Plans for Next Two Days

We are leaving the ship on Friday (5/1) and staying in France to explore the Normandy area. The ship sails on to Dover 5/2 and exchanges 3/4th of the passengers. Then on 5/3 it sails back to France to the same port, where we will rejoin the ship.

This means we are 2 nights off the ship. We likely will not have access to the computer, so will have 48 hours of so without a posting update.

We plan an interesting two days. We are going to visit the small walled village of Mont St Michel on Friday. Then on Saturday we have a 9-hour tour set up for Normandy with a guide recommended by Rick Steves on his TV travel show.

We’ll rejoin the ship on Sunday when it comes back to France. However ¾th of the passengers will be new, and they will be excited about starting a cruise. We’ll be thinking how the atmosphere has changed, and will be starting to pack away our warm-weather clothes and getting ready to close out the cruise.

This plan could turn out to be really great. However, there are some potential problems that could crop up. May 1 is a holiday, and we had a heck of a time getting a rental car. Second, we do not have hotel bookings, so room could be hard to find, or they could be priced exorbitantly due to the holiday. Finally, we originally had arranged our plan by joining another couple on the ship. That couple cancelled out, did not tell us, and the guide is livid that they caused him to pass up other clients. All the other tours we tried on our own and with other passengers turned up without problem, so you have to expect one of these. We have a very uncertain method of how and when we meet the guide. (You have to be willing to take some risks in getting all of your plans set up.)

This could be an adventure.

Ventriloquist

We had a ventriloquist entertainer tonight. He was billed as the world’s greatest ventriloquist. He clarified that this meant the greatest ventriloquist within the price range for a cruise ship. They had extra chairs set up so that we could be very close. He had film of himself performing for Regan, Bush I, Clinton, and the Queen of England.

Keukenhof Tulip Festival in Amsterdam

We’ll be in Amsterdam on May 5. One of the tours is to the Keukenhof Tulip Festival. They have 7 million tulips! That is a lot. I’m not sure that Kathleen could see this many flowers in one day and still remain conscious.

Kathleen did travel there one time before, and she was too early. All the bulbs were still closed. She was not happy about this.

So the rumor this year is that the weather has been warm early, and it may have rained, which could have knocked off the blooms. Watching Kathleen try to deal with the possibility that she was too early one time and too late this time has not been pleasant for me.

Further, the Princess tour seems to involve an hour bus ride each way, and as little as 2 hours at the Festival. Further there would be the typical large group with some really slow people.

So, I think we will cancel the Princess tour, and plan to book on our own trip so that we could have up to 5 or 6 hours in the gardens and in some other sites nearby. But we still have to figure out whether there will still be flowers or not there. (You cannot figure this out by e-mailing the gardens because, of course, they do not want to say anything that will cut down on the visits.)

We try to figure this out while we still have the 2-day France visit tomorrow with its uncertainties.

Navigational Map

One of the traditions on any cruise is for the ship to post a map of the region that the ship will sail, and label all of the ports and the pathways that that the ship plans to take. This is traditionally auctioned off near the end of the cruise, and the proceeds go to charity. The chart is signed by all of the ship’s officers and is a nice memento if you are into that stuff.

For a 7-day cruise, the typical auction price ends up to be around $100 to $125. For a world cruise, it usually is higher.

We know the person who “won” the auction for the auction of our ship’s map today. He bought the map for (get this) $2,000! He was very excited that he had won.

Update on Next World Cruise

We had a “good-bye” reception this evening for the passengers who will get off the ship two days from now. I saw the Cruise Director and asked him if he knew how many of the passengers had signed up for next year’s World Cruise. He was not sure of the exact number, but knew that it was about 20 of the current passengers!

Good-Byes

We have a strange situation today.  Since we plan to leave the ship on Friday for 2 nights in France, and the ship will sail on to Dover for Saturday to switch out 3/4^th of the passengers, today is the last chance for us to see some of these people again.  A substantial number of these passengers have been on since Ft. Lauderdale in mid-Jan.  So there may be 60-80 people who we have lived with for 3-1/2 months and done many activities with them.  Most of them we will likely never see or hear from again.  We will likely say “good-byes” to 8-10 of these, but there is no way we’ll see them all.

 

Frequent World Cruisers

There are 151 passengers out of 550 who have traveled more than 150 days in total with Princess. What has surprised us was how many of these passengers have done long cruises before, and how many are considering doing another world cruise in the future.

