Day 10 – Leaving Venice

Our feet told us to take the day off from exploring more of Venice, so we did. We were able to grab a good spot in the lounge on the 11^th deck to watch the departure. We were a little late leaving as twenty people were late coming back to the ship. I asked our waiter later that evening if they ever left anyone behind. He’s been doing this for twelve years, so I figured he’d know. He told us that he’s seen people come out on the pilot boat and have to climb a ladder to get on board, but he didn’t know of anyone who hadn’t gotten on before the ship was very far out to sea. I find it hard to believe that people don’t get that when the ship has to leave they need to be on board! Leaving Venice is a pretty spectacular sight – a sea of red tile dotted with bell towers floating like buoys and high cathedral roofs like bulbous sailing vessels riding the waves of roofs. It’s a huge city, and no part of it isn’t quite lovely. I’d like to come back here some day when there aren’t hoards of visitors fighting for every inch of ground in the squares, bridges, and walkways.

The departure was very interesting. Did you know that ships’ captains don’t take the ship into or out of the ports? Every time we approach a port, a little boat speeds to the side of the ship and a pilot comes aboard to take the ship in. Same thing happens on the way out. In most ports, it’s no big deal, but the port of Venice is something else. We backed out of our dock, and turned toward the city (that alone was about thirty minutes). We steamed down a huge canal that was joined by the Grand Canal just as we approached San Marco Square and the lagoon. We sailed through the lagoon, seeing all the best sights again, and wended our way through a series of broad canals between islands. The pilot really earned his money on this trip.

The sky turned dark as we headed for Dubrovnik and the sea became pretty choppy. I woke up sometime in the night to great flashes of lightning and loud thunder. I looked out over our balcony and, even in the dead of night, I could see some pretty good whitecaps. The boat was rocking and rolling pretty well, but it just rocked me back to sleep. The storm did wake me a couple of other times, but the rocking put me right back to sleep each time.

Day 11 – Dubrovnik, Croatia

We came into the harbor of Dubrovnik, Croatia this morning and it is quite lovely here. Red roofed houses, mostly white stone or stucco, clamber over the steep green hillsides dotted with tiny groves of mustard plants and red poppies. We wanted to see the old town, so took a shuttle bus into town. I did notice some of the houses we passed on our way into town had what looked like bullet marks on the walls. One particular house was just covered with them. There was quite a war here just sixteen years ago, and not everything has recovered from that. The whole town is quite hilly and pretty, but the old town is something else. It has a wall about forty to fifty feet high that runs a mile and a quarter around a charming old town area. This was built in the 13^th century. The streets are all made of marble blocks, polished by thousands of feet over hundreds of years. Crooked, narrow little streets dash off between buildings, and then head up stairways to the top of the walls – six or eight flights up. Of course there are shops and restaurants everywhere, as well as street vendors galore. There are many women selling beautiful handmade linens with fine lace and embroidery. They are pretty pricey, but if you hold off until you get to the back part of the old town, you can pay a little less. (Our tablemate Lena told us later that if you bought at the stand right outside the ship you could save even more!) When we were ready to leave and go back to the ship, we had 12.20 kuna – about $3. It was too little to exchange, so we found a gelateria, and I put the money on the counter. I told the woman that was all the money I had. Could we each get a small cone? She laughed and said it wasn’t really enough, but she would make it do for us. It was a nice ending to our time in Dubrovnik.

Sailing out of Dubrovnik was another treat. The countryside is so beautiful. There are lovely homes right by the craggy shoreline and scattered all over the hills. Several islands, big and small, crowd around the harbor, some with squat lighthouses sitting on them, guarding their shores.

The entertainment tonight belied what I said earlier about the lounge-type acts on the ship. Tonight we heard Jonathan Clark, a British comedian and impersonator. If you ever get a chance to see him, don’t miss it. He was hysterical. Tomorrow we can sleep in as we will have a quiet day at sea traveling to Naples, although we may have stormy weather with some high seas. The captain said the seas might be two and a half to three meters, so we should be rocking and rolling again.

