We Take the Tour. You Get the Story.

OceansAfoot began with a simple idea: if we’re going to travel all this way and experience these places, we ought to remember more than where the bus stopped.

Since our first cruise in 2010, travel has taken us through historic cities and ancient ruins, churches and cathedrals, castles and fortresses, mountains and coastlines, islands and villages, and more than a few places we never expected to find ourselves.

OceansAfoot is where those journeys become stories.

The excursions and travel experiences described here are ones we actually took. We write about what happened as the day unfolded: where we went, what we saw, what we learned, how much walking was involved, where time felt rushed or generous, what surprised us, and sometimes the small details that would have been easy to overlook. Because those details are often what make a place memorable.

The goal isn’t to sell you a tour.

It’s to show you what taking it was actually like.

More Than an Excursion Description

Cruise lines are very good at telling you what an excursion is supposed to be.

That’s useful when you’re deciding what to book, but it doesn’t always tell you what the day will actually feel like.

How long was the bus ride? How much time did you really have at the main attraction? Was the walking difficult? Were there stairs? Did you spend more time traveling than sightseeing? Was there enough time to explore on your own? Did something barely mentioned in the description turn out to be one of the most interesting parts of the day?

And sometimes there are things you simply wouldn’t know unless you had actually taken the tour.

A border crossing might be so unobtrusive that you barely notice you’ve entered another country. A building that seems unremarkable from the coach might contain the most interesting story of the day. A short stop might deserve more attention than you realized at the time. And occasionally, misunderstanding where the group is going can teach you something the next traveler ought to know.

Those are the details excursion descriptions rarely capture.

That’s why our excursion stories generally follow the day in the order we experienced it. Along the way, we add the history and context that helped us better understand what we were seeing.

At the end, we try to give you enough practical information to answer the question that really matters:

Would this be a good excursion for me?

The Places Are the Point

Cruising may get us there, but OceansAfoot isn’t really about ships.

It’s about the places waiting beyond the gangway.

Sometimes that’s an ancient temple or archaeological site. Sometimes it’s a medieval old town, a cathedral, a battlefield, a castle, a museum, a mountain, a coastline, or simply a street where something catches our attention.

History has a way of becoming much more interesting when you’re standing where it happened.

We enjoy understanding not only what we’re looking at, but why it’s there, who built it, what happened there, and how it fits into the larger story of a place.

But travel is also about noticing what is right in front of you.

The unusual organ pipes inside a church. The worn stones beneath your feet. An old map hanging inside a railway station. Fishermen along a river. The view from the coach between scheduled stops. The ordinary things that reveal something about how people actually live in the places we’re visiting.

Not everything meaningful appears in the excursion description.

Those things belong in the story too.

Behind OceansAfoot

OceansAfoot is written by Charlie Keyloe, a longtime alias I’ve used for many years and one that, somewhere along the way, became almost as familiar to me as my own name. It seemed only natural that Charlie would become the voice behind these stories as well.

Before OceansAfoot, I spent ten years on active duty in the U.S. Navy and later built a career in information technology.

Ironically, my years in the Navy may have been one of the reasons I wasn’t particularly interested in taking a cruise. I already knew what it was like to spend a lot of time aboard a ship, and I didn’t yet understand just how little that experience had in common with being aboard a cruise ship.

That changed in 2010 when we boarded Norwegian Sun for our first cruise.

What I discovered wasn’t simply a different kind of ship. It was a different way to travel: a way to wake up somewhere new, step ashore, and begin discovering another part of the world.

One cruise led to another. The destinations became farther away, the itineraries more ambitious, and the list of places we wanted to understand considerably longer.

Somewhere along the way, simply taking photographs and remembering that we’d “been there” stopped being enough.

I wanted to remember what happened. Where we went. What we saw. What we learned. The unexpected things we encountered. The details we noticed while standing there that would otherwise gradually disappear from memory.

I wanted to remember the stories.

That’s what eventually became OceansAfoot.

How These Stories Are Put Together

The foundation of every OceansAfoot excursion story is our own experience.

We take notes. We take photographs. We pay attention to times, distances, transportation, walking conditions, stops, conversations, and the little details that tend to disappear from memory surprisingly quickly.

Then, after the trip, we go back through it.

Photographs become more than pictures of where we have been. They help us reconstruct the route, identify what we were looking at, remember details we might otherwise have forgotten, and sometimes notice things we didn’t fully understand while we were standing there.

Those observations are combined with additional research to add historical and cultural context and to identify the places, buildings, monuments, artwork, and landmarks we encountered along the way.

That distinction matters.

Our firsthand experience tells you what happened to us. Research helps explain what we were seeing and why it mattered.

We don’t want the research to replace the experience. We want it to help us understand the experience more completely.

When something didn’t work particularly well, we’ll say so. When something exceeded expectations, we’ll say that too. When we made a wrong turn or missed something another traveler should know about, that belongs in the story as well. And when we simply don’t know the answer, we’d rather leave a mystery unsolved than manufacture one.

A Travel Scrapbook, Not a Review Site

OceansAfoot isn’t here to sell excursions, and it isn’t really here to review them either.

These are travel stories first.

In many ways, OceansAfoot is my travel scrapbook, a place to preserve the details of the journeys we’ve taken before time has a chance to erase them.

But a scrapbook can be useful to someone besides the person who made it.

If you’re considering one of these excursions, I want you to be able to follow along and understand what you’re signing up for: where the tour actually went, what we saw, how the day unfolded, how much walking was involved, where the time went, what caught our attention, and what the experience was really like.

Sometimes that means documenting something wonderful. Sometimes it means pointing out something we wish we’d known beforehand. And sometimes it means preserving an apparently insignificant detail because that detail ultimately says something about the place.

Then you can decide whether it’s the experience you want.

The excursions and experiences described here are ones we actually undertook, and the observations are our own. A cruise line, tour operator, destination, or attraction doesn’t get to decide what we say about them.

We’re not trying to assign stars or declare winners and losers. An excursion that was perfect for us might be completely wrong for someone else, and vice versa.

The goal is much simpler:

Pay attention. Preserve what happened. Tell you the story. Give you the details. Let you decide.

Why OceansAfoot?

Because so much of our travel begins with an ocean beneath our feet, and the real adventure begins when we put our feet on the ground.

There are always more places to see, more history to uncover, more details worth noticing, and more stories waiting beyond the next port.

We take the tour. You get the story.

Charlie Keyloe
OceansAfoot