First example is a single 46 year old eye doctor who is retired with a vision disability. This was his first world cruise, but he has already signed up for the world cruise from Princess next year. About half of the ports are different, and he plans a number of several day excursions that he sets up himself.

We personally know of 3 additional passengers who are considering doing the world cruise again next year. I’m sure there are more passengers who have signed up that we do not know.

Another couple who seem to be about 60 years old have taken 30 to 60-day cruises at a rate of about 2 per year for the past several years. They know details about any cruise line you can name.

Another couple that we have met, probably in their early 60’s, have done 2 or 3 world cruises before this one. It seemed like 2/3rds of the time in port they had “been here before,” so they have great suggestions, but often do something simple or unusual themselves because they have seen the big attractions before.

I overheard on elderly woman at lunch who must have been in her upper 80’s, who was asked if this was her first world cruise. Her answer was: “No, I think this is my 6^th world cruise, and I’ve been cruising since the 1940’s!”

We have met several passengers who went to Antarctica. There seems to be two ways to do this. If you go on a standard cruise ship, you go up to Antarctica, but you cannot step off onto the land. One had a choice to fly in, but that was blocked by weather. The other approach is that you take the trip on an ice cutter ship. Here you get onto the continent several times, get photos standing in groups of penguins, and have to add about 10 pages to your passport because each “landing” belongs to a different country’s supervision, so you need visas for each. There is some limit like 50,000 visitors on the ground that constrains how many people can go to Antarctica. (I’d love to do this one, but Kathleen will be a tough sell. Our daughter, Megan, on the other hand would likely kill to do this trip with me.)

This makes a rich environment to learn about other cruises. I like the idea of 60 days out of and back to Ft. Lauderdale that goes around South America and up and down the Amazon. No flights! Around Africa and to Antarctica also both sound very interesting. We’ll see.

Day 105 - 4/29 - Cobh, Ireland

We docked today in Cobh, Ireland. This lies about 25 miles from Cork, Ireland. We did the day on our own. We took a local train into Cork, then came back and spent time in Cobh.

Cork is the third-largest city in Ireland, after Dublin and Belfast. It was pleasant but had no specific grand sites, and was too large to have the allure of the small, quaint places.

We chose not to go see the Blarney Castle and the Blarney Stone. We also skipped the Butter Museum!

Cobh was the last port for the Titanic before it left on its failed trip across the Atlantic. It also was the destination for the Lusitania before it sank. (These are nice facts to learn prior to leaving here on a ship.)

Cobh had a status to one of its residents, Maggie Malone, who was the first immigrant to the US processed through Ellis Island.

We had an Irish folkloric show at 4:30pm put on by locals prior to sailing. They did the Irish clog dancing. Since my brother has two daughters who are into this dancing, I think he should consider bringing his family on this cruise so the girls get a chance to see Irish kids doing this dance.

Talking to other passengers after everyone got back and it seems that best choice for the day was to go to Blarney Castle. See and kiss the stone, or not…that doesn’t matter that much. Just walk the grounds. They go to a pub for a drink.

Ireland Photos II

1)      Statue honoring Annie Moore, first US immigrant through Ellis Island.

2)      City of Cohb, with the Coleman church in the background.

3)      Two of the youngest dance performers at the folkloric show.  I think they are both 5 years old.  (Lighting makes it tough with my camera to get a decent picture under the lights that they use.)

 

Ireland Photos I

1) Shopping street In Cork. [My new e-mail method of posting rotated this photo 90 degrees. I think I can prevent that my opening each attachment prior to sending the e-mail. To fix this, I'd have to spend 10-15 minutes of on-line time, so I'm going to leave it as is. So for this one time only (I hope) just rotate your computer!]

2) I had to get a picture of a beer truck in Ireland.

3) They had a good price on pig’s heads in the local market.

Baggage

One of our neighbors on board bought a jacket from us for $9 in a ship’s auction. (The ship runs white elephants sales where passengers can sell stuff that they bought and realized they do not need, or stuff that they do not want to ship back. Actually, you could probably make a hundred bucks if you bought lots of popular trinkets early on the trip and auctioned them off at the end.)

Anyway, what I found interesting is that this fellow was lamenting that his wife had bought way too much stuff during the cruise. They shipped a box back to the US from Dubai. It cost them about $300 to ship and insure via Fed Ex. Kathleen thinks they said it was 80 lbs, I think he said 40 lbs. Regardless, this is a lot of cash. Further, they bought extra luggage and now plan to fly back with 7 bags instead of the 4 that is included in the ticket…so they will pay an extra $150 to $200 per bag for 3 of their bags. The man said he tells his wife they could wait and buy all this stuff when they are back in the States and it would cost them a lot less.

