At Sea with Doug Newman

If it’s Sunday, it means it’s time for me to sail the virtual seas to Bart de Boer’s wonderful site Ship Parade to take a look at the Photo of the Week.

I’ve been reading Ship Parade since its inception back in 2000 and it quickly became one of my very favorite web sites. Since 2001 Bart has posted a “Photo of the Week” every Sunday (unless he’s on some cruise ship somewhere!) and so for the past six years visiting his site has been a Sunday morning ritual for me.

If it’s the first Sunday of the month, it usually means a new feature article, too. This week, the feature is a review of Bart’s cruise in Hawaii last year aboard Infinity. If you’ve never read one of Bart’s cruise reviews, you don’t know what you’ve been missing - they’re about the most detailed and lavishly illustrated you’ll find anywhere.

In addition to the feature article, for today’s “Photo of the Week” Bart brings us the first photos of MSC Orchestra which has just been named at Aker Yards in St. Nazaire, France. As with MSC’s previous pair of sister ships, MSC Lirica/Opera, the decor of Orchestra is almost the same as her older sister Musica but with a different color scheme. Still, this is no bad thing as Musica was a very attractively-decorated ship anyway.

So sail on over to Ship Parade and have a look at the latest Bart has to offer. Maybe it will become a Sunday morning ritual for you too!