Thirteen journeys in twelve years, and this is the first one we have written about before going rather than after. There is a reason for that, and it is at the bottom.

This autumn we are sailing out of Lisbon on the Crystal Serenity: down to Portimão on the Algarve, across to Casablanca, on to Agadir, out to Arrecife on Lanzarote, and then a full day at sea back up to Lisbon. Seven days, round trip, and the best part of six hundred miles of open Atlantic on the way home.

Why this one is different for us

Four of the five ports are places we have never been. Morocco is a country we have never set foot in. Crystal is a line we have never sailed — it will be the eighth operator and the eleventh ship in twelve years. And Lisbon, where we start and finish, is the only name on the list we already know, from a few days there in the summer of 2017 before we went on to Bordeaux.

The other thing that makes it different is the size. We came off Le Bougainville in the spring, which is 10,700 tons and carries 184 guests. The Serenity is 68,870 tons and carries 740, with 655 crew. That is roughly six times the ship and four times the passengers, and having just spent a fortnight learning to love a very small one, we are honestly not sure how we will find it. We will tell you.

What we don’t know yet

Here is the honest state of our research. Every one of these is a question we could not get a straight answer to online, which is exactly the sort of thing this blog is for — so we are writing them down now, and we will come back and answer them here afterwards.

• Lisbon — what do you do with the ends of the trip, and where do you drink? We had a few days here in 2017 and did Sintra then, so we are not after the first-timer list. What we would really like is wine, and there are four small regions inside an hour of the city that we cannot choose between. Colares, out by the coast, where the vines are ungrafted and grown in deep sand because phylloxera could not get through it. Azeitão and the Moscatel houses over the bridge on the Setúbal peninsula. Bucelas and its Arinto whites just north of town. And Carcavelos, which is almost extinct — a couple of dozen hectares left between Lisbon and Cascais. Is any of that realistic on a turnaround day, or does it need an extra night at one end? And is the Sunday-closing problem as bad as it looks from here?
• Portimão — alongside or at anchor? And if she goes alongside, how far is it from the berth to anywhere you would actually want to be? Is the Algarve coast realistic on a port day, or is the day really just Portimão itself?
• Casablanca — is the city worth the day, or is everyone right about Rabat? The received wisdom is that you should leave Casablanca immediately. We would like to know whether that is true or just something people repeat. And how long the Hassan II Mosque actually takes, door to door, from the port.
• Agadir — what is the day? The town was rebuilt from nothing after the 1960 earthquake, so it is not an old city. Is the draw the souk and the beach, or is it a jumping-off point for Taroudant or Paradise Valley — and is either of those honestly doable and back aboard in time?
• Lanzarote — Timanfaya or Manrique? The volcanoes are the obvious move, but we cannot work out whether the park is bookable on a ship day or whether it fills. And there is an argument that César Manrique’s houses and gardens are the more interesting island anyway.
• What has actually changed on Crystal under Abercrombie & Kent? The line went bankrupt, was bought, and came back. Almost everything written about the Serenity is either from before that or is a press release. What is the dress code in practice? Do the speciality restaurants really book out on day one? Is the all-inclusive genuinely all-inclusive?
• The sea day. Lanzarote to Lisbon in one hop, up the Atlantic in autumn. We have never done a proper open-ocean day on a ship this size. We would like to know what that stretch of water does at this time of year, and which side of the ship you want to be on.

If you have done any of this, tell us

Comments are open on the blog now, which they have not always been, and this is the post we would most like them on. If you have been alongside at Portimão, or done Rabat off a ship, or sailed the Serenity since the refit, we would take any of it gratefully. So would the next person who searches for it and finds this page.

And if you have not, this is what our write-ups look like. The last voyage was Málaga to Malta in the spring, seven ports on a small French ship, and the film of it is here:

Why we are posting this in advance

Because for twelve years we have written everything up afterwards, and afterwards is too late to ask anybody anything. Every trip has had two or three moments where an hour of somebody else’s experience would have changed the day — and every trip has also had two or three things we worked out on the ground that nobody had written down anywhere.

So this time we are putting the questions up first and the answers up after. If you are sailing this route later, this page should be worth more to you by December than it is today.

The whole record so far — twelve voyages, seventy-odd ports, all of it mapped — is on the Journeys page.