A few weeks ago we put up a list of things we could not find out about this voyage before booking it. We sail this month. Here is what we ended up booking, and which of our own questions got answered before we even left.

Seven days round trip out of Lisbon on the Crystal Serenity: Portimão, Casablanca, Agadir, Arrecife on Lanzarote, then a full day at sea back up to Portugal. Two nights in Lisbon at the front, one at the back.

The wine question answered itself

The first thing we asked was which of the four small wine regions near Lisbon was worth a day — Colares, Azeitão, Bucelas or Carcavelos. We went with Colares, and the answer to the second half of that question turned out to be the useful one: it does not fit on a turnaround day. We have put a full day aside for it before the ship, with a car and a driver.

The visit is to Casal Sta. Maria at Colares, founded in 2006 by Baron Bodo von Bruemmer at the age of ninety-six, which is the sort of detail that makes you want to go. It is a private visit and tasting rather than a cellar-door drop-in, it runs about two hours, and it is booked through the hotel concierge with a car and driver for the day. Colares is 45 to 50 minutes each way from the middle of Lisbon, which is the number that decides everything else.

And here is the part we did not expect when we wrote the questions. Colares survives on ungrafted, pre-phylloxera vines, because the louse cannot move through deep sand. Five days later the ship calls at Lanzarote, where we have booked a tasting in La Geria — vines grown in pits dug into volcanic ash, each one ringed by its own stone wall, and also ungrafted, because phylloxera cannot live in ash either. Two of the last places in Europe where the vines are on their own roots, five days apart, entirely by accident.

The excursions

We book ship excursions rarely and independently often, but Morocco is new to us and the ports are short, so this time we took the ship’s. The durations and the activity grades are the ship’s own, and they are the part worth paying attention to.

• Portimão — Jeep Safari. 4h30, moderate. Starts at 08:00, which is the exact minute the ship docks, so breakfast is going to be early.
• Casablanca — Casablanca In Depth. 7h45, graded extensive. The longest day of the cruise by a distance, and it returns thirty minutes before all-aboard.
• Agadir — Highlights and the Berber Heritage. 5h, moderate. Back aboard with three and a half hours of the port call still to run.
• Lanzarote — Wine Tasting. 3h30, moderate. La Geria and the Malvasía Volcánica.

The booking came with a slab of onboard credit — non-refundable, usable only onboard, and enough to cover the better part of those four excursions. Worth saying out loud, because credit like that is easy to leave sitting unspent, and it does not come back.

What Crystal includes, and what it does not

This is our first time on the line, and one of our questions was what the all-inclusive actually covers now that Abercrombie & Kent own it. One concrete answer before sailing: the speciality restaurants are included. We have three booked — Beefbar, Umi Uma by Nobu Matsuhisa, and Osteria d’Ovidio — at no charge.

The exception is The Vintage Room, which is a ticketed wine dinner, cocktail attire, and which we are currently waitlisted for rather than booked into. We will report back on whether the waitlist clears and whether it is worth it.

Getting there and about

Airport to the hotel in Chiado is 16.6 km. We pre-booked a car rather than join a rank after a transatlantic, which means somebody is tracking the flight instead of us. The cruise terminal at Jardim do Tabaco is about 1.5 km from Chiado — an eight-minute taxi, which makes a hotel in that part of town worth it.

One thing we got wrong and nearly paid for: the airport parking at home was booked with an exit time keyed to the flight number rather than the landing time, which would have left the car sitting nine hours past its reservation at the drive-up rate. Worth checking yours. It is the kind of mistake that costs more than the excursion.

What we still do not know

Most of the original list is still open, which is rather the point. Whether Portimão is alongside or at anchor. Whether Casablanca is worth the day or whether everyone is right about Rabat. What an Agadir day actually is. What the Atlantic does on the way home. We will answer all of it on the original page when we are back, so it is worth more then than it is now.

If you have done any of it, the comments there are still open and we would still be glad of it.