Day 12 – At Sea

We had a relaxing day, reading and watching the clouds go by. It’s been very overcast and windy, consequently the boat is rocking a bit, but I’ve gotten so I like it. I probably will take a week before solid ground feels okay after this long cruise. There was a big buffet in the dining room at lunch time with lots of ice sculptures and too much good food. I haven’t talked about the food this trip, but it has been outstanding. Wonderful choices, great recipes, and beautiful presentation. They even offer sugar-free and low-fat desserts every night. The wait staff has been terrific and knows what we want, often without us asking. I’ve probably eaten more fish this trip than I usually do in a month, but we’ve had two or three good choices every night, all nice and fresh. No lobster this trip, but that’s been the only disappointment. Our table mates, cruise professionals, really know how to eat. They almost always order two appetizers and two entrees each and sometimes two desserts! I think Lena weighs about 100 pounds, so I don’t know how she does it, but it’s working for her. Dave and I have been trying to avoid overeating, but temptation is everywhere all the time. Ah, well, it’s vacation!

This afternoon, I decided to enter the blackjack tournament in the casino. The buy in was only $20, so it seemed like a good idea. Dave decided he would enter, too. Big copy cat! We got there early and were able to claim the two leftmost seats at the table – a clear advantage! This is the way the tournament works. Everyone is given $500 in chips (funny money) and plays seven hands in the first round. We had fourteen entrants, so two first rounds of play. They counted the chips at the end of the first round and the top seven players advanced to the final round for seven more hands. I played pretty badly and had crappy cards, but I’m pretty conservative, so ended up with $300, dead last except for one who busted in our group. Dave, of course, had more! (Do you hear my teeth gnashing? No, I’m not at all competitive about games.) Some people had as much as $1700! I never thought we’d end up in the final round. But the second group in the first round played really poorly and all but one went broke, so Dave and I danced right into the finals. Everyone went back to $500 in funny money in the final round. There were a couple of people making really boneheaded moves in that round, but Dave and I played pretty conservatively and got lucky on a couple of hands. Anyway, Dave came in second with $575 and I came in first with $600. Of course, that’s all funny money, but there were prizes. Dave got a T-shirt with Casino Royale Winner on the back and $56.50 in cash. I got a nice polo shirt with Casino High Roller embroidered on the front, a hokey little trophy, (which I’m quite capable of putting where Dave has to see it all the time) and $94. Hollinbecks RULE!!!! My mother would be so proud!

I finished The Vig (Thanks, Gordon!), a really good cop novel. If you like those kinds of stories, I recommend this one – very convoluted and fun. I started Tripwire by Lee Childs (Thanks again, Gordon) and it is intense! Dave’s been reading Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett and hasn’t been able to put it down the last few days. He says it’s really good. Check it out. It will be my going home book.

The entertainment tonight was The American Drifters. I think two of the four guys are from the original Drifters. You know how guys in those kinds of groups will flirt with the ladies in the audience? There was a sweet woman right in front of me who was probably about eighty. One of the guys was flirting with her the whole night and I think he was pretty serious about it. They were, after all, about the same age. Anyway, it was a fun show with lots of good songs from the fifties and sixties.

Day 13 – Sorrento and Pompeii

The winds were quite high and the ship had trouble docking. It took about an extra two hours to get docked and tied down. I think the ship made five or six approaches before making it in. The pilot was earning his money this day! Consequently, several tours were cancelled, but not ours. Ours left two hours late, but off we went. We drove through part of Naples and it’s not much to see. The city has been destroyed several times by nature and war. I suspect it was severely bombed during WWII, because the whole place looks like it was built in the 1950s and 1960s. Not very pretty. Also, they have run out of landfill space for garbage and it is piled high all over the city. Yikes! We headed to the Sorrento area to visit a farm where they make mozzarella cheese, their own sausage, and limoncello along with other things. It was interesting and fun. When we arrived we had plates waiting for us with good crusty bread with olive oil, two kinds of mozzarella, sausage, olives, and a bottle of homemade red wine at each table. While we snacked, we got a demonstration of how the cheeses were made. It’s a very quick process. One of them only takes an hour – the other just a day. Then we went downstairs to the wine cellar and tasted limoncello. It’s a liqueur made from alcohol, lemon zest, sugar, and water. It was on my list of things to try, so I did. Very nice. I suspect more than a little could be deadly (36% alcohol or more and lots of headache-causing sugar), but a taste is very nice. We got back onto the bus and headed for Sorrento. Our bus driver, Giuseppe, was amazing. We were in a brand new HUGE Mercedes tour bus and he handled it like a champ. Our tour guide told us in southern Italy there are traffic laws, but they think of them more as suggestions. I believe her after seeing the way people drive here. The roads we were on were very narrow two-lane roads with lots of hard turns and switchbacks. In the towns where there was lots of traffic, people on their little scooters would come streaming past big lines of cars right toward the coach, slipping back in just in time. I think the No Fear label must be Italian. They should start a No Brains label to go with it. Sometimes we would come around a tight turn and find a car facing us. Giuseppe would hold his ground and force the car to back up thirty or forty feet to let us go by. We passed a number of private beaches called lidos, including the famous Bikini Lido, along the Amalfi Coast. It’s spectacularly beautiful. We spent about an hour and a half in Sorrento, a pretty little town full of (here’s a surprise) shops and restaurants. We had pizza, which originates in this area (actually Naples) and it was not to die for. In fact, I like Round Table better and so does Dave. But it was fun to try anyway.

