Month: August 2019

Day 13 was another day at sea and the last day of the Mediterranean cruise. I actually got a shower because Mary put the plastic bags in my chair and we use my chair for the shower. I was feeling a lot better than the day before. We stayed in the house till about 11 o’clock. We watched TV and worked on our computers and did this and that. Around 11 o’clock we decided to go down and play bingo at 1130. We bought a $59 ticket set which was 30 tickets for each game. We went down there and there were a lot of people. We did not win anything. I don’t even think we were close on any of the cards. For lunch we went to the Savoy dining room where we dinner. They were having pub lunch again. Just like the one about a week or so earlier, we both had fish and chips. I had a beer called John Smith. It was very weak almost like a light beer. Our fish and chips were good and we had bread pudding for dessert. I’m surprised at the number of people that take advantage of the pub lunch. The place was filled. After that we decided to head to the art auction. It was the last art auction of the cruise. It started about 130 or so. It was much more subdued than the earlier art auction. I would say the majority of the pieces went without being sold. Mary and I bid on and one a Warner Bros. cartoon seen for $90. I sawed later and it has to do with golf. I asked the salesman if we could look in a different Warner Bros. one for the same cost and he said we could. We will later in the week. As part of the auction the host and auctioneer offers a prize called the Clapper award. He looks for people in the audience that consistently clap and are involved in the proceedings. I was kind of being a pain in the butt by being and clapping and in general making a fool of myself. This worked however. Mary and I won the Clapper award. This means we get to pick a piece of art of a limited selection. I would imagine the piece itself would probably go for hundred bucks or something like that. It’s nothing grand, but it is fun. We are busy in the day-to-day events of our vacation but yet are real-life peeks in every so often. There is a hurricane off the coast of Florida – called Dorian. Obviously there’s not much we can do about it. We did find a station on the ship TV that discussed the hurricane. We received a text from Linda and Tom something about sandbagging. We both wondered what in the world are they sandbagging. I guess time will tell. After the art auction we walked back to the picture display area. We picked up a boatload of pictures from the night before. There was one that was missing that we would pick up later in the night but as I mentioned above our total was over 200. After we picked up the pictures right next door was bingo. We arrived a little late so all the tablets were gone. We ended up with nine cards and 12 cards for the final game. As with the morning session we didn’t win anything. We were close on a couple of the cards, but nothing came of it. Someone won $2600 on the final game. After bingo, we came back to the room. We both took a nap for a while. It was about 6 o’clock by time we got our stuff together – cleaned up and dressed. We were headed to dinner. Again, seated in the same row we sat all cruise, we had a nice dinner. We finished off the white from the night before. I had a seafood terrine which was really good. For my entrée I had the burger. The burger was spiced up with jalapenos and kimchi. Mary had soup and New York strip steak. She liked both of them too. For dessert we had a slice of baked Alaska. It’s basically ice cream with meringue around it. It was good. Yet to wait a while for to melt a bit before you could eat though. From dinner we decided to go back to the picture area to see if we could find the missing picture. One of the picture people found it for us. It was buried behind some other pictures. While Mary took care of this I wandered around. It was now about 9 o’clock. We decided to go up to the casino to get the money off our cards. Because it was the last night of the cruise you had to cash in all your money. I had about $123 on my card from playing poker one of the first nights. We cashed up the money on our cards and headed home. Mary went down later and picked up some tea for us. We watched a movie called Up Shots. It was pretty good. It was funny. By time this was over it was almost 12. We did gain an hour last night because we moved back into London time. Tonight we lose that hour again as we move out of London time heading east. That was pretty much day 13. This also signals the end of first half of our vacation. The Mediterranean cruise was cool. It had some very interesting places. It went by very quickly. It’s amazing how fast 14 days can go. We learned a lot about several countries. I would have to say that the highlight of the trip was either Marseille or Cetau. Seville was a close third. I would have to say that Rome was a letdown. Florence was cool and I could see going back there. I can see flying into one of these cities and spending some solid time to learn them better. As I mentioned above somewhere we were only seen about 2% of a given city or country. It’s just enough to give us a tiny taste of what the entire city or country could be. It’s probably obvious but the personal guides are much better than the generic Princess managed excursions. The people we met on our personal guided trips will worth every penny. We actually have more stops on the Baltic cruise. Unfortunately, only one of them is a personal guide. We will spend two days in St. Petersburg. Other than that we are on Princess managed excursions. I believe in Poland we do not have anything arranged. We will have to see how they go. I actually have higher expectations for the Baltic cruise that I did for the Mediterranean. We’ll see how that plays out too.

Day 12 – Thursday – at sea. We slept in a little bit. Mary got up about 8 o’clock and I got up closer to nine. By time I was ready it was probably already 10:00. Mary decided she wanted to go to a presentation on camera lighting at 1045. She then wanted to go to bingo at 1130. I decided to stay in the room and work on this log. As I mentioned above, I also had to pay bills. There’s some discrepancy on how much we paid for some of the excursions. I had to look through several credit card statements to find what I think are the charges we paid for excursions. We will have to go to the excursions office or the sixth floor to figure this out. While I was in there I also paid the Costco card. I also paid my credit card. Beyond that, I spent the entire two hours or more working on this log. Mary recently came back from bingo. She did not win anything. We going to get cleaned up here and then go out for lunch. I’ll pick up the story from there. (I’m actually writing this Saturday, August 31.) We went up to 14 for lunch. We are leaving the warm weather. It was about 70 and sunny but the wind made it cool. The outside pool was empty but this pool that was more indoors was jammed with kids. I had a burger and fries. Mary had hotdogs. From there we walked back inside to the sixth floor to the store that sells perfume and face creams and other stuff like that. Mary was on the hunt for some Lancome. She says it was cheaper on the ship so she bought it here. After that we came back to the room. For whatever reason, I was cold and tired. Frankly, I felt like crap. While Mary went about her day – bingo and such – I stayed in the room. I fell asleep and slept hard for about two hours. Even after I woke up I wasn’t 100% but I did feel better. It was formal night. We had debated but then finally decided to get dressed up for dinner. I put on my tux pants, shirt and bow tie. I took the jacket with me and wore it for pictures. Mary had on her silver sequined dress. She looked good. We walked down to five and went to dinner. We were seated in the same area as we always have sat. We took the bottle of rose that we bought from the French place. It was actually pretty good. I’m not usually a rose fan. I had escargot and lobster tails. The busboy got me a second lobster tail. They were very good. The escargot was kind of bland but it was good. They’re usually more garlic. Mary had potato soup for her appetizer. She had beef Wellington for an entrée. She said she liked them both. I had a chocolate mousse thing for dessert. It was good. Mary had New York cheesecake. She likes cheesecake. After dinner, we made the rounds to six picture taking stations. We were in our finest clothes so we took advantage of it. I can say this now because we ended the first leg of the trip – we have 203 pictures of us from these photography stations. That is about 50 more than we had from the South America trip. Now we have this next 14 days where we will likely have 200 or more again. I’m not exactly sure why we need more than 500 pictures of us, but Mary likes it so that’s why we do it. We then went to the picture area where pictures from the previous days would be displayed. For whatever reason they were not out yet. So we came back with none. On her way back we stopped at the casino to see if anyone was playing poker. Of course no one wants. We sat around for a little while and I put $50 in a slot machine and lost it in a heartbeat. Mary lasted a little longer than I did on her $25 but she lost that too. We decided to call it a night and headed upstairs. That is day 12. It was a mixed day because I wasn’t feeling well early on. After I had dinner and a couple glasses of wine I started to come around. I was in 100% but I was well enough to go through the motions.

