Mediterranean April 21st, 2009
I made it safely on my first cross-Atlantic sailing. I’ve now crossed the two biggest oceans in the world on a ship. Not that anyone really puts that on their Life To Do List. The cities here are all so colorful and full of character. There are a lot of oranges, pinks and yellows on the buildings. Today I was able to get off the ship for a couple hours and wander into the old city of Dubrovnik, Croatia. I’d never really thought of Croatia as being part of the Mediterranean, but here it is and looks just like all our other stops. I’m used to the French and Spanish we’ve been hearing, so the Croatian language was an interesting switch.
I don’t have much of a story to tell. We had lunch, where we asked to have something local and ended up with a mixed seafood plate and another local dish that came out looking quite a bit like breakfast sausages. If I get fast enough internet I’ll post the pre-meal picture. It was all absolutely delicious. Then of course topped the meal off with “ice cream” which was an even creamier version of Italian gelato. All in all, I’m a fan of Dubrovnik.
This cruise consists of this stop, 4 in Greece, Ephesus in Turkey and Messina, Italy. We are doing 10 day cruises out of Civitavecchia, the port city an hour outside of Rome. Things with work are really busy. We don’t have enough staff to cover the kids program and the library all day long, unless we work the entire day with little chance to get off the ship. Which defeats the whole point of me being here, since I’m doing this for the travel. So I’ve been frustrated with that lately. It’s almost worst to be here and see it from the ship, but not be able to go, than to be home and not see it at all. That’s the bad news.
The good news is I like this ship and have made some friends and I’m sure there’ll be more to come. Once we settle into the cruises we’re doing and the scheduling gets figured out I’ll know what to expect and can hopefully plan on doing things ashore.
Hopefully I’ll have more exciting stories from the Med for you next time!
