looking at a few more ruins, the guide said we would now have some free time, but not to go downtown, it would be too loud and dangerous near the parades. So you know what I did…I went right downtown where the parades were. I am so glad I did. An amazing experience, as you will see.

On the way downtown, I found people getting ready for a parade. It turns out they do the parades twice in the morning. Once from the square and once back. So I ran into a bunch of people getting ready to march on my way down. Here’s a quick gallery of those people.

When I finally reached the city square, I could tell they were getting ready for something. At this point, I thought I had missed it all. Then I heard (from a side street) firework explosions. I headed from the square to where the parade would be coming from, and this is what I saw. Don’t forget, if you click the first shot, you can then scroll through with your arrow keys or by swiping…and PLEASE…don’t look at my photography on a phone. Please…

OK, sorry to post so many photos, but it was a photographic bonanza where I got to combine travel photography with street photography, my two favorites. I spoke to so many other photographers during the parade. They would see my camera and comment on it, and I would ask about theirs. Or about what was happening in the parade. They all spoke some English, and I speak zero Catalan, but they were so hospitable, and they did their best to tell me about their city and the festival. This, to me, is what travel is all about. What an incredible time I spent shooting in this awesome city.

After I had shot all these photos, it was back to the ship (I actually shot more than 900 photos of the festival—aren’t you glad I didn’t put them all online?) I was actually back on the ship in time for lunch with Kathleen. Then we spent the afternoon with Kathleen napping and packing and my processing photos, posting the photos and writing about our adventures. Speaking of processing and writing, I have had a couple of people ask about what cameras and lenses I use and how I decide what to post and not to post. I promise to do a separate post about that when I have finished the cruise write-up.

Two more posts will finish this trip. One for our disembarkation and full day in Barcelona and another to sum it all up and review the cruise. We are sitting in Barcelona airport, ready to board our flights home. See you soon.

I saw a human pyramid once. It was very unnecessary.
—Mitch Hedburg