Day 11 found us sitting in port at a city called Cetua. It is part of Spanish Morocco which is on the African coast. This means that Mary and I officially hit our fourth continent. We’ve done North America, South America and Europe. This added Africa. We only have three more to go – Australia, Asia and Antarctica. These three will have to wait. Maybe our next cruise will take us to somewhere near Asia. Anyway, we got up early and were to breakfast by about 915. We both had something to eat – not a lot though. I had orange juice to put some liquid in my system. They also make some nice hashbrowns which are probably for zillion calories but they’re good. After we were done eating and drinking we made our way down to the fourth floor to disembark. It took a while to get through the people and wait through the elevators. A lot of people take the elevators instead of the stairs. It was a beautiful day outside. It had to be about 80° and not a cloud in the sky. It was early, but it stayed around 80°. Because it’s so close to the Atlantic Ocean I’m imagining that that kept it cool. In one of the stores we went into a few hours later Mary noticed that they actually sell winter coats. It must get cold there. Anyway we get off the ship and were directed to the shore. We took several pictures as we went and it was about a 15 minute walk into town. By chance, our first stop was – yes you guessed it – a church. It was a small Catholic Church. I didn’t see anything specifically interesting about it. It was an old church. We’re getting used to seeing these. Mary took countless pictures in the church to add her collection. After that we walked around from there to a huge plaza with trees and a sitting area and a few monuments. There were several statues of people who we had no idea who they were. The plaques on the statues were all in Spanish. You could kind of guessing they were based on the words but you weren’t sure. Around the back of this Plaza was the Cathedral – just a bigger church in my opinion. I was not able to go into this one. Mary spent a few minutes and site taking pictures of this and that. While I was on the outside playing with my GoPro camera. I’m starting to learn how to use the camera better. I took several pictures of the Plaza and surrounding area. When Mary came back out we decided to walk behind the Cathedral. Up a block or so was getting another coastline with a huge beach. We walked to the edge and took several pictures. The beach itself was very long – to the point we couldn’t see the start or finish. It was sparsely populated but those that were out there looked like they were having fun. It was actually one area that looked like it was designed for beach wheelchairs. We didn’t actually see one, but there was an area that had what appeared to be a ramp down into the water. We were too far away to see for sure but it looked like it. This whole town was very wheelchair friendly. Very few cobblestones. Everything was ramped nicely. All the sidewalks were done nicely. We wandered around the beach area for a little while. After that we decided to head back down towards the ship and see if we can get some shopping done. I noticed a couple of grocery stores when we left the ship. It took us a good half hour or more to go from where we were back down to the ship and then out the other direction. We ran into one grocery store that was by far more popular than the second one we saw. Anyway we wandered around there for about 20 minutes. I didn’t see anything I wanted to buy. Mary bought some nuts and a can of Pringles. She was on the hunt for Stevia. The first store didn’t have it. We debated if we should go down a little further and decided to because it was kind of early. We are glad we did because we hit the mother lode. The second store was a combination grocery store and department store. It was much bigger than the first one. Anyway, this one had Mary’s Stevia. It also had Monster energy drink. We bought the cans of Monster. That should be more than enough to carry me through the end of the trip. We also bought probably 10 boxes of Stevia. This is about 400 packets which should last Mary throughout the end of the trip. She probably goes through 30 to 50 packets a day. Lastly, we bought three bottles of wine. We asked the woman in the wine aisle what was good wine. She pointed out three bottles and we bought them. She better be right. With this all in our card we made it to the cashier. All of the stuff costs a total of €59. Now we had to figure out how to put it in our bags so we could plug it back to the ship. The wine bottles one in my backpack. Mary put all the Stevia and other stuff in her backpack. The Monster cans were kept in a separate bag which Mary carried. We were not that far from the ship. I would guess we were about half a mile away. We made it back to the ship without incident. Actually, a young guy pushed me part of the way. We made it back to security and up to the room. It was a very good visit. It’s a great town. I can see us coming back. We can officially say we’ve been on the fourth continent. Overall it was a very successful visit. 

Back on the ship, we headed to the room. We unloaded the bags. We both managed the pictures that we took that day. I freed up space on my card. One of the videos I took was 20 gig so that was messing everything up. I managed to move that to my laptop so both my phone and the cmera were happy. This took a while. Mary took a nap for about an hour. It was around 430 when the ship left port. We took numerous pictures and a video taped it to. We passed by the rock of Gibraltar. It was kind of fuzzy and unclear because of the distance and the humidity in the air, but we could clearly see it. We watched for a while longer. The cruise ship bypassed several container ships. Is an interesting time to watch all the ships in this one small area. By about 6 o’clock we had decided to get dressed for dinner. At dinner, for my appetizer I had cheese soufflé. Mary did too. We both had a sorbet pallet cleanser. For our entrée I had roast beef tips and some type of sauce. It was really good to try. Mary had Southern fried chicken which she liked. We both had ice cream – chocolate peanut butter. We also had fancy cookies. Again, it was a good dinner. We sat next to a couple we had met previously. By now the routine was set – after dinner we went and got our picture taken. There was only one or two spots where we can get our picture taken but we hit them both. We then walked over to the picture area to pick up pictures from the previous day. Again Mary picked up about 40 pictures. I think our total know is somewhere near 150. From there, it was back to bingo. We picked up the cards – I actually picked up a tablet which held 18 games for $45. Mary picked up her six cards. We were little early so we had to listen to Family Disco which was led by some DJ playing music had never heard before. Thankfully, it was over in about 15 minutes. In that time I ordered a drink called Bushmill Collins. It was pretty good. Bingo started. We didn’t get anything the first game, but I got to go on one of my cards it during the second game. This won us $125. So we were $50 up for this visit. We didn’t win anything the next two games. After bingo was over we decided to sit there and watch a silly game show called Fill in the Blank. It was truly silly and we did not win but we tried. After that, we went to five for the that made it back to the room. We watch the end of the movie we had started earlier in the week. It was frustrating because their TV network is not built for the demand. You watch five minutes and the thing would stop you have to restart it from that point forward. Eventually we got through the movie and then decided it was time for bed. That should cover day 11.

Day 10 found us at sea. We were moving between Sardinia and the North course of Africa. The previous night I slept like crap. I wish there was some consistency to my sleeping and not sleeping. There doesn’t seem to be a smoking gun. Anyway, that kind of set the tone for the day. I was tired. Not that this is a new occurrence so I can’t complain. We got up fairly early and we were on our way to the art auction at 930. I’m not exactly sure how we got roped into going to the art auction but we did. These art auctions are something else. They have about 250 pieces of art. Some of them is really nice. You wander around and take a look at the pictures and put little tags on ones that you might be interested in buying. Then you sit down and they bring the art up to the front and it is an option. If you want a piece of art you bid on it like any other type of auction. The prices go anywhere from $60 up to $30,000. And in this specific auction there were some Pablo Picasso’s and the one price was $171,000. No one bought this but it does show what they offer. They have several other gimmicks for lack of a better term. Mary and I did buy a $50 hand-drawn sketch of Betty Boop. As part of a mystery auction we also picked up a $60 hand sketch of Elmer followed. I don’t mind spending 50 and $60. We did look at some art which we were seriously interested in by a guy name David Walls. We learned later that he’s actually Chinese, but he does have some interesting landscapes. They don’t really going our house very well but there is one that has some green in it which would tie to the green on the walls of the house. There were a series of three of these paintings – there actually reproductions embellished by the artist. We had the opportunity to buy one more all at about $500 each. I don’t think we need $500 painting. The auction went till about noon I guess it was. After that we went and picked up pictures from the previous night. We went back to the room to the cath etc. We decided to go to pizza for lunch. We went down to six to the pizza parlor on the ship. We ate there the first day think it was. This time I had a ham and cheese pizza – it was pretty good. It wasn’t ham and cheese like you think. It was Parmesan cheese and prosciutto I think. Mary had a true pepperoni pizza. I also bought a class of Chianti. It was a nice lunch. It was around this time that the casino was running a slots tournament. Of course we played. Each round was $20. I played a round and did not make the final spot. Mary made the finals right off the bat. I plumped down another $20 to see if I can make the board. I did for about 30 seconds because another player came right along and knocked me off the board. I decided $40 was enough. We waited around for about 30 minutes or so, so Mary could run the finals. She was one of five people in the running for $500. She did receive a free T-shirt and a coupon for a free slot pull. There really is no logic to the slot tournament. It is simply luck based on your machine. If your machine is hot in the three minutes you’re doing the tournament you’re gonna win. If you have a cold machine you’re not gonna win. End of story. As it turns out, Mary did not have a hot machine. She actually came in fifth place. That’s okay. She tried. You can’t win if you don’t try. This ended just in time for us to get to the wine tasting we had signed up for days earlier. The previous winetasting was higher end and cost $25 each. This one was only 9.50 and featured lower end wines. We were seated at a table with a British couple. We did the idle chitchat thing. There were five wines. One was a sparkling wine from California I think. It was pretty good the next two were whites – one from Spain and one from the US. The last two were reds – one from Oregon and one from California. It was strange that the ones we like the British couple didn’t like. Obviously not much can be made of this but it was an interesting fact. This winetasting only lasted about a half hour. We drank our wine, listen to the presenters, and nibbled on the appetizers provided and made notes on the various wines. It’s good to taste on. There might be one that jumps off the plate. The white wine from Spain was pretty good – it’s great was something like Aribger. I’ll have to look it up. I wouldn’t mind buying that at some point. Then at 330 was bingo. What manner way back to the bingo area and sat there and lost. We weren’t even close in any of the cards. We went back to the room. We cleaned up and I think we napped for a few minutes. This day was one event after another and we were not done yet. When we did the art auction in the morning we made an appointment with one of the art ladies at 5 o’clock. The intent was to go through what we had done at 9 o’clock. To see if we really wanted to buy those $500 paintings I guess. As it turns out because we’re going on the second cruise we didn’t really have to do anything. We are in a discussion phase where we are committed to the two small paintings and we still have the option on the bigger $500 paintings if we want them. We agreed that over the next week or so we would continue talking to see if there’s anything else we liked. There are some Mark Godard and James Coleman pieces that Mary and I like. They are probably out of our price range but it doesn’t hurt to look. Godard is more pop art and Coleman is an artist that uses alternative materials like tinfoil and such. They’re both cool – I just don’t want to buy something for the sake of buying it. This discussion took a good hour so we did not make it to dinner until almost 630.