Next, the piece de resistance -- Pompeii. The weather was wonky and we had squalls all day. We had to buy expensive cheap umbrellas from street vendors, but we didn’t care because we were at Pompeii. I’ve wanted to visit Pompeii as long as I can remember. Now the danger of going someplace you’ve dreamed of so long is that you will be terribly disappointed. Not this time. It was so much more than I ever imagined. If you think you know how big Pompeii is, multiply that by a factor or ten or even twenty. It is easily twenty times bigger than I ever imagined. It was just the most amazing place. It helped that we had a great tour guide who was both knowledgeable and entertaining. We started in the gladiator school (yeah, they have one!), went on to the music amphitheatre – one of three amphitheatres Pompeii had – and on and on. We saw the famous Villa of Mysteries (a bordello, in case you didn’t know) with ancient dirty frescoes on the walls and stone beds for the ladies to ply their trade. There were also symbols of nice erect penises (Sorry, Dave K.) with accompanying testicles everywhere. It was supposed to bring them good luck, so they had them carved over their doors or in the pavement in front of their homes, etc. There was a temple to Jupiter that was pretty amazing. The forum was huge and impressive. There were plaster casts of those who died that day (August 24, A.D. 79 at one o’clock in the afternoon). They are really sad. Some of them have bones showing in the casting process. Some are just sad. One is of a boy – perhaps ten or twelve – trying to cover up with a hooded garment. The archaeologists found cloth still in his mouth and nose that he must have shoved in there to help him breath and keep out the ash. There was one of a dog who had been chained up and was in a kind of crazed position as if he’d been trying to somehow escape. So sad. There is so much preserved here that they have a big warehouse full of antiquities and much has been moved to the archeological museum in Naples. I’d like to go there someday. I definitely want to come back here and spend much more time in Pompeii. It’s just too much to take in all at once. I can’t wait to get the pictures posted.

Our ship sailed a bit late and there was quite a storm blowing. The noise from the wind kept me up much of the night. I thought it might be the Sirens singing, but I finally fell asleep.

Day 13 – The end of the cruise and beyond

In the morning, we just had time to get breakfast before we were called to claim our luggage and get out of Dodge. It’s amazing to me that, after we spent all that money on the cruise, we can’t even get a ride to the train station. We got on a bus and they took us to the port entrance and said bye-bye. We dragged our luggage up hill (wasn’t it up hill coming to the boat?) to the train station, bought tickets to Ostia Antica, and boarded the train. We had to take a train all the way in to Termini Station in Rome and change there. Termini Station is like O’Hare Airport on steroids. We walked for miles, going up and down stairs and lifts and ramps, asking directions every step of the way, and very few people had heard of Ostia Antica. We finally found our way to the Metro (subway) to another station, up and down and up again dragging our bags, and then on to a train that would take us there. When we finally arrived in Ostia, we had to go down and up again to cross the tracks, then buy a bus ticket, take a pedestrian bridge (Dave says it was 43 steps up and 43 down – he’d know – he made two trips at each end carrying the heavy bags) with all our bags, walk a couple blocks to a bus stop, and get a bus to our hotel. No taxis here. The hotel has a shuttle, but not for the train. We walked into the hotel and there were two people who had sat at the table next to ours on the cruise! They looked refreshed and relaxed. I greeted them and asked them how they’d gotten to the hotel and they said they had a driver from the ship to here. “How did you get here?” she asked staring at my flushed and sweaty face, but I just said how smart of them to get a driver. We dropped our bags off and took the bus back into town to have lunch. Did you know they have siesta time in Italy? After lunch, everything was closed, so we couldn’t buy a bus ticket back to the hotel and had to walk about a mile and a half. There are no sidewalks in most of this town, and drivers don’t have much patience with pedestrians. Pretty exciting walk! We finally made it back and it was siesta time for us. I finished Tripwire (Thanks, Gordon!) and it was good! I never figured this one out. If you like action thrillers, I recommend it. We spent most of the evening whining about why didn’t we just schedule ourselves on a plane right after the cruise! We are ready to be done. But Ostia Antica is a pretty little town and tomorrow we will explore the ancient ruins here.

