Zadar, Croatia

Thursday 22 August 2024. Today we are in Zadar. We've been here before but I totally fail to recognise the port. We must have been moored either somewhere else or perhaps somewhere so hideous that I've blocked it from memory... I do know that, like today, shuttle buses had to be taken to get into the city and that we had done it and enjoyed the city. Today we decided not to bother and spent the day again on the ship.

The view off the side of the ship was particularly pleasing with a harbour with twin piers directly opposite and berths and more piers to the rear of the ship from where a steady stream of ferries all bearing the company name Jadrolinija passed us by on their way either into or out of the port.

All day cars and vans were forming lines, waiting to board the next ferry and none of them seemed to have to wait long as another ferry sailed in well before the outgoing vessel had disapeared.

I once again got out the sketchpad and today used pastel pencils to produce a coloured sketch of the harbour opposite. The red roofs added to the mix of colours. I left any large boats and ships out but added a few very basic shapes to represent the small yachts and pleasure boats lined up against the harbour wall.

Miss Franny told me afterwards that I had several onlookers as they passed our table on Deck 12. I was mostly oblivious, looking out over the side as I was, but one or two stopped to talk and made nice comments.

A closer look at Miss Franny's bracelet which was made for her by our granddaughter, Grace especially for the cruise. It wouldn't be Grace if there weren't a few Disney motifs included!

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Wendron Forge and Mine, and Porthleven

Tuesday 6 August 1996. All those adventures in Mevagissy and it was still only just after lunch! We drove to Wendron Forge, which has a tin mine open to the public.

The mine is called Poldark Mine after the books and TV series. The mine is probably the most interesting part of the visit. You can go down and explore but are not allowed to start knocking chunks from the walls...

Hard hats were a must as the roof is only 3 feet high in places - usually those places where you find yourself going down very steep steps. We all had cause to be thankful for the hats! There is only one way round so you can go at your own rate and there is a choice of routes for different abilities. We went round the hardest, having to bend lower, climb steeper, get wetter, and bang your head more than the other routes.

We had tea in a village called Porthleven where the cafe owner gave as good banter as she got from us and the only other customer in the place lingered over his meal as he was enjoying all the comments from our table!

Porthleven is the most southerly port in England, Great Britain and the UK, helped by the fact that England is the most southerly of the latter two... As such it was a place of haven in the days of sailing ships and bad storms. It was historically lumped in with Helston, the place with the Furry Dance, but became a town in its own right as it grew.

Although he was born in India, Porthleven was the home town of the World War II Dambusters Squadron Leader, Guy Gibson.

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Poulton-le-Fylde, Our New Surroundings

We moved house earlier this year, prompting cries of "Never again!" We've not moved far in terms of distance, but have moved out of Blackpool Borough and into Wyre Borough, in Poulton-le-Fylde.

I'm not giving up the bispham2 email address though. After some 25 years, I'm sure people who email me will have got used to that address by now! Anyway, we've had a few sunny days recently and I ventured out with the camera. The walk into the town centre takes us about 20 minutes.

The town centre is wonderful.. It has a row of old reminders of the past. The stocks, a Jacobean pillar, the "fish stones" - left over from ancient market days, a whipping post - not used these days, and a lamp standard commemorating Queen Victoria's Jubilee.

A closer look at the fish stones and whipping post. Poulton is close to the River Wyre and was a major port in the old days before Fleetwood was built. The whipping post has probably seen its fair share of scurvy knaves in more colourful days!

The parish church of St Chad. The churchyard is best seen in spring when crocuses and daffodils abound. It has its origins in a church on the site dating back at least to 1094 when it was first mentioned in records and quite possibly it predated the coming of William the Conqueror. There are traces of the old church in the structure, but most of what we see is no earlier than the 17th century and a major restoration a century later. Other work was undertaken in the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries.

The main roads of the town centre surround the church in a square, two sides of it being a one-way system. An old road used to bisect the square but half of it is now pedestrianised and the section with the antiquities seen earlier is now reserved for loading and drop-offs.

There are a couple of old pubs and many more recent ones. The Golden Ball is most likely from the 18th century with two other old pubs in the town being The Thatched House which is thatched no longer and dates from the 1790s and the Ship Inn, now The Cube which dates from the 1800s.

The road out of Poulton towards Carleton which has its own interesting ye olde stories, including one involving the Fylde witch, Meg Shelton. But more of her another time. Up along these ways, but well out of shot here, lie the new Burke Towers...

Containment at Livorno Port

Wednesday 22 May 2013. Early morning once again and also once again David and Jeannie are up on deck well before we tumble up the steps to the Promenade Deck. By the time we get there we are well into the port. David has taken a good hundred photos of ships of all sorts and we are passing an empty row of dockside cranes.