To dinner we go. We took the bottle of red Ferme Blanche we bought in Marseille to dinner. It was pretty good but not as good as the Italian wine we had earlier. I’m not complaining though. It was good. For dinner I had seafood antipasto as an appetizer. I had pot roast for my entrée. Mary tried the soup and liked it. She also had the prime rib again. I’m pretty sure she liked it. For dessert she had ice cream of some sort. The one thing that we can say is that the food is good. It’s hard to have an amazing dinner every night especially 14 nights in a row. I would say that the food was very consistent. It’s hot, it’s fresh and it tastes good. Can’t argue with that. Dinner was quick. We were done by about 730 or so. Mary decided that we should go back upstairs and make a couple of phone calls because it was only around noon in the states. Our new boss texted her the day before asking her to call him. After we figured out how to call the states she talked to him for a few minutes. Apparently, by mistake, Mary facetimed his number and he was curious what she wanted to talk about. After the initial confusion was settled they chatted for a couple of minutes. He sounds like a really wired guy. I’ll be curious to see how the relationship goes. The second call was to the company that we bought the Smart Drive from in Chicago. I think it’s called new motion. Mary talked to them briefly about the possibility of them helping us get the drive fixed or swapped out in Southampton. As it turns out they’re not allowed to do anything with the SmartDrive as far as fixing or swapping goes. That all has to be handled by the company who makes them now called Permobil. Not much progress was made there but at least we knew. We’ll have to get it fixed when we return. These two phone calls, at $2.95 a minute, probably cost somewhere near $50 or $60. Not much we could do there. Because it was still early we went back downstairs and got some pictures taken. After that we wandered into the casino. We are hoping there would be someone to play Texas hold-em but there was no one. Mary plunked some money into a slot machine but managed to lose it. We had the money that I won from Roulette a few days earlier and decided to go back and play roulette. It took us about 20 minutes but we went through the $71. The good thing, if there is a bright spot, is the casino host bought us a drink. I had a bottle of beer and Mary had a Drambuie on the rocks. It was a nice touch. After we drank those we went down to five for tea and cookies, headed back to the house and pretty much called it a night. We did watch part of some movie until we got to tired. That was day ten. It goes to show that these crew ships have a lot of things for people to do. On any given day there are probably 30 or 40 events listed in the daily newsletter called The Princes Patter. If you were inclined, you could run from 7 AM until 2 AM nonstop. The example above of our at Sea day shows that we can be busy too. It was a good day.

I think I’m up to day nine – Sunday – Rome. We had to be up again early so Mary ordered breakfast in the room. This morning we were ahead of schedule for the most part so we were not pressured. It was also the first morning in a while where nothing was broken. Everything was going well. I hope that it would continue. After breakfast, with all of our junk in our bags, we went back downstairs to The Explorers Lounge. We made it there with about 10 minutes to spare. We sat there for about 15 minutes before being directed off the ship. We went through security and down the ramp. At the bottom of the ramp we were instructed to go to the tour buses. I immediately thought we were in store for another big bus but as it turns out there were mini vans with lifts. They were built to hold two or three chairs. We were loaded onto one of these vans with another family. The husband was in a wheelchair – manual. The wife was in a scooter. The driver loaded up them first. I got in last. Mary and I sat next to each other. After everyone was loaded the tour guide introduced herself. What was becoming a theme, happened again. She was on a microphone that really just garbled her English which was pretty good but hard to understand with her accent. So the combination made it difficult to understand what she was saying. That didn’t stop her from talking nonstop for the hour or so it took to get to Rome. We are actually in a town about 50 miles away from Rome itself. Nonetheless, we were off. The lady talked while the guy drove. Again, after some sidestreets we found ourselves on the autostrada. We went for quite a while until we actually hit Rome itself. For the next hour or so the driver drove around Rome. We saw the Coliseum – because I recognize it. We passed several other buildings that I’m sure meant something to the people were able to understand the tour guide. Rome is not a very clean city. Everything had that layer of dirt feeling. None of the buildings were white. They were all kind of gray. Obviously some of the more historic ones I can understand. But everything was gray. Many buildings, too many, were covered and graffiti.. We went by all kinds of monuments. Unfortunately because we didn’t understand the tour guide, we didn’t know what we were passing off. This didn’t stop Mary from taking pictures. I think she said she took 183 today. She’s well on our way to 1000.. At the end of this driving around town segment, we pulled up outside of Vatican City. The driver let us all out and the tour guide walked us about four or five blocks into an area where there were hundreds of people trying to get in to see the Pope. He was to give a Sunday address had 1 o’clock in the afternoon. We got caught up in that rush of people. Mary wanted to go inside but I said no. I didn’t want to get lost in a sea of hundreds of people knowing that I had to be at the pickup point in 45 minutes. Again, I was the bad ass. So instead Mary took pictures from outside the gate. She actually got some nice ones of the TV screen projecting the Pope. I did a sound recording of him. It was only about 15 seconds and it was all in Italian. While we were standing near the entrance to the common area where people could see the Pope, one of the crew members of the ship asked us for help. There were two women who need to talk to the Princess representative. Our driver had wandered away so we didn’t have a representative right by. While Mary was taking pictures and I was wandering around, a Princess representative showed up. We hooked the two up together and I don’t know what they worked out. It was at this time that the Pope started talking. I think his sermon was for about 20 minutes maybe. We were in the store which was the pickup point when he ended. We had found the bathroom that would work for us – we were lucky again. By time we finished the cath and Mary bought us water. Our tour guide was ready to take us back to the van. We only spent maybe an hour outside of the van. Before heading back to the van, Mary bought for kitchen magnets with Rome on them. This was after she got some euros out of the ATM. She was down to know euros she bought €300 from money in our checking account. It came to about $379 I guess. So, with the kitchen magnets purchased we made our way back to the van. We were loaded back up in the van and we drove back. That’s pretty much what happened. About an hour later we were dropped at the dock. We tipped both the tour guide and the driver. What manner way back on the ship after we cleared security.

Once upstairs in our room we took a few minutes to cool off and gather our things. It was only a little after 3 o’clock so we went upstairs to 14. I worked on this log. I played with my GoPro camera.

Monday, August 26, 2019

Mary and I are sitting on the 14^th floor. The ship is anchored off the coast of Sardinia. I would say that we are about a mile offshore. You can see the boats that they use the test go back and forth down below. It is another perfect day – large puffy clouds in the sky. It’s cool where we are sitting – probably in the 80’s, but in the sun was probably closer to 100. Because we knew I couldn’t get off the ship I slept in a little bit. Mary got up about 730. I got up closer to 830. Before coming up to 14 I spent some time managing the pictures on my camera, my iPhone and my laptop. I cleaned off the cars on the GoPro so I shouldn’t worry about space for a while. I copied the files from the camera to my laptop. On my phone, I believe a bunch of pictures that I did not need to free up some space. All of this management took about a half-hour. We got our stuff together and walked up to 14. We had a quick breakfast. That was about an hour and a half ago. It took me that long to update and edit the log entries that I wrote yesterday.

Just to close out last night – after we came from Rome – we cleaned up and went to dinner. I guess needed to dinner about 730. We were seated in the same area where we are always seated. At least one couple in the same area were familiar to us. We took one of the bottles that Mary bought for me in Florence. This was a test to see what would happen when we brought our own wine to dinner. The busboy picked up the bottle and opened it – end of story.  So far we have not seen any corkage fee. The wine itself was excellent. Mary could not have found a better bottle. Even Mary had two glasses. As an appetizer I had a crab and artichoke dip. It was good. For my entrée I had an ox tail and pasta dish. It too was very good. Mary had two appetizers – both soups. One was a hot chicken broth of some sort and the other was a cold apple of some sort. The first was good. The second not so much. For her entrée she had cottage pie which was very similar to shepherd’s pie. For dessert I had apple and walnut spring rolls. Mary just said fruit. We drank about half the bottle of wine before the waiter went away for the night. We spent probably another half hour or more talking to another couple that was seated in the sink.. Her name was Deborah and his with Brian they were from Ottawa. I got the impression that she was a nurse because she and Mary talked nursing for quite a while. It was another good dinner. Mary and I discussed it this morning – as the food better now or worse? I would say that the food is as good or better than it has been in the past. It definitely is not worse. After dinner, we made our way from 5 to 6 and then to 7. Along the way, had our pictures taken. Mary is quickly approaching 100 pictures taken of us. On seven we picked up the pictures that were taken the day before. We then walked by Explorers Lounge. It was 10 o’clock and a game show called True or Moo was starting. We found a spot and waited for the show to begin. Mary waved a waiter over and I ordered a Sapphire Princess Martini. It was a special drink of the day. Mary ordered a Coke zero. The game show was simple – the host would post a fact and the contestant have to decide if it was true he or she would say true if it was false or should say moo. If they were able to get three out of five correct they won a prize. Almost everyone won a prize except for which booby prizes such as straws and napkins. My martini was pretty good. Not something I would drink often. The game show lasted about 30 minutes. From there we went back down to five to get tea and cookies before bed. It wasn’t long and we were asleep. I guess that was day nine. I will have to go back and verify that the numbers. I already covered how we started daytime above. Will probably sit on 14^th for a little while longer. I want to go to seven and push for a while. I think that’s good for now. I’m over 18,000 words. That’s about 2000 words per day. That’s okay this will provide a good history 10 or 15 years from now when I reread it. I’m sure it will bring back good memories.