Be sure you have digested this…they are spending at least $750 to ship their extra stuff back to the US.

This theme comes through again and again…do not bring as much stuff on a long cruise with you as you think you need. You are going to bring too much stuff. Bring less, bring less, bring less.

If you under pack by 1 or 2 or 4 items, it is okay. You will have chances to buy what you forgot. If you have to pay for laundry a few extra time so that you do not run out of under ware or socks, that’s okay too. These two sources of cost are going to be much less than the $750 shipping fees that our neighbor is spending getting their excess stuff back to the US.

This exception to this is drugs. Bring the simple drugs such as cough drops, antibiotics, cold tablets, sensitive tooth paste, etc. I had to accept some sensitive tooth paste from another passenger because I needed it and did not bring any. We have helped 4 to 6 other passengers with cough drops, antibiotics, and the like that they needed and we had.

Astronomer

We have had an astronomer on board as a guest lecture the past few days. He is currently a Vice Chancellor and Professor at University of California at Santa Rosa. He had also worked on the Hubble telescope as one of the group that decided which proposals to accept for use of Hubble’s time.

He has given 3 lectures. I’ve enjoyed them and have had some items clarified about the universe.

I had not been aware of how successful the Hubble telescope has been. Since many of the frequencies of light are blocked by the earth’s atmosphere, Hubble has been able to capture “photographs” over a broader spectrum of light than has been possible with any earth-based telescope. So some questions about the materials that are given off by aging stars have been answered by Hubble. Hubble also has photographed “stellar nurseries” (volume of space in which new stars and planets are forming from the debris of dead first-generation stars.

He also gave a lecture on where the various atoms come from. The answer is: 1) hydrogen, helium, and lithium were made in the cooling period right after the big bang, 2) elements up through iron are made in stars much more massive than our sun (the greater mass is required to ignite nuclear reactions about the hydrogen burning done in our sun), and 3) everything heavier than iron can only be made in a start that goes super nova (a specific very heavy mass range) that crushes suddenly enabling all of these higher reactions, then exploded to “recycle” the materials into a second-generation star and planets.

I’ve know that every atom in our body had once been inside of a first generation star that exploded, but I had not recognized the “poofing off” mechanism that can also disperse the atoms from the old stars.

I caught him at dinner one night and did a quick example of my “jokes for quantum physicist.” Kathleen just rolled her eyes and looked forward to when she would have me all to herself again!

I became a bit distressed hearing comments of passengers leaving the lecture. A lot of people do not have even a basic understanding of how science works…how one uses theory plus observation to establish when something become “fact” rather than “opinion.”

Cruise Critic Website

There is a website that Kathleen used prior to our cruise.  It is:  CruiseCritic.com.  This is a very extensive site that has tens of thousands of postings about cruises:  by cruise, by destination, by private tours, and by many other subtopics.  Kathleen says that you have to create an ID to use it, but there are no issues with this:  if you choose never to post a comment, you remain invisible.  She says this is a rich source of everything relative to cruises.

 

More Affordable Way to Run a Blog on a Ship

Computer time is expensive on the ship. It is up to 75 cents per minute. If you buy a package of 1,000 minutes, you pay $250, so that brings the cost down to 25 cents per minute.

I have been posting items to the blog while I am on line. To post 10-12 pictures this way takes about 30 minutes of computer time, even if I’ve typed the text offline, and then cut and paste it onto the blog postings.

That means that doing the blog the way that I’ve been doing it would have cost over $1,000 if I had to pay for the computer time. I get reimbursed for computer time because of the cabin that we bought, so this has not been an issue. However, if I were paying for the computer time, I doubt that I’d have been willing to spend $1,000 to run the blog.

Today I learned from another passenger of a way around this issue. You can set up an email address for your blog. It is located under the “settings” tab on the blog setup site. Once you have this, you set up an e-mail system that can operate offline. (I already had this.)

So now, I simply work offline using a separate e-mail (made out to my blog’s email address) for each topic that I want to post. I add any pictures as attachments to the email. Once I have them all ready, I simply go on line, enter my email, and hit “send” for the items in my outbox. All of the emails go to the blog and are posted automatically.