Presumably the operator of the nearest crane does haircuts in his spare time...

We are moving very slowly and pass the Catharina Schulte which is being unloaded to our starboard side.

The photos hardly do her justice - she is huge. Each of those metal containers is a lorry load and they are stacked 12 across and up to six high. There are at least ten rows of the same from front to rear of the ship not counting the hold of the ship! So without counting what she carries inside there are 360 lorry loads stacked on the deck.

As we pass by, leaving the cranes behind on the opposite side a couple of hundred containers are waiting for a fleet of lorries to pick them up and take them to where they need to go.

Fran threads her way through the deck loungers. It's still early enough for the deck to be deserted yet. A few passengers are at breakfast, but the majority are being sensible and are still snoring...

This is the self-service counter breakfast bar. David has sneaked into the middle of the unsuspecting half-asleep passengers and snapped them in the midst of their jollity... We decided that self-service was much too common and descended a few decks to be waited upon!

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Sunderland Point

April 1983. We risked the tidal road over the salt marsh to Sunderland Point. It is a long disused port in Lancashire, at the mouth of the River Lune.

The dockside with its row of mooring posts stands forlornly next to the gravel bed of the edge of the river. Hard to imagine now as a thriving busy port thronged with ocean going ships unloading goods for transport to the mills of Manchester and the rest of Lancashire.

Sunderland Point was where the first cargoes of cotton came to, from America. In 1983 it had two curiosities that reminded us of those times. The "Cotton" Tree, seen above, is actually a kapok - a type of poplar - but it gained its name because it started to grow soon after the first bales of cotton were imported here and the locals thought it had grown from a seed blown from the bales. They didn't know that cotton grows on a bush rather than a tree.

Sadly, a few years after this photo was taken, the tree was damaged in a storm and died, having to be uprooted.

The second curiosity is Sambo's Grave, the grave of a negro slave left here c1736 by his master whilst he went inland on business. The legend is that the negro thought himself abandoned in this wild place amongst strangers and died of a broken heart. Another version is that he died after catching a disease from the locals that he had no immunity to. However he died, the locals refused to bury a non-Christian in the churchyard and the sailors buried him on the headland according to the Lonsdale Magazine of 1822: "...without either coffin or bier, being covered only with the clothes in which he died."

The entire place is a bit of a curiosity. It was Lancaster's first port, but the tidal nature of the road to it meant that goods could only be transported at low tide to and from the port. It was replaced by Glasson Dock in 1787 on the other side of the River Lune.

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Glasson Dock

Back in 1982 a regular ride out was to the tiny port of Glasson Dock.

Getting up the River Lune to the docks at Lancaster was extremely difficult due to the low water in the river. A dock had been built at Sunderland Point on the north side of the river in the early 1700s, but it was decided that a dock should be built on the opposite bank at Glasson.

A pier was built in 1782, but the wall bulged so badly that it had to be rebuilt a year later at which time a second wall was built so that gates could be fitted to retain enough water at high tide to float up to 25 ships within the sea dock.

The sea lock was only opened for 45 minutes up to high tide and from that point ships had only about an hour to clear the river before the water drained so low by the tide that they would be in danger of bottoming.

When the Lancaster canal was built a branch was constructed to join with the sea dock via another set of locks. These were wide enough to let small ships through from the sea onto the canal to transport goods north or south along the canal.

The tiny watchman's building with its lookout tower was built in 1836. A large marina - the canal basin - is large enough to moor over 200 boats.

In the 1980s there was almost always at least one large ship in the sea dock. Coal is exported from here and incoming goods include fertilizer and animal feed.

A swing bridge over the canal between the sea dock and canal basin opens at set times for ships or boats to pass into the lock between the two, allowing mainly small masted pleasure craft to reach the sea from the marina. At these times cars have to take a circuitous route through the village to reach the road bridge on the landward side of the marina.

A closer look at the watchman's hut and the capstan linked to the "sea lock" gates - they actually lead onto the River Lune as has previously been mentioned.

There used to be a floating cafe-cum-restaurant moored on the seaward side of the marina. Named the Ba-Ba-Gee, you could eat with your feet at, or just below, water level and look out the windows at swans who would peck the glass, looking for titbits.

Large versions of the photos: buildings behind the canal lock, capstan, pier, ship, watchman's hut

A Day in Koper, Slovenia

Monday, 15 August 2011. After a day at sea, whilst we sailed north past Croatia and other bits of what used to be Yugoslavia, the Thomson Spirit arrives at a country that we've never been to before. We dock at Koper in Slovenia and find ourselves with an easy walk from the ship's gangplank into the heart of the medieval city.