Thursday, August 29, 2019

Again, I am playing catch-up. As I write this the ship is off the coast of Portugal heading north. Today is an at Sea day as well as tomorrow. Mary is down playing bingo right now. I stayed in the room to pay some bills. Even though or 2000 miles from home we still have to pay bills. The Internet connection on the ship works but it’s terribly slow. Overall, we are ahead of schedule budget wise for this trip. This doesn’t mean that we should start spending like crazy but we are spending less than projected. This is a good problem. I went and spent some time looking at this document. I know that there are some typos buried within. I try to review it at least once before I publish it, but it needs a deeper dive. I am truly confused on the number of days right now. If I count Southampton as one we should be on day 12 today. Which means yesterday in Cetua, Spanish Morocco was day 11. The day before that was day 10 and we were at sea. Which makes the day we were in Sardinia day nine. I think this is where we pick up the story.

To reset the stage, I left off that day nine in the afternoon. We were anchored off the coast of Sardinia. We could not get off the ship because it was a tender spot. I made updates this log well were sitting on 14 this took most of the early afternoon. It was somewhere near 2 o’clock when we went down to the seventh floor. Around the outside of the seventh floor is a track of sorts where you can walk literally around the ship. Actually, on the ship at the front of the ship there are stairs only those that can do the stairs can walk completely around. I am able to push from the front porch side all the way to the front of the ship on the other side. There is a sign that says three complete loops is a mile. Over the next two hours or so I probably did that loop four or five times. It’s the first time in several weeks that I actually got in more than 3000 pushes. I’ve been watching my shoulders to make sure that they don’t get overworked. Doing the 3000 felt good. It was a perfect day outside. It was not too hot. There were several people on the deck with me but it was not crowded because many people were ashore. While I was doing this Mary sat on a lounge chair and listen to one of her lectures. It worked out good for both of us. I guess it was about 430 or five as the ship pulled out of Sardinia when we went upstairs. We came back upstairs to the room and got cleaned up for dinner. I kept some notes and they say that for dinner I had ceviche as an appetizer. For my entrée I had steamed mussels. Unfortunately I didn’t jot down what Mary had. For dessert I had a tart of some type. We finished the bottle of wine we started the night before. I didn’t make any notes on if we met anyone that night at dinner. Chances are we did or, more likely, we talked to people that we had met previously. It seems that the maître d’ seats the same people in the general area night after night. For example, Barb and Bob, we have been seated while they were seated several times ready. This is neither good nor bad – just an observation. After dinner, we stopped to get our pictures taken. There were four spots where they were taking pictures. We hit them all. From there we went to the pictures area to pick up pictures from the previous night. I will mention it later but our stack continues to grow. Mary is on a bingo kick. After we picked up our pictures, we wandered up to Club Fusion to wait for bingo to start. We were there early so there was a previous event in action – Dance to the Music. It was a British band and they were playing primarily British music so I did not recognize much of it. There are a lot of kids – little kids. This must be where families hang out because it’s kind of off the beaten path. There’s a lot of space for kids to run around. While we were waiting for bingo I ordered a drink called Greyhound – this was vodka and grapefruit. About 45 minutes later bingo started. Mary plays six cards. There are four games. The last game is the one where you have the ability to win the jackpot. The jackpot right now is somewhere near $2000. They also have a raffle ticket piece and Mary won additional tickets for the last game. On one of those sheets we came within one number of winning the prize. Someone got bingo before us though. After bingo, we went to five. We got our tea and something to nosh on before we went to bed. That pretty much wraps up day nine.

Day eight found us in Livornia, Italy, about 50 miles or so from Florence. Because we had to be off the ship by 745 we ordered room service for breakfast. Mary had a sandwich and some fruit and other things. I had a Danish. This excursion was a Princess arranged one. Our string of luck continued. One of the pieces of my GoPro camera was laying on the table. It was the door that hide the power connectors. It wasn’t a big deal. I just had to make sure it didn’t get wet. Nonetheless, another day and something fell apart. So, after eating breakfast we made our way downstairs. This time we had to go to the Wheelhouse Bar. From there we were ushered our way down the dock area where we were pointed towards one of those big tour buses again. This time there was no confusion because there was a spot for me on the bus. This driver seemed to have a little more knowledge on the lift. He actually rode the lift with me up and down. So I loaded on the bus and tied down. It was a full bus. Mary had to share the empty seat next to her. As I mentioned above, the port was about 50 miles from Florence. Along with the driver was a tour guide. It was a lady sat at the front of the bus and talked for the entire trip up to Florence. Even Mary said she could not understand her. I did not try to hear her. The bus ride was uneventful. We passed miles of the Italian countryside. We did go through many small towns. We saw a lot of corn, cotton and vineyards. There wasn’t much traffic on the way out. It’s interesting how their highways – autostrada. – are. There are two lanes for each direction. There is no shoulder to speak of. If you go off the road you are literally off the road. I couldn’t see anyone’s speedometer but the ranges in speed were all over the map. There were some cars that seemed to be going 30 mph and others going 90 mph. And I don’t think that as much of an exaggeration. They do obey the slower traffic stays to the right rule. The other thing that is interesting is that the motorbikes in and out of traffic. They actually go directly between cars at high rates of speed. I find it somewhat amazing that there are not accidents every 2 miles. In town it is even crazier. Those roundabouts have cars going in every direction. Just part of the experience.

Eventually, we pulled into Florence. You would not know that based on the signs. Everywhere it said Firenze, which must mean Florence in Italian. All along the trip the tour guide was talking about the various museums and plazas. She gave us a map and was talking about the map. We couldn’t understand it so we were kind of guessing. she pointed out of the highlights. Eventually, we stopped at a corner which was basically unpassable by cars beyond that point. We were instructed that this was our pickup point – in five hours. This being an ancient part of the city, there were cobblestones everywhere which made the going terrible. I should mention to you that the weather was drizzling. I was afraid we were going to get rained on. Thankfully, that did not happen. The clouds broke up maybe an hour or so later. We were instructed to follow the tour guide to a store on the opposite side of the Plaza. I have the map in the room and I will put the name of it in later. So we bounced our way about a quarter of a mile in the drizzling rain to the leather store. There’s something to do with the Princess recommended store where we should be able to get discounts. The leather in the store was amazing. Beautiful leather coats. Leather gloves. Leather purses and wallets and belts – anything you can imagine leather. All that very night. Unfortunately the prices were also nice – in a not good way. The average coat was around €400 which is pretty close to $500. If I was interested in a leather coat, I would consider it. There was some gold demonstration going on in the other room and it took us a while to get down there because we needed to find the ramps. By time we got there demonstration was over. We did go over and look at the gold anyway. They had some really nice pieces. We spent about 10 minutes wandering around that store before going back out to the Plaza.