Using this approach, I only need to be online for a few minutes for each posting, instead of a half hour. The total computer time using this approach on this length cruise would be more like $50 to $100, rather than $1,000. That makes it reasonable to do when you are paying for the computer time.

Rough Seas

Now that we are in the Atlantic, the seas have been rough for the past 24 hours. They postponed a song and dance show last evening due to concern that the ship’s movements might make it dangerous for dancers attempting to perform. The ship pitched so much during that night that in the morning our bowl of fruit, glasses, and other items that had been on tables had been tossed to the floor.

I think it was rougher in the Tasmanian Sea, but it is very close.

We met other passengers who have traveled to Antarctica. They say the seas there are the roughest. This is because there is one latitude where there is no land the whole way around the Earth, so there is nothing to block the winds. People said on that cruise they teach you that the way to walk on the ship is to wait whenever the floor is falling away from you, then start to walk forward only as the floor moves back upwards during the other portion of the rocking cycle.

I may have difficulty getting Kathleen to sign onto an Antarctica cruise for this reason.

Go-Go, Slow-Go, and No-Go

Someone once told me that there are three successive phases that one goes through in life after retirement: go-go, slow-go, and no-go. I really like this description because the terms explain themselves. I’ve shared this model with probably 100+ people, and everyone understood the concept without the need for explanation.

The other observation about this categorization system is that nobody assigns the phases to you. Everyone determines it for themselves. They start out doing what they want to do (within the limits they can afford). At some point either physical changes or attitude or preferences causes them to develop self-imposed restrictions. Then later, there are reasons why you cannot do things like travel from home for any period of time (perhaps even overnight), or drive a car, or miss a weekly hair appointment.

When I think about the makeup of the ship’s passengers, it occurs to me that even though the age distribution is toward the high end, a majority of the makeup is still in “go-go” mode (perhaps 2/3rds of them?). There really are few pure “no-go” types because all have at least traveled onto the ship. There may be 20-40 passengers who take no shore excursions, but stay on the ship even on the port days. A handful of these may not even leave their cabins, even having room service for all their meals in their rooms.

Perhaps 1/3rd are “slow-go.” They did adventure onto the cruise. They do sign up for the excursions…and they almost exclusively take the excursions set up by the ship. Their intentions are good, but they sometimes overlook the warnings about an excursion being physically demanding, and they poop out. They are late getting back to the bus, or painfully slow…or sometimes stay on the bus while the group goes into some magnificent site.

A majority of the passengers are “go go.” They are always figuring out their plans for the next port and keep busy all the time.

Kathleen and I have each concluded that one should do this type of trip while you are still in the “go go” stage. Once you move on to “slow go” it will difficult to extract the entire potential of the trip. Once you get to “no go” the trip is no longer an option.

Day 102 – 4/26 – Lisbon, Portugal

We had a private tour set up by another passenger for a group of 9 of us. We spent most of our time outside of Lisbon, going to two seaside villages (Estoril and Cascais) and to a mountain village (Sintra). We then visited some places inside of Lisbon.

Estoril is where Ian Fleming started writing his James Bond stories. Cascais at one time had the King of England and the King of Italy both living here.

Sintra is in the mountains, so the temperatures were typically 18 degrees cooler than in Lisbon, so many of the royalty had their summer home here. Sintra has 3 palaces, so we visited one of them. It has the first hotel built in Portugal, demonstrating how tourism has been important here.

Sintra

1) Sintra was big into tile. Many of the buildings have tile all over the exterior.
2) Show the narrow streets, sometimes with stairs, in the city.

Palace at Sintra

This palace was built in the late 1800’s and privately owned. The grounds had a huge landscaped area of probably 5-10 acres. There were not only plants and flowers, but all sorts of stone structures: caves, winding walkways, an 80 underground tower that led down to a maze with fake exits, lookout towers, terraces and status.
1) Exterior of the palace.
2) This is an 80 foot deep well with steps leading down. At the bottom you find a maze of tunnels to get back out.
3) One of the towers located randomly about the gardens.

Belem Pasteis

Belem is one of the districts in Lisbon. There is a store there that is famous for small tarts called Belem Pasteis. There was a line outside and another one inside about 30 people long to buy these. The store makes and sells 12,000 of these each day. The recipe is secret. An employee has to work there for 25 years before they are trusted with the recipe.
1) Exterior of the store
2) One of the tarts.