Koper sits on the opposite corner at the top of the Adriatic Sea, across from Venice. Just a bit south of the speedboat chase in From Russia With Love!. Again we are docked just opposite the city wall with a very short walk into the main parts of the city.

The Venetians in Medieval times were the dominant naval force in the Mediterranean and many ancient cities along the coasts of the Adriatic show significant Venetian influence. You can spot the Ventian winged lion on the front of the Praetorian Palace, on the site of two earlier municipal halls. One was here from 1254 but was destroyed during a revolt in 1348. Its replacement hadn't been finished by 1380 when a raid from Genoa destroyed it and the rest of the city. The present palace was started in 1452.

Facing it across the square is the Loggia Palace parts of which date back to 1462 with an upper storey added two hundred years later.

Aside from the usual ways of getting around a town - walking, taxis, etc., there were several horse-drawn carriages waiting by the port. One of these catches up to us with a family from the ship onboard.

The old part of Koper isn't that big, but has plenty of interesting sights. Leaving the main square we pass into narrow streets paved with marble.

We came across this railed off drinking fountain with two entrances governed by turnstiles to stop children rushing in and out. It works - as the child who tried it whist we were there banged his head on the turnstile and stopped running quite abruptly!

A nicely ornate street lamp bracket.

A beautiful medieval town house, though with rather more modern windows on the ground floor!

We are getting close to the coast. A large courtyard with a fountain lies behind an arcade that could be a market or just a meeting place.

We pass through to leave the old town a different way than we had gone in and found ourselves faced by a very attractive view of the Adriatic and a marina.

We sat for a while on a bench and applied a bit more sun lotion in order to fry rather than roast... It was H-O-T! So we were tickled to find this framework blasting out jets of frosty mist! By the time you had walked through the heat dried off any moisture that you may have picked up!

Behind it was a shopping centre and this delightful fountain, ringed by more benches. We sat on one and Fran packed me off to buy ice creams from a stall on the marina. Another couple from the ship came out of the shopping centre and sat staring at the air conditioning jets. "Don't you get wet?" the woman asked suspiciously, whilst moaning about how hot it was.

We walked back to the ship and came to this resort area. It was absolutely crowded with people of all ages, sunbathing, sitting, swimming in the cordoned part of the sea whilst a massive container ship nudged its way past only a few yards away. We walked through to get to the ship. Fran pointed me the way past a couple of girls sitting on the grass with their backs to us. They had bikini bottoms on but nothing else. I sighed... Now to show my mature character by not turning round as I walked past. I strong-heartedly strode past them.

"Can we get that way?" asked Fran. Oh... damn... I had to turn to answer her... Gorgeous that woman...

We spent the afternoon lazing about the ship. Koper is so close to Venice - our destination for tomorrow - that we again had a chance to take photos as darkness fell. On one side of the ship, the large container ship had docked and already was lighter by about a third of its cargo of containers.

On the other side a lone excursion coach stood on the dockside in front of Koper's city wall.

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Barcelona by Bike

10 August 2006. The Island Star has brought us to Barcelona on our first ever visit to mainland Spain. The port is a mixture of industrial and cruise terminal with several office blocks and a cable car overhead that comes from the top of a nearby hill, and over to a tower built on a man-made island wharf. Presumably no one gets off there but stay on as the car turns round for the return journey. We were being incredibly active that day... The ship carried a compliment of mountain bikes and today we were going to join the two Austrian bike guides - Ollie and Alex and spend half a day riding round Barcelona. 27 of us went out to tour Barcelona by bike. Our group of 15 was led by Alex, who was far too fit. If I do a tour again I want it to be led by someone as knackered as me! There wasn't much chance to take photos as you can imagine. When I wasn't pedalling and needing to keep hands on handlebars, I was panting and needing to keep hands on knees... Hey, no, come on... I'm not that bad! Here we are at Gaudi's unfinished cathedral, La Sagrada Familia. In truth it was good fun and not too strenuous. We rode about 12 miles over a period of about 3-4 hours and had 3/4 hour to stroll about and visit a pavement cafe for a drink. Here, Miss Franny regards the camera with a look that says "I want to do this again"... And so after a whiz around the city we arrived back at the ship for lunch. The afternoon was spent reading and soaking up fresh air and sunshine. As we finally left at the end of the day we looked over the ship's rail at this unloaded cargo ship riding high in the water with the shadow of Island Star's funnel stack against it's bow. We are heading for Ibiza with its clublife, topless girls and sun, sea and sex... Well... I can hope... Hmmm - was that the reason for Fran's expression...?

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