Thankfully, the street names are on the corner of every building. We worked our way down one long incredibly narrow street until we ran into another Plaza. We actually went up the ramp of a building – I don’t know what the name of it is – to get out of the way of traffic. At the top of this ramp was what appeared to be the front of the church. All the doors were locked except for one which Mary went into. I couldn’t get in there. I sat outside for 10 or more minutes wondering what she was up to. She came out and said it’s amazing in there. She showed me some of the pictures. Then she decided to go back in and take a video. All kinds of religious artifacts. She was gone again for another 10 minutes. When she came back out we plotted our next strategy. We didn’t really have anything in mind so we went to the next biggest building on the map. From the Plaza we needed to go to the upper left corner and take that street straight back to yet another Plaza. This Plaza had hundreds of people and it. They were all standing outside of this one Museum. I need to put the name of the museum here. Initially I didn’t think we should go in the museum simply because it was a museum. That didn’t stop Mary. We went up to the entrance and we waited in line. We were in line for about 10 minutes before one of the museum guides walked over and ushered us forward. She handed us a pair of tickets and told us where to go to lock up our bags. We were getting into the museum for nothing. Mary had said that people on the bus had actually ordered their tickets online because they were afraid they would not get in. The line was not that long and we got in for free. After we put our bags in a locker we took the elevator up to the second floor. This was a huge room with huge murals along all the walls with smaller murals all along the ceiling. Supposedly, Leonardo da Vinci was to paint the murals on the wall. He started the project but never finished. Another painter finished it after da Vinci abandoned it. I will have to look this up but the murals were in relationship to some battle. The room had to be 200 feet long by 100 feet wide. The murals themselves at the be 40 or 50 feet across. This was all done in the 1500s. So the building and the murals were more than 400 years old. After leaving that room we went up to the third-floor. On this floor there was an apartment that was built in the building. It was a big room – maybe 40 x 40. Again with pictures on all the walls and the ceiling. These pictures though were all gods and goddesses. They all tell a story. I just don’t know what the story is. Mary took pictures of the explanation so I might add detail here later. There were countless marble sculptures in the room too. Adjacent to this room was an outdoor area, which I couldn’t get out to because of stairs. We have pictures of it but it was an open air room, again probably 40 x 40. It had incredible views of the city. Mary took a bunch of pictures here too. There were a couple of other rooms with the various items in them. Nothing worth mentioning though that I remember. We were probably inside the museum for about an hour maybe an hour and a half. We wandered around the first floor which really was part of the museum but it was open to everyone. There were huge sculptures. I’m not exactly sure what was being depicted but this one sculpture have to be 30 feet tall. It looks like a David, but it wasn’t. Again, we scored on the bathroom. The museum had a nice disabled bathroom. So we wandered our way back to the room that had the lockers. We picked up our bags and did the bathroom thing. It was now early afternoon and we were getting hungry. Across the Plaza from this museum was a restaurant – among several in a row. We just took the first one we saw. One of the waiters or hosts opened the table for us. We sat outside. We were literally shoulder to shoulder with other customers. If you reached across you could take his water without them knowing – that’s how close. We looked at the menu. I went straight to the wine. I ordered a glass of white dry. I later learned their dry white was Chardonnay grapes. We ordered bruschetta and we each ordered a pizza. They were very similar but mine had artichokes. I forgot how much I like artichokes. So it took a while – not that I care. It was a perfect people watching spot. It was getting hot out and we were under a tentlike thing. What was interesting is the customers were kept cool by misted water. It was a great idea. We’ll have to think of something like this for our Florida backyard. So about 15 or 20 minutes later – I had drank half my wine – the bruschetta came. It was very good. I won’t lie and say it was the best I’ve ever had, but it was very good. I asked the waiter for a dry red wine. He came back with a class of Cabernet of some sort. It was pretty good. Probably another 10 or 15 minutes, maybe more, the pizzas came. They were very good. They are super thin. They were superhot. As with the bruschetta, they were very good, but not the best I’ve ever had. They were pretty big, but both Mary and I plowed through them. I don’t know if it’s just Italy or Europe in general but you have to ask for your check. When I realized he was not going to give us the check we had to ask for it. Not a big deal, obviously. I don’t remember the exact price but I believe it was €50 which included a tip. It was really warm out by now. It was also getting closer to the pickup time. We decided to work our way back towards the pickup spot. We knew that with the cobbled streets and traffic and any other stops we wanted to make, it could take an hour or more to get back. So we worked our way back from the one Plaza to the other. We walked pass an ice cream store, so of course we had to stop. Mary had a cone of vanilla I believe. I had a small dish of mint. Now we were really full, but happy. From that Plaza we made our way back to the Plaza where we initially came in. We decided Mary would push me to the corner near the pick up spot while she worked her way back to the leather store to go to the bathroom. I parked myself in the shade. I watched the people. It took Mary about 15 minutes to walk across the back. By now it was pickup time. We still had about two city blocks to walk to the actual pickup spot. We worked our way down there. As it turns out, there was a wine shop right across the street from the pickup spot. We were a few minutes early and I asked Mary to go in there and buy me a bottle of wine. I wanted something from the region – Tuscany. She went in the store while I sat across the street. She was gone for several minutes before she came out holding a glass with wine. She walked across the street and asked me to drink this glass. It was a very good red. She said it was a wine we couldn’t get in the United States. She also said that they had a bottle of wine from the winery owned by Sting the musician. It, too, was a red. Mary asked if she should buy both and I hesitantly said yes. I now have five bottles of wine I wasn’t sure how is was going to drink because of ship policy. I was not that concerned. We would figure it out – like everything. By this time the bus had arrived. They started loading us up. It was a long and we’re on our way back. We drove almost straight back. I don’t remember anything specific about the ride back except that it was a repeat of the way out. The traffic might’ve been a bit heavier. The ship was set to leave at 530. The bus pulled in at 510. We made our way off the bus. We tipped the driver but not the tour guide. Because we had not bought our city magnets Mary bought them in the terminal before we got back on the ship.

Overall, Florence was nice. It started out a bit shaky with the lousy weather and cobblestones everywhere. In the end though it turned out to be an adventure. We saw a lot of good architecture. The museum was cool. We took a ton of pictures of the scenery. We had excellent food and wine. We brought home wine. The trips on the bus were uneventful. I would say that someday, given the chance, we could come back to Florence. We probably could spend two full days in any one of those plazas.

Back on the ship we came to the room. We took some time to chill out. Mary downloaded her pictures. I watched a couple of movies. Mary decided to do some laundry. Actually, she ended up doing it all. While she was doing the laundry I watched movies. Around 7 o’clock or so, we agreed to go down to the seventh floor to look for pictures. I took my GoPro camera in hopes that they could fix the broken door. We worked our way down there and Mary picked up pictures as we went. She must’ve had 30 pictures in the pile. We made our way up to the counter where we asked the guy about the camera. He quickly fixed it because it has happened to him in the past. He showed Mary how it was done so in case it happens again. He also disabled the button on top of the camera which would turn it on by accident. I’m hoping this will not use up the battery too quickly., I managed to somehow turn it on in the bus in the morning so it was out of juice by time I actually wanted to use it. That is how you learn – by mistake. After he fixed my camera, he took about 20 minutes to scan in all of Mary’s pictures. From there we walked our way up to six. Wanted to stop at the main desk and ask a couple of questions. Along the way, down in the foyer on the fifth floor were Irish dancers. We stopped for a few minutes and watched the Irish dancers. In my mind I thought it was kind of strange – we are in a Mediterranean cruise off the coast of Italy but yet the entertainment is Irish – again, strange but true. At the counter we asked about the wine policy and found that we were okay. We can take the wine to the dining room and they will charge us $15 for corkage. The wine that we bought was not that expensive so in the end I’ll probably be saving money. Mary also asked about my tuxedo jacket. The one they gave me at the start of the cruise is too small. The hope is that they will provide a jacket that is the right size for me. With that information, we went down to five. Because we had not eaten, we stopped at the little café where Mary gets her tea. I asked for a toasted tuna sandwich. I also got some pasta. Mary had a toasted ham and cheese. With this we walk around the corner and found the table. We ate it all. There were a few people that we have met on the ship that wandered by and we said hello to. We have been on the ship for about eight days and there are a lot of faces that now say hi too. After a quick little dinner, we went back upstairs. I continued watching movies while Mary went down and got the laundry. Another almost big disaster was Mary left her phone in the laundry room. Thankfully one of the maintenance men returned to the sixth floor versus stealing it. She had to track down her phone, but she did get it back. We had another big day ahead of us so we were not long before bed. Another successful day.

Sunday, August 25, 2019

I am three days behind in this log. The reason I am behind us because we have been busy. My last entry had to do with Barcelona. Since then we have done Marseille, France, Florence, Italy and today was Rome. As I write this we are eight days into our 28 trip. We have done so much in eight days it’s hard to envision another 20 days. Nonetheless, that’s what we’re doing. Right now though we get a break for a few days. Tomorrow we are on the island of Sardinia and I can’t get off the ship. Mary said she might go into town. We’ll have to see what it’s like when we get there tomorrow. After that we have a day at sea. Admittedly, I could use these two days down. I was thinking about it this morning as I lay there staring at the ceiling – some things never change – we are doing the cities and countries that such a pace that we’re only seeing maybe 2% of the given city or country. Based on what I learned from Seville and Barcelona I would say that Spain is a very nice country I know these two cities were really nice. Of course like all big cities I’m sure they have their downsides, but we didn’t see them. Based on my experience with Marseille, I would say that France is pretty nice. I’m smart enough to know that one experience in one city does make up for the country. I guess I will cover this little bit more as I get into each day. I will say that right now because I’m three days behind I have already forgotten certain details that either Mary and I caught in pictures.

Let’s go back to the day after Barcelona – the day we went into Marseille. By now you’ve read the story about the broken shower chair. Of course her string of luck continued. We were  getting ready to go off the ship onto Marseille when we hooked up the SmartDrive. It would not work. All the lights were there and it be but it would not drive the chair. We didn’t have a lot of time to deal with it so left it behind. Nonetheless, I was not happy – two days in a row was something going wrong right off the bat. I tried not to let it sour the whole day. Because it took a few minutes to play with the SmartDrive we are running behind. Not that it mattered because we meeting are driver at 9 o’clock downstairs. We went upstairs and Mary had a little breakfast. I don’t remember what I had but I don’t think it was much. We did our thing to get off the ship. As we worked our way through the terminal to the parking lot we saw a lady holding a sign with my name on it. This was our driver. We later learned that her name was Cecile. We also learned out later that she is a 49-year-old woman who grew up in Marseille. She was very animated. She was a nice lady as we would learn. After we did our introductions we walked out to the parking lot where she had the lift equipped van. She loaded me up into the van and tied me down. We were off on a six hour adventure with her. The boat actually docked in Marseille. Unlike Seville where we had to travel two hours to get there. She weaved the way up and around through the town until we got to Notre Dame de la Guarda – a fairly small church out on a very high hill that overlooks the city of Marseille. Like all churches it had very interesting architecture, stained-glass windows and various bits of history. What was notable about this church  was that people go there after having near death experiences. They go there to thank God for surviving their particular accident. This was symbolized in several different ways, but most notably there were long strings hanging from the ceiling. On each of the strings were model boats or model airplanes, for the most part. Each one of the boats and/or airplanes signified a specific near death experience. People donated money to the church to keep it running. There were also other ways of this acknowledgment of near death experience was symbolized. There were plaques on the wall with dates, for example. Considering the churches we’ve been in, this one was tiny. As I mentioned, the church was on a hill overlooking the city we got incredible pictures of this similar to what we saw in Barcelona. We could see forever.