Other Photos

1) This is the Monument to the Explorers. It commemorates the era during which Portugal led the world in sea exploration, building colonies all over the world.
2) Cascais

Our Question List—Extended Shore Excursions

[Revised]

I’m glad that I posted my idea of a list of questions for Kathleen and me to answer independently. I’ve added one of those suggestions to the list. We also had two questions about extended shore excursions which I’ll deal with here since Kathleen and I will have the same perspective on this. (So the extended list is revised below.)

I also agree that we’ll post something one week or so after we are home. We may have some “reentry” reactions that could be of note.

So the issue of extended shore excursions:

You are right to focus on the shore excursions as a major part of what makes the cruise interesting, as well as the cost. For the initial 107 world segment, we’ll have had 30 excursions: 13 through Princess and 17 on our own. However, 4 of these were the big ones (all through Princess) in Galapagos, Beijing, Angkor Wat, and Taj Mahal all of which involved airplane flights. These represented about 3/4ths of the excursion money that we spent.

We spent around $16,000 for the two of us ($8,000 each) on all of these excursions. Some people booked their basic cruise for as little as $15,000 (they think it was a computer mistake!), so you can see how significant the excursion cost can be.

So, first rule is “book most of the simple port tours on your own.” Often you can walk out of port and negotiate for a taxi. Alternatively you or another passenger may set some group trip up. This helps, but, as I said, that was only 25% of our excursion expenses. Kathleen’s add to this is to do as much as possible from the US prior to getting on the cruise. She spent 30 hours or so prior to the cruise, and we could have done more. Booking on your own usually saves half the costs, you see more, and you have fewer people who could be unpleasant to deal with.

The big excursion money is on the longer overland trip where you take an airplane flight. We did all of ours through Princess. That was “safe” in the sense that we did not have to worry about a late flight or immigration papers. But, there were other passengers who did similar trips for about half the price. So this is the big cost leverage item. Focus on these, go on the web, and book your own plan.

A number of passengers are already booking next year’s world cruise. One passenger said that this cruise opened his eyes on how to think about the cruise. His conclusion (I agree) is that you think about the ship as a mobile homing location. So, for example, he has not been to Hawaii, and next year’s cruise goes from LA to Hawaii with 5 days at sea. So he is going to fly from LA to Hawaii and get 5 or 6 nights in Hawaii while the ship is in transit. You may actually take a greater number of extended excursions, but set them up yourself so each is much less costly, yet still spend a bigger percent of your total cost on these.

So if you are going to be more aggressive on the extended shore excursions (and therefore be off of the ship longer), spend less on your cabin (it will bother you less missing nights there), plan you own excursions (spend time figuring this out in advance) and think of the cruise as saving you the super long airplane flights that you would have had to do if you set any one of the excursion up as a single vacation out of the US.

Ideally, any excursions that you book yourself, try to arrive at the port where you are going to rejoin the ship a day early, and spend that day visiting that city. In this way if anything goes wrong with your flight, you still have a cushion to get back to the ship. If you miss the ship and are on a trip that you set up yourself, then it is your responsibility to get yourself back to the ship at some future port.

You may choose not to take the long excursions while you are close to the US. You can do Machu Pichu or Galapagos at some later time as a stand alone trip because the travel from the US to these is short and simple.

One passenger did a unique plan. The first 80% of the itinerary for the Tahitian Princess and the Royal Princess was identical, but with the Tahitian Princess 6 days ahead of the Royal. So the passenger booked the first leg (Ft. Lauderdale through Sidney) on the Tahitian Princess and the last three legs on the Royal Princess. This gave them a 6-day layover in Sidney without the need for a single airplane flight. That would have been a quite cost effective to spend time in Sydney.

If you have a good travel agent at home, you can use them prior to the cruise to set up personal excursion. However, passengers have been successful also simply Googling the destination and “travel” or “tours” and finding someone who deals with that location who can set up the tour for you. There is enough references on the web that you can assure yourself that they are reputable. The only issue that sometimes is tricky is if they want a security deposit, and you have to share your credit card number.

While airfare, food and lodging are independent of the number of people, the cost of a guide, the driver, and the guide’s vehicle usually are independent from the number of people. So once you have determined what you plan as a private excursion, share that idea with other passengers with whom you get along. If some of them decide to do the same thing with you, you might be able to reduce the cost of the excursion by a few $100’s per person.

Tahitian Princess--Our Suite

This is a photo of our ship in port. This gives a good view of our suite from the outside. Ours is on the left side (starboard side) just above the main deck (right above the word "Tahitian")…the center of the photo. We are the double set of three doors each to the front, and the first porthole on that side.