Last Day – Ostia Antica - Just when we thought it couldn’t get better

We took a bus into town from our hotel to find these ruins we’d heard about. Well, Boy, Howdy, did we ever find ruins! This place has to rank right up there with Pompeii. It is just about as big and just as well preserved. It has a huge amphitheatre, baths, apartment houses, temples, forums, a bar, a necropolis, etc. etc. In a way this is really better than Pompeii in that the antiquities haven’t been removed to a distant museum. Many of the statues, carvings, and frescoes are right where they were found. There are many, many amazing mosaic floors with beautiful pictures on them. There are altars and kitchens and huge jars for storing oil which probably held fifty gallons or more. Ostia was at the mouth of the Tiber River and was the port for Rome for many years. It was a very successful trading city for many years probably starting around 400 B.C. and lasting in this capacity until after the decline of the Roman Empire. The Tiber River actually changed its course and that helped to change the course of Ostia. It fell into decline as the port for Rome was moved and over time it covered over and was forgotten. Excavations here started in the mid-1700s as they did at Pompeii. Excavations still go on today. The real beauty of this place is that everything that was excavated here stayed here. Some extraordinary statues have been moved to a museum on the grounds, but it’s included in the admission and is right where you can get to it. In Pompeii, the really good stuff has been moved miles away into Naples. All of the statues are beautifully displayed with natural light in this small museum. It reminds me of the Glyptotech in Munich, my favorite museum in that great city. They don’t allow cameras in the museum, so I can’t show you those when I post pictures, but some of them are in the little book we bought, so come and see us. It was a marvelous day, but we are worn out. I’d like to come back here someday, too, to spend more time in the ruins and to visit a great fortress in the town that was built in the mid-1400s. We were just too tired to visit that as well.

Now we will rest and pack. Tomorrow morning we head to the airport and home. We are ready. It’s been a great trip, but we really miss our kids and grandkids. We will be home by the time this posts. Internet access is really a problem over here. Too expensive and slow. I hope to add pictures soon and I hope you enjoyed reading about our trip.

Last Day – Home Again, Home Again, Higglety Hig

Our hotel had a shuttle to the airport and we arrived nice and early. The lines moved well and we had no problems getting to our plane, but there was a lot of up and down and walking. The flight to New York was fine. After walking and walking and going up and down and up and down, we cleared customs, rechecked our bags, and started waiting to get our plane home. We had a four hour layover. There was an earlier flight, but we didn’t try to get on it since we thought our bags would come in on our scheduled flight. So we waited. The flight was over an hour late loading and then took another hour to take off. Needless to say, at this point we were cranky. The flight was bumpy most of the way, but we finally got into San Francisco about ten o’clock. Fortunately Dave was able to get some sleep on both the flights. I had a little, but I don’t do well on planes. But I did get about halfway through Pillars of the Earth, Ken Follett’s thousand-page tome. If you like historical fiction, especially set in the middle ages, I recommend this one. Great book! We waited and waited for our bags. Everyone else had theirs and had left. That’s when we discovered American had put our bags on the earlier flight (the one we didn’t try to get on because of our bags!) and they were waiting for us by the baggage office. We were able to laugh about it. The two-hour drive home seemed to take much longer, but being in our own bed and close to our kids and grandkids felt great. It was a wonderful trip. Dave will be working on a slide show this week and I will add pictures to my blog as well. I’ll keep you all posted on when those are ready for viewing. Ciao!