From there we loaded up and continued driving. We weaved our way up to wine country, specifically Cassis wine country. It has a specific appellation for the area. It took us about an hour to get there – all along the way, Cecile was telling us about this and that. She had a lot of history. We saw a lot of French countryside. We went by countless wineries. There were several small towns were passed. They all seemed very similar – small with roads that were just wide enough for the car. Mary took a zillion pictures on the way. We wound our way up until she finally pulled into the driveway of the winery called Ferme Blanc – which means white farm. We unloaded and went into the tasting room. It was really just a small room inside a huge old barn. We were introduced to sales guy. Of course I don’t remember his name, if he told us, but he was a young guy – spoke decent English. Over the next 20 minutes or so, Mary and I sampled two different whites, one red, one rose and one sparkling wine. Because it was not from the Champagne region they could not call their sparkling wine champagne, but it was the same thing. They were all very good. French wines have that flat earthy taste that I like. Even Mary liked them all. Then we had to decide if you wanted to buy any. I did some debating because I wasn’t sure what the ship policy was. Eventually, we bought three bottles – a white, the rose, and the red. Mary also bought some olive oil. There were two different kinds of which I don’t know what the difference was. We bought both anyway. We were saying our goodbyes when we found out that barn had a bathroom that I could use. That is one of the strange things that we run into every so often – there are brand-new buildings built in modern cities that do not have bathrooms that are assessible, yet we pull into a winery that’s been around for 300 years, go into a 200-year-old barn and find a bathroom that is spacious as the one we have at home. Strange but true.

From there we loaded up and continued up and down the road until we ended up in a small town on the seaside which I don’t remember the name of right now. Mary thinks it starts with an “O”. I’ll have to look on the map later. Anyway, this was a very popular spot. We eventually found a parking spot near the water. We walked up to the water’s edge. From this you could see various aspects of the small town. It had a bridge of some sort that one along the waterway. There was a good size beach with a couple hundred people laying on the sand or wading in the surf. We took a lot of pictures and listened to the history that Cecile provided. It was an interesting place from a landscape perspective because way up high there was an ancient fort, I guess you call it, that was used to protect the town. To the left of that probably a half mile as the crow flies was what they call Charlemagne’s crown. It is a rock formation that literally looks like the crown. Mary’s pictures capture this pretty well. After lounging around near the beach for a short while we walked up to the little plaza area. Earlier in the day there had been a farmers market and all the people that were selling their wares were now loading them up back into their trucks. This made for a very chaotic area, but on the other side was this little hole-in-the-wall restaurant. Apparently, Cecile had been there before. We found a table sitting just outside the door. We looked at the menu and tried to decide what we wanted. The first thing I looked for was wine. I’m in France so you got to drink the wine. Instead of by the glass they had a menu that said something along the lines of Blanc – 12 cc, ¼ L, ½ L, or L. It makes sense in hindsight, but the quarter meant a quarter of a bottle. This equated to about two good-sized glasses. So I ordered 1/4L Blanc. In hindsight we should have had crepes like Cecile did. In France eat French food. No, we ate salad and pizza. Actually, Mary had a salad and we shared the pizza. It was a four cheese pizza so at least it had French cheese. Maybe that counts. Anyway, the food was really good. We sat there for a bit while I finished my wine. By now it was early afternoon. We had about an hour or so back to the ship. Cecile suggested that we go through the national forest to see those sites and work our way back down to the ship. We agreed.

The straps she used in her van to tie my chair down would eventually loosen up and I would fall backwards. This is not a big deal because I wasn’t going to fly out the back but it was uncomfortable. It seemed the longer we went the more frequently it happened. This, and the fact that we were kind of bumping up against the time the ship would leave, made me think that we should skip the forest and head back into town. In the end, we did drive through the forest. We just didn’t stop. As we drove back through town we went through several areas that had stores. Mary was on the hunt again for sweetener – Stevia. We stopped at a couple places – surprisingly called casinos, but were actually small grocery stores. We didn’t have any luck. Mary was also looking for some of her face cream. Thinking that it might be cheaper in France because it’s a French product. No luck here either. The stops and the fact that there was a lot of traffic, maybe it was a good move to skip that last stop. We made our way back to the parking lot outside of the ship. There we had to say our goodbyes. Cecile was a great tour guide. We spent almost 6 hours with her. We saw a lot of Marseille and the surrounding area. Obviously, the personal guide is the way to go. And as expected, it is more expensive. We learn something new every time travel.

It was almost 5 o’clock in the afternoon. We made it back to the room. As soon as we opened the door I saw the SmartDrive laying on the floor and I remembered this morning’s feelings. I asked Mary to open my last bottle of Heineken. I chugged that down. We then set up the computers trying to find a telephone number for  the company that makes the drive. Mary found a number from the Nashville area and she called it. I was somewhat surprised that a guy picked up the phone and within about 15 minutes we knew the answer – unfortunately it was not good news. Apparently the circuit board in the drive has failed. There’s nothing to do with us sitting in France. He did commit to trying to see if he could find a dealer in Southampton and arrange a swap of some sort when we are in Southhampton. I don’t think it is likely, but there is some hope. It would be great if it worked out. The sad thing is that I’ve only had the drive for about six months and have used it ten hours total.  I can’t imagine I have more than 10 miles on it. I was not happy with the answer but had no choice.

With that behind us we chilled out for a while. Eventually, we went downstairs for dinner. I don’t remember if I mentioned this, but the previous night I ordered a bottle of white wine. I finished it off tonight. A French white. It was pretty good. I know that I had gazpacho as an appetizer that was really good. I don’t remember what I had is my second appetizer. I was hungry so I wanted a second something. For my entrée I had spicy shrimp. I don’t number what Mary had but I am sure it was in the beef family. Part of my unhappy morning was the fact that I woke up and found that 100 of my Internet minutes were missing. On the ship we are given 250 minutes as part of our platinum membership. I was down to about 150, but I woke up and looked I was down to 40. I wasn’t happy about this. So while we were looking for the latest pictures, we stopped at the Internet café. We asked the guy who runs it to take a look at my logs. He gave me back my hundred minutes. I thanked him and we were on our way. Internet minutes are like gold around here. I remember now that it was a formal night. I didn’t feel like getting into tux pants, etc. I left my jeans on, but wore a white shirt with a tie. Mary looked good in her black sequin outfit. That’s one thing about formal nights on the ship – there are some guys that think their T-shirt is formal. At the other end of the spectrum is the guy with the real tux – fitted for him. Thinking about it, I would say that there were even number at both ends. I kind of was in the middle. Jeans with a tie. I know that’s not formal but I just wasn’t in the mood. And actually Mary suggested that so I took advantage of it. It had been a long day and had another couple big days coming up so we went to bed. That’s the story for day seven.