Day 101 – 4/25 – Gibraltar

Gibraltar is a British colony. It sits on the southern tip of Europe on a peninsula from Spain. Spain owed it for 300 years, and still wants it back from the Brits. The locals voted last time 99 to 1 to stay British, but Spain does not give up.

We hired a local excursion and visited St. Michael’s cave, the top of the rock, and some military tunnels. There are over 30 miles of tunnels in “The Rock.” The drive up to the top was something. Near the top the width of the mountain was no more than 2x the size of the road. We could look over both sides at one point at the same time. It was very high up and very steep.

The Moors had brought monkeys to The Rock and the monkeys still live there. We got lots of pictures with them, so I’ll post one.

There was a major event this day…something like the 70th anniversary of the military. So there was a parade.

We left port early, at 1:00pm because we have to make it to Lisbon by tomorrow. We had a sail away party at 1:00pm, with one hour of free champaign.

Gibraltar Photos I

1) Inside St. Michael’s Cave. This was a very impressive cave with stalactites and stalagmites. I could not get good photos with our camera.
2) Monkeys on Gibraltar.

Gibraltar Photos II

1) Kathleen, with our ship in the background.
2) The airport runway goes across the peninsula at the northern end of Gibraltar where it borders with Spain. The highway crosses the airport runway, so they have to stop motor traffic whenever an airplanes takes off or lands.
3) This was the ceremony due to whatever military anniversary was taking place.

List of Questions

I'm thinking of having Kathleen and me both independently answer a list of questions as the cruise ends. Here is my list. If you would like additional questions, please enter them under the comments section.


1) What places did you enjoy the most?
2) What would you do differently if you had the cruise to do over again?
3) Would you do another cruise of this type again?
4) What are your most memorable events?
5) At any point did you think doing this cruise had been a mistake?
6) What recommendations do you have for someone preparing to take a world cruise?
7) How easy or difficult has it been to stay in contact with loved ones back home?

Day 100 – 4/24 – At Sea

We are happy to have a sea day today, after the 4 port days in a row. There still is a busy schedule for the day. They must have had a lot of items saved up from the days in port.

It is hard to believe that in just one week the cruise will be over for those passengers who are doing the “basic” world cruise without the 10-day Scandinavian extension. I believe there are about 130 of us doing the longer 117-day version, so that means about 75% of the people that we know will be leaving the ship in one week. That will likely make it seem strange next week when 3/4th of the people are excited about the “new cruise” and the rest of us will be feeling like the cruise is almost over.

I thought I’d share some facts about our blog. So far we have made 307 postings, including about 400 photos and 45,000 words of text. The blog has had 1724 “hits”, with 4437 page viewings. There has been a range of between 45 and 80 visits each day. 49% of the visits are “direct” (meaning the person entered our specific blog address), 41% came from references on other sites (I have no idea how those references got in place), and 10% came from search engines.

[Updated: 3635 visits from 437 cities and in 58 countries. (I had only read the past month into.)]

We appreciate this level of interest. It is more than we had expected and has kept us faithful in keeping the blog up-to-date with information.

Day 99 – 4/23 – Barcelona, Spain

When I worked in Frankfurt, Germany, and then later near Rome, Italy, one of my responsibilities included our Spanish disposable products business (think Pampers) in Spain. Their headquarters was in Barcelona, Spain. Because of this I have been to Barcelona 10-15 times before. This is Kathleen’s first visit to Barcelona.

However, all of my prior visits have consisted of drives from the airport to the office, all-day meetings, and then a dinner in a nice restaurant. I have never truly “visited” any of the sites in Barcelona.

An interesting aspect of the restaurants here is that they typically do not open until 10:00pm! When we had our business dinners, our local company had enough pull with the restaurants that they would get one to “open early” for us so we could start eating at 9:00pm. They knew that 10:00pm was just too late for we foreigners. Even starting at 9:00, you’d be lucky to get to bed by midnight, and that did not change the plans to start work early the next day.

We plan a simpler day today that we have done the past 3 days. We have no formal tour set up, but plan to use the “hop on, hop off” bus to see the city and to select a few spots to stop for longer visits.

Today turned out to be a national holiday: St. George day. This meant that traffic was heavy due to people being off work, roads were clogged, and the hop-on, hop-off choice was not a good one. We spent too much timing waiting for a bus and riding a bus, and not enough time visiting interesting places.

