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jpalbny

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About Me

  • Location
    Albany, NY
  • Interests
    Adventure travel, wine, food
  • Favorite Cruise Line(s)
    Silversea, Ponant, Uniworld
  • Favorite Cruise Destination Or Port of Call
    Wherever I am going next!
  • If you have a personal or hobby CRUISE or TRAVEL BLOG, include the url here:
    http://jpalbny.smugmug.com, https://www.blogger.com/profile/01909358205846920309

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  1. Here's the halibut dish I cooked up.for tonight. 2 red potatoes, halved and sliced, then sautéed in olive oil with salt and pepper. Add some shallots and chopped garlic. I also added a few sliced mushrooms for good measure. Put the halibut on top and drizzle with more olive oil. Sprinkle so.e herbs. Then transfer to the oven to bake until the fish is done. It came out nicely, and stood up to a California Grenache. My inspiration for this was a dish that I had for lunch at a winery along the Douro. They served a healthy slab of baked cod over spinach and potatoes with lots of olive oil. Maybe next time I'll add some greenery...
  2. For the first bottle, sure... Today we had a craving for some halibut, so we took two small fillets out to thaw while we went out for a walk. Unfortunately the treadmill is on the fritz so we had to bundle up in the 40-some degree chill and brave the wind in order to get our steps. This chilly expedition put me in the mood for a red wine. But with halibut? I thought back to a delicious lunch that I had along the Douro, where they paired a cod fillet with a light red... So, I cooked some potato slices in olive oil with shallots and garlic, then threw in a few sliced mushrooms. Finally I put the halibut fillets on top and baked it in the oven until the fish was just cooked through. A drizzle of olive oil and some herbs finished the dish. And it went well with a Grenache!
  3. So we had three nights there. On the first evening, which was the day our arrival, we went to Eataly and had a light dinner on their outdoor patio. The second night, we had dinner with Chris's friend at their house. The last night we had dinner at a place by Naviglio Grande. The restaurant was called Osteria della Darsena and we enjoyed the food very much. Fried squash blossoms, veal chop Milanese, osso bucco, Panna cotta, and Pinot Nero. It was so warm that we put the wine in an ice bucket! Delicious food but obviously very heavy. Luckily we had a decent walk back to the Metro station!
  4. I looked, and neither of the places that we had dinner are near that area. Sorry!
  5. I'm glad that you got to meet up! Maybe next time it will be somewhere close enough for us to join you.
  6. Sorry to hear this. May those good memories bring you comfort. Dora has been very cuddly all weekend so she has had lots of extra attention. Will give her an extra hug for you and Marino.
  7. Safe travels home and thank you for bringing us along on your journey! We enjoyed traveling with you.
  8. Thanks - I had to look them up to remember the difference. And the fact that they both are in Antarctica for the Austral Summer. Here is my lucky shot, taken from the shoreline at Deception Island almost 15 years ago.
  9. The terns are amazing. Longest migration route of any animal. If you think C2C is impressive, these guys go pole to pole! I got a lucky picture of one during our first Antarctic cruise, with a fresh krill in its beak. And I've been dive-bombed by them during the Arctic summer in Svalbard. Amazing birds. Enjoyed the shots of Inaccessible Island. Sorry the name was so apropos.
  10. The struggle is real. I have so many on this site, saved in perpetuity. At least on my other blog site, there is no time limit and you can always correct them, even if you happen to notice them years later!
  11. Ugh. That is a new one. Certainly an unpleasant surprise to those of us who are booking tours. I think this is another example of why it's a bad combination to (1) make excursions bookable years in advance, and (2) have the gimmick of "included" excursions part of your fare, which is/was set years in advance. Now they are trying to actually find operators who are willing to provide all these tours that SS has promised us, years ago when we booked, at yesterday's prices. And they are doing this in an economy where inflation is nuts, especially in the tourism industry. Silversea is undoubtedly "discovering" that the tour which they could buy for $X a few years ago (and what they budgeted $X for), is now going to cost them 2-3 times that much in 2024 and beyond... They simply cannot provide what they have committed to provide, without blowing their budget. Guess who's going to be on the hook for that cost increase? The esteemed (or steamed) customer. PS - I'm not saying that there isn't ample opportunity for price gouging on top of this.
  12. Thanks! We're mainly visiting Sao Miguel in the Azores. This is a non-cruise holiday for us. We are there for the last week of March. So, we're just using Lisbon as a hub. We will have an almost full day there on a Sunday, assuming our plane arrives on time. We plan to rent a car and visit a few places that we've missed on previous trips. Or maybe we'll park in Cascais for a long, late, lunch on the waterfront before heading back to the airport for our hotel room. The next day, we fly to Sao Miguel bright and early, and spend the rest of the week there. We have friends who visited the Azores, and have been telling us to go for more than ten years now. It looks like a fantastic destination. Excited to visit!
  13. T4 in JFK is pretty nice. They supposedly have a fairly new second Delta SkyClub that we have to check out one of these days. Hope you get to visit there when you fly through! The other SkyClub in T4 was pretty nice when it first opened about 10 years ago, though I don't think we've been there since before Covid. But we are spoiled because there is an AMEX Centurion Club which we almost always visit instead. We're flying DL to LIS in less than two weeks, but we're flying out of Boston, not Kennedy.
  14. Outstanding color (sorry, I can't use the "u" or my spellchecker would go on strike) in those icebergs, and captured so well in your photographs! I definitely need to do a C2C cruise one of these days.
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