It’s 2 o’clock in the afternoon today on Thursday (Day 6). We are sitting on the 14th floor. We just got back from Barcelona tour. Another day and another adventure. We knew we had to be downstairs for the tour by 9 o’clock. Mary got up about 730 or so. She got me up around 8 o’clock. I try to do all my stuff on my own. Of course I had to shave. And now the shower chair is broken we had to wash my hair. Not a big deal because I was done by 830 or so. Mary finished her stuff up and we were out the door by 845. We had to get Mary breakfast. Over our history the one thing that has to happen before we go out is Mary needs to eat. I’m sure it has to do with her sugar level and the fact that you takes her medicine in the morning. We packed everything we needed into our backpacks and headed out the door. The 14th floor was busy with other people getting breakfast. Everyone had the same idea – load up before all day journeys. I had a piece of brown bread just to put something in my stomach. Mary had eggs and bacon. She had a couple cups of tea. We are watching the clock pretty closely because we to be in the Explorers Lounge by 915. When we arrived down there at 917 everyone was already gone except for one Princess cruises lady. She directed us to the elevators after giving us our fancy little yellow stickers with the tour number. We made it off the ship and through the court building down to the ground in about 15 minutes. We were directed to a specific bus so we went down to that bus only to find out it did not have a lift. I’m rarely surprised when this happens any more. We walked back towards the ports building to find a princes person. They realize the mistake and then huddled around each other for about 15 minutes trying to figure out how they were to let me off the tour.
As it turns out, the first bus had a lift and it but there was already a guy in the disabled spot. They managed to talk him into sitting in a normal chair and putting his scooter downstairs. This freed up the spot for me to get into. It was one of those huge tour buses where the lift lifted you up about 10 feet in the air to get inside of the bus. I was never a fan of these buses. But the fact that they had a lift at all is a good thing. So the driver loaded me in the bus. We sat there for a few minutes before he loaded everyone else and then came tie me down. At first I didn’t think he was going to tie me down. I would not of been happy but if that was my only choice. So it took about 10 or 15 minutes to get the straps figured out. I’m not complaining because I’m sure he doesn’t do it every day. And every chair is different. When he was finally done I was secure. The tour lady was very helpful. As soon as the bus started moving she started into her speech. I couldn’t make out much of it so I basically ignored it. We drove for about 30 minutes to the seaside spot near the Barcelona Casino. It was a cool spot because you can see several of the buildings in the background while sitting on the shore so you could see I’m assuming the Mediterranean Sea. Before we left I was able to download the GoPro app onto my phone. I did some basic set up of the camera just enough to get it going. There are more features than I will be able to figure out, but I wanted to start playing with it. As it turns out it takes some really cool videos, time-lapse and still pictures. We hung out in this seaside area for about 45 minutes. We walked to the end of the pier. We wanted to take a selfie so Mary walked up to two women were sitting on the edge of the pier. Only Mary would find the only person in Barcelona who spoke English. As it turns out this lady was from Sweden on vacation. Mary had a nice discussion with her. We asked her how she liked Barcelona. Mary asked what was good to see in Stockholm. We had a good 10 minute conversation with the girl. She took some nice pictures of us too. After that we made our way back down the pier towards the bus. We were loaded back onto the bus and then we traveled for probably an hour. We went through several areas of the city and saw several things. We wandered through some of the better parts of town and probably because he had no choice went into some less nice parts of town. Mary got a bunch of pictures. I was able to use my GoPro on the bus obviously. We saw old churches and old buildings along with new modern building for the most part it is a very modern and clean city. It seems to be a very tourist friendly city.
Our next stop was somewhere near the Barcelona national museum. it was high on a hill so there were views of the entire city below. Spent about 45 minutes there. We took several pictures of the city below us. I played with my camera and got various pictures. Mary took several pictures too. We talked to the tour lady where to find a disabled bathroom. I think she went a bit out of her way, but she did find us a bathroom inside the museum. We did the cath and then headed back out towards the bus. Remember above where I said I don’t like buses? This time on the lift I damn near fell over backwards out of it. The bus was on a slight angle and I was facing the bus. This combination made me flipped backwards and the only thing that saved me for my retard bars. These are the bars in the back of the chair that stopped me from tipping backwards. Thankfully, they held while Mary rushed in the bus and pulled me forward. It was flipping scary. I hung for about three minutes on my back wheels 10 foot off the ground praying that I wouldn’t fall off. I was confident that the bars would hold, but you never know. So after that mini near disaster, I was happy to be back in the bus and tied back down. We had talked about having us drop us off in town and we would work our way back to the ship by taxi. The tour lady had to contact of people with disabled ready cars. When we saw where they were going to drop us and the fact that we are probably still a mile or so from the actual town center decided not to go. If we were actually in town and we had the taxi back, that would’ve been fine but this wasn’t the case. The bus pulled up to the port building and we got off. We gave both the driver and the tour lady tips. The both did a very nice job.
Back on the ground we went through the port building of course on the way back to the ship they have souvenir shop. That’s okay because were not able to go in town so we souvenirs. We picked up some magnets for both us and our mothers. I bought a wine stopper that says Barcelona on it. I also bought a little bottle of sangria in the shape of a bull. After I drink the sangria, I can keep the bull as a memento. We made it back to the ship and headed towards the room. We both needed a break. I pounded a Monster to get some liquid in my system. We were only in the room for about 10 or 15 minutes before we decided to come up to 14. So, Barcelona? I would say that Barcelona falls into the category of the city could visit again to learn more about. Just the three hours of
the tour showed us a lot but most of his was from the bus. There were several things I saw from the bus that I would interested in looking at up close. The two stops that we did were nice. I’m sure that the lady giving the tour had a lot of information that would’ve helped those that could hear and/or understand her. I’m not complaining because we did see Barcelona. We can add it to our list of cities that would like to visit again sometime. I learned later reading the Princess Plate, the church, La Sagrada Familia has been under construction since 1882. It’s still a few years from completion. The hill I mention is called Montjuic Hill. We also drove by the main area/stadium from the 1992? Olympics. Mary’s pictures tell a visual journey.
Now we are sitting up on 14. It is 90° even in the shade. The occasional wind helps keep it cool. I’m writing this update, checking email and publishing the earlier part of this log. Mary is across from me working on her pictures that she downloaded from her camera. She said she took about 200 more today. I had to Heineken bottles left from my pocket the other day. Mary brought one of them up for me. We will sit up here for another hour or so. As I write this the ship is leaving Barcelona. I’m capturing it on the GoPro because my photographer (Mary) is sound asleep in the bed. This tourist stuff is tiring.

Day four or five depending upon if you count Southampton. (Southampton, at sea, at sea, Cadiz, at sea)

Let’s just say this day did not start out great. As mentioned previously, we got this fancy doing portable shower chair. Throughout its short history we have had trouble with it. I actually thought this time he had it fixed but that turned out to be not the case. This time, unfortunately, I ended up on the floor. And so did Mary. Mary transferred me into the chair and we’re working our way towards the bathroom. The transition from the main room to the bathroom has a home that you need to get over and at the top of that home is an aluminum transition. You really have to talk to get me up that little Kellen over that transition. Well, the aluminum of the chair was not strong enough to handle that so the one leg bent. When the one leg bent it through my balance off and I ended up falling into the side of the cabinet. Mary fell on top of me so we were both on the floor. Thankfully neither of us was hurt but there was no way she was getting me off the floor by herself. Not only did the leg abound, but the socket that it fits into was torn in half. It would probably be strong enough if you are going on a flat floor, but trying to get over that transition was just too much for. So now how do we get off the floor? Mary called the general number and explain the situation. I don’t think they understood at first so she had a call back and explained it again a little differently. This time I got their attention and the guy came to the door pretty quickly. It was not a medical emergency. The first guy called a couple of the guys and all of a sudden there were three people here. They lifted me up and threw me on the bed and disappeared. That’s what we wanted. It is the first time in probably 20+ years that I’ve been on the floor. Thankfully I still bounce pretty well. That was the start of our day. We will have to deal with the shower chair company when we get back.

After that fiasco, Mary got me up and we were ready to go by about 1030 or so. Mary wanted to go play bingo at 1130 so we headed that way first. We picked up the pictures at the picture lounge and then went to play bingo I guess there were three games and Mary didn’t win anything. That’s okay I guess. It’s the first time in several cruises since she’s played bingo. After bingo, we went to the dining room on five for English pub lunch. We both had fish and chips. I had a beer called Gem Ale I’ve deftly had better, but it was a new experience. The food was good. They had some type of bread pudding for dessert which was bizarre at best. Of course, we got into a conversation with people were sitting next to so we were there for a while. More people from England. Talking about health insurance – yada yada yada. After leaving them decided to go to a presentation on the camera called GoPro 7. It’s a pretty fancy video camera for capturing moments. We sat through that presentation about 45 minutes. It’s an interesting camera. I want to see how much it costs here on the ship. I might take the dive although I’m not sure. After the presentation on the camera we made it back up to the room. Mary closed her eyes for a few minutes while I start working on this log. By this time it was already time for the 330 bingo. I decided to stay back and work on this log. I ended up taking a micro nap though. We had some intentions of going outside today but based on things we did the fact that it was cool in the wind we decided to stay in. Mary did some investigating after the 330 bingo and found the sanctuary and gym. We have plenty of days to explore these more. On the Princess homepage it says it’s 86 out there but that doesn’t account for the wind off the sea. The lady we talked to at lunch that might be able to see dolphins so that’ll be something to look for I guess. Mary came back from bingo – she didn’t win – and she is sitting beside working on something right now. We’re going to get cleaned up and go to dinner.

We went down to the dining room. On the way there, there was one picture stop. We got our picture taken in our smart casual clothing. From there we went down to five to the dining room. We were seated in the same aisle that we sat all dinners so far. They pulled the bottle of wine that I did not finish the night before. We each had a glass of that. For an appetizer I had a salmon and crawfish dish. It was an actual crawfish on my plate but I didn’t know how to do it. Later, a lady seated across from me actually ate her crawfish. I saw her take it apart the way you should I just didn’t know this. For my entrée I had an Indian inspired dish. It was spicy shrimp. They serve with the yogurt sauce to calm down the heat. It was actually very good. Mary had salad and the chicken dish. She seemed to like it. I know mine was good. She had ice cream for dessert. I had some type of tart that was named decadent Drambuie a but I didn’t taste any Drambuie in it. We did run into some people that we talked a while. From there we walked down to the fixture place to discuss the go Pro camera. We wanted to go to the comedy show, but it was too busy. Instead, we walked back up to the casino. We wandered around there for a little while before I sat down and played some roulette. I only went for about four rounds. I made $15 and decided to get out of there. Walked over to the poker table but there was nobody there to play. We talked to the casino manager for a while to learn his history. Mary put some money in a slot machine. She did not make any money. We decided that at 930 we would go back to the camera place to buy the go Pro. We spent about a half hour with the lady. She said it all up for us. We spent time trying to figure out which attachment wanted. I ended up getting the jaw device. After playing with it today it seems like the right device. By time we were done with the demo it was about 11 o’clock. We need to go to bed. That was the end of day five. Going forward I’m going to go assumption that Southhampton was day one.

As you can see that I skipped yesterday’s entry. It turned out to be a very busy day from the get-go. Mary got up about 630. I got up about 715. The goal was to get up, eat breakfast and get off the ship by 830. We went upstairs for breakfast. I had toast and a muffin. I also had some juice. Mary had eggs and bacon. We wanted to get some food in our system because we knew it was going to be a long day. We were done with breakfast on time but it took us about 15 minutes get off the ship. We went to where we thought we could disembark but we needed to go to a different floor midship. Once off the ship we had to walk about a quarter of a mile or more to the actual port entrance. It was a beautiful morning. It had to be near 80° and sunny. You could tell though it was going to be hot. Just outside the Port Authority building was our driver holding a card with our name on it. His name was Manuel. He spoke very little English beyond Chicago Bulls and Michael Jordan. He was very personable. Over the course of the three hours we rode with him – 90 minutes there in 90 minutes back Mary was able to get a lot of information out of them. She has an app on her phone which translates English to Spanish. S one example, with this she was able to determine that he runs marathons – seven of them in the last seven years. He averages about four hours per marathon. Mary is able to get information out of anyone in almost every situation. He loaded me up in his van. It was the type of van where I am loaded up in the back. I was not able to see out of the windows very well but I didn’t need to see much. I was able to see the Spanish countryside which is filled with fields of things like cotton and grape vines. We went for quite a while before we ran into the city called Seville. Actually in Spanish at Sevilla. The driver got turned around somewhere and he was trying to find our tour guide so we saw several parts of the city that we would not normally seen.  There seem to be several parks and public areas. There were a lot of people on the streets that appeared to be tourists. Many horse-drawn carriages held up traffic. The traffic also had lots of those roundabouts. On the way into town traffic was pretty quiet. In order to get into the historic parts of the city we had to go down to one lane streets that didn’t look passable until we were through them. All along the sides were cars and motorbikes parked one on top of the other. What was left of the lane, not much of, he slowly wedged his way down the street until we got to what I guess you would call the center. There, standing on the corner, was a lady who turned out to be our tour guide. I guess we met her about 1130. We piled out of the van. We made arrangements with the driver to have him come pick us up at 230. I’m not sure where he went for the next three hours.

Rachel, our tour guide, must of been in her late 30s or early 40s. We did learn that she has two kids – nine and 13 and that she’s married. She lived right in the area we were touring. To say she was talkative  is an understatement. Without exaggeration – and this is not a negative thing – she talked nonstop. Initially, she offered to carry our bags. Mary and I both carrier bookbags that have the essentials for the day in them. We didn’t expect her to carry oir bags all day. I carried mine on my lap and Mary carried her is on her back. She asked us what we wanted to get accomplished. Did we want to see the monuments? Did we want to shop? What would we want to do during the day. Mary and I really didn’t have any preconceived ideas so we said let’s see the monuments. Neither of us were big on shopping. In this area of the city where we were they have several historic monuments all in one area. We were dropped off outside of the Real Alaczar, which is one of the palaces for the Spanish royal family. Apparently they still use it occasionally. The lines to get in there were long so we decided to walk down the street probably a half mile or more to the Cathedral of Seville. This was a huge building built mostly in the 11^th century if I remember correctly. We’ve done cathedrals before and this is by far the largest one. If I heard our tour guide correctly Notre Dame Cathedral would fit inside of this one. The ceilings had to be 300 feet or higher. There were countless smaller stained-glass windows. I guess they had to be smaller because of the way the roof was designed to carry the weight there was not enough room for windows. All along the base were I guess call them rooms owned by prominent Spanish families in history. Very famous people of Spanish history are entombed in these rooms. As I understand it, these rich families donated money which help build the church. With their donations they were able to carve out a space in the base for their family burial or tomb areas. Rachel pointed out several of the more popular ones. Probably the most popular one was Christopher Columbus. She went into the long history of it that basically only part of Christopher Columbus is actually in his tomb. It had to do was something about how he died and it took several years to get what was left of his remains to Seville. His son is buried in the floor of the Cathedral. This is little roped off area that is his burial area. After our guide pointed this out I realize that there were several of these little square areas but they weren’t open off. As it turns out, there are all kinds of these burial areas throughout the floor the just walk on. Obviously there was a ton of history on this building. We were in there for about 90 minutes and I would say that Rachel had a story about almost everything we looked at. The building was so huge you could probably spend an entire day and only see half of it. There was a ton of history and several little side rooms that contained even more history. For example, we saw these huge tapestries. There was one of the map that had to be 50’ x 50’. It was a map but it wasn’t understandable until you were told that it was upside down. Then all of a sudden it makes sense. Throughout the entire day Rachel would point out things that you would never thought of if she hadn’t brought it up. In many rooms she would stop and say look at the ceiling. And the ceilings were amazing. The artwork that they contained was probably missed by 95% of the people that walk through the room. Despite it being a ancient, dark and not necessarily clean building it was something to see. The architecture of the building shows the technology of the time. All of the history that is buried at building literally is a whole other story.

From there we walked the quarter of a mile or whatever back up to the Royal Palace. The lines were still long but Rachel had prearranged a priority entrance for us. We stood in line for about 15 minutes before she came back and said that she had it all figured out we went straight to the head of the line. Some of those people will probably in line for an hour or more. By now it was in the 90’s and sunny, but not too humid. We scooted right to the front. Much like the Cathedral, the Royal Palace was filled with architecture and history. We went to one area which was the main Palace which is actually three different palaces connected together. I don’t remember the exact dates but it was like the first one was built in 1000, the second one in 1300 and the one in 1500. The first and third were very Gothic architecture. The second one was very Arabian influenced. I’m not sure Arabian is the right term. It was influenced by the Muslims which might be more North African. Either way, it was very interesting to see the very different architectures all in one building. The various kings who built these separate palaces were influenced by the people of their time. We made short journeys into each of these palaces. Again, we were filled with the history. More importantly, again, were the details. There had to be without exaggeration 1 million ceramic tiles on the walls. Each one was hand done in the 14^th century. Rachel went into some of the mechanics of what it took to create ceramic tiles back then. All of a sudden you had a new perspective and respect for these tiles. The surprising part is there over 700 years old and for the most part they look pretty new. Again the ceilings of the rooms were important. One of the last rooms we stopped in contained the Spanish Royal family crowns. Obviously, they were grand. Before leaving the complex we wandered through several garden areas. If it wasn’t for the thousands of tourists wandering around these would be very peaceful areas. A lot of water and trees and open skies. I can envision being a royal person wandering through these gardens.

We were running a bit short on time by now. It was nearly 1 o’clock. We were supposed to be picked up at 230. Rachel, our tour guide, and prearranged a place for us to go to lunch. It was a good 20 minute walk from where we were. Most of the streets were pretty good but there were some cobbled ones that made the going tough. Even Rachel pushed for a while. My smart drive helped in certain areas. With all these avenues we did make it up to the restaurant. Along the way Mary stopped at a currency exchange and exchanged American dollars for euros. I think the exchange rate was $1.16 per euro. I don’t remember the name of the restaurant now but Mary got a picture. In my mind it was a true Spanish restaurant. From the entrance there was a long while way back to the room there were about six or seven tables. There were families on three of these tables. Keep in mind this was Tuesday afternoon. The looked a little odd that there were families having lunch at 2 o’clock in the afternoon on a Tuesday but that might be a Spanish thing. Rachel talked with the waiter to make sure that he understood that we needed to be in and out in an hour. We were given menus which were in Spanish for the most part. Under the Spanish explanation were cryptic English versions which helped us understand what they were but didn’t really tell us completely. So we kind of guessed. Mary had some kind of him which turned out to be what I would call pork shank. It was very good because I had a piece. I had some type of fish toast. I’m pretty sure was tuna, but either way was very good. It could be my place because it had a two page wine list and the most expensive wine on there was 3 ½ euros or about four dollars.. I had some type of white wine that was very good. Of course I don’t remember the name of it now but it was good. While we were having lunch, Rachel went to the grocery store for Mary to try to find her some of her sweetener. She was successful. She returned in about 30 minutes and by then we were nearly done. We paid our bill after figuring out how