We concluded that St. George must have had something to do with roses and books. There were stands everywhere selling single red roses and others selling books. I think you were supposed to buy your lady friend a rose and then go read a book by yourself.

Sagrada Familia

This is a huge church designed by Antoni Gaudi. He hated straight lines (as you also see in later photos). Construction on this church started over 100 years ago and is still going on. It is funded by anonymous contributions, so the rate of construction is determined by the rate of gifts received.

Park Guell

This park is another Gaudi project.

Other Photos

1) Typical residences in the city: ornate exterior mid-rise apartments.
2) Crowds in the street.
3) Business building by Gaudi.
4) Lambs head for sale at the meat market

Sangria

At the end of the day, we stopped for tapas and a drink. Kathleen ordered a sangria. [This is the small size!] She thought it was much better than any sangria she had had before. We asked the waiter if it was made from red wine and fruit. He answered that sangria also has Contreau and gin. Okay, that explains the richer taste!

A Ship’s Issue with Immigration Officials

We had a very full schedule for our visit to Cannes yesterday. We got back to the port as the next to the last tender boat was loading. It had just brought back to the dock the ship’s Customer Services Manager with about 10 locals to leave the ship before we set sail. The officer held their passports and was giving them back. All of the locals had plastic bags with cartons of cigarettes and other things.

One passenger said that the bags were probably “gifts” to the visitors from the ship. It appears that the ships might give a “sign of appreciation” to local immigration officials for clearing the ship for entry as we dock in each port. Immigration could easily require a slow, delayed process that would at a minimum cut into the time for the shore excursions. Having a cooperative and helpful immigration process is quite valuable to the cruise line.

We heard that at one port (I won’t name the nationality), the Cruise Director was upset because the “officials” turned out to involve a group of 34 individuals. The ship provided them with a nice meal with drinks, and several of the guests overindulged and threw up! Then they wanted bottle of alcohol as parting gifts. A passenger said these people looked like looters when they left the ship.

I find this an interesting (and disturbing) dilemma for the cruise lines. It is certainly fine to show a “sign of appreciation” for an expeditious immigration process. However there is a line where it can (and here perhaps does ?) cross a line and become bribery and extortion.

Cruising at High Speed

Today will be our 4th port day in a row: Naples, Italy; Rome, Italy; Cannes, France; and now Barcelona, Spain.

There are two issues with this. First is that it is tiring. Since you only have 6 to 8 hours in each port (once you have gotten from the port into the city), you want to keep a busy schedule. This is challenging to do for four days in a row.

The second unobvious issue is that it means the ship has a lot of distance to cover...not so much on the night from Naples to Rome, but definitely on last night and the night before. That means the ship travels at its upper speed of 17-20 knots, rather than at 8-13 knots.

In practical terms this means that for any given roughness of the sea, the effects are substantially amplified at the higher speed. The ship may choose to go a little bit faster than typical during the evening and the morning when passengers are up and about, but at night, when the passengers should be in bed, the ship cranks the speed up to maximum.

Since we are in the very front of the ship, we really feel it when the ship is pitching (forward to backward rocking). Last night and the night before we had sufficient pitching during the high-speed night run that we had dried salt spray coating our forward-looking balcony glass doors each morning. We were awakened during each night at least once to the movement and the slamming sound of the front of the ship against some waves. Last night we had to wedge a towel into the drawers in one of the cabinet in order to stop the clicking of the drawers against the door facing as the rocking was enough to move the drawers out.

Last night we transited the Gulf of Lions, the region of the Mediterranean between France and Spain, that is known for high winds and rough seas.

Of course, neither of these two issues are horrible, just unobvious aspects of this type of cruise agenda. All other things being equal, the impact of the ship’s pitching from the rough seas can be minimized if you select a cabin towards the center of the ship.

Day 98 – 4/22 – French Riviera

We docked in Cannes, France, but arranged a tour that included most of the French Riviera. Kathleen set up our private tour for us plus 12 other passengers. Our trip was almost 8 hours and included: Cannes, Monaco (including Monte Carlo), Eze, and St. Paul de Vence. We also drove through Nice and Antibes.

Cannes Photos

The Cannes Film Festival starts in 2 or 3 weeks. We visited the main festival building.

Photos:
1) The building where the film festival is held.
2) Kathleen’s hands with the imprint from Sharon Stone. Celebrity hand print surround the Cannes film festival building.

Monaco Photos

Monaco is an independent country. It is less than one square mile in size, but is only the second smallest country in the world…with Vatican City being the smallest. (So, we’ve been in 4 separate countries in 4 days: Rome, France, Monaco, and Vatican City.)

Monaco has 4 separate municipalities. Monte Carlo is one of these 4. It is the place for gambling.

There were 3 events that made Monaco prosperous. First was the gambling. Second was the Monaco Gran Prix race. Third was Grace Kelly marrying Prince Rainer.

We drove over the Grand Prix streets. (The streets were being prepared for the Grand Prix in 3-4 weeks from now.) One passenger pointed out that there were no manhole covers on the streets. All of the sewer lines were moved to underneath the streets because the race cars generate vacuum to hold the car down onto the streets. If manhole covers were present, the vacuum from the cars would life up and displace the manhole covers!

Photos:
1) The Rock. This is the old section of Monaco that is atop a huge stone plateau.
2) Overlook from The Rock.
3) Joe was here…or at least Joe parked his Rolls in front of the casino at Monte Carlo, and he does not need to have a more complicated license plate than this.

Eze Photos

This is a small mountain top village. It is mostly made of stone. The only apparent means of transportation within the town was walking.

Photos:
1) View of the city from a distance.

St. Paul de Vence Photos

This is another mountain village. This one was bigger than Eze, and had lots of consumer shops. A huge percent of the shops were high-end art of various types.

Photos:
1) View of city from a distance.
2) A sculpture of a horse, made entirely of horse shoes.
3) A typical street.

Day 97 – 4/21 – Rome, Italy

Our family lived in Rome for a year, from summer ’92 to summer ’93. We have not been back since then.

When we lived here, Kathleen was part of a group that went on a “walking tour of Rome” with a guide one day each week. In total she took 35-40 such tours. The woman who gave the tours claimed that she could go 3 years (or over 100 different tours) before she had to repeat one. That shows how rich Rome is in different sites to see.

Our cruise’s port lecturer gave similar perspective. He gave his “top 20 sites in Rome” list, with almost all of the items on his list being places that we knew.

We dock at a port that is a 1-1/2 hour drive away from Rome. We are taking the ship’s excursion bus that drives into Rome and drops you off for about 5-1/2 hours on your own. This costs more than the train, but having lived here before, we know how strikes can occur and how trains can be unreliable on schedules.

We must have walked 6 miles on our tour. We had stops at: Vatican City, Piazza Navona, Piazza di Fiori, Colosseum, Roman Forum, Trevi Fountain, Spanish Steps, and the Pantheon.

We are worn out, and have two busy port days ahead of us.

This was a nice revisit for us, but like so many other ports, you only get a quick sampling of what is there. In many of the better ports, you need several days to a week to get a decent visit.

Photos and commentary follows.

Vatican

When we lived in Rome 16 years ago, it was no problem going into St. Peter’s Basilica. It is huge, opulently decorated, and took over 100 years to build. We even got tickets and went to midnight mass on Christmas Eve in 1992 given by the Pope.

Today, you need to clear a metal detector. It may be that the Vatican only invested in one! The line had between 500 and 700 people when we arrived in the morning. We could not go inside and see all of the other things that we wanted to see.
Photos:
1) St. Peter’s Basilica.
2) Vatican City Plaza enclosing wall.

Piazza Navona

This is one of Kathleen’s favorite piazzas.
Photos:
1) Fountain in Center
2) This church is the one Kathleen went to when we first moved to Rome.
3) Inside this church.

Piazza di Fiori

Plaza of the Flowers! This piazza is most active in the mornings, with booths selling: fruits and vegetables, spices, and flowers.
Photos:
1) Fruits and vegetables.
2) Dried fruits and vegetables. We bought a mixed bag that included figs, raspberries, tomatoes. We were most amazed by the tomatoes. They were great.
3) Flowers (of course)

Colosseum and Roman Forum

Here again is a sign of the changes to tourism. We simply walked in 16 years ago. Today, you need to queue up, pay an entrance fee, and go through a metal detector.
Photos:
1) Colosseum
2) The Rome Forum Hotel. When we were ready to move our family back from Rome to the US, we had to stay in a hotel in Rome for a few days after our furniture had been packed up. We owned a cat at the time. Most hotels did not permit a cat, but one of the few that did was the Rome Forum Hotel. So because of our cat, we got to stay on the upper floor suite in this hotel overlooking the ancient Forum ruins.
3) Here is what the view from that hotel room of ours looks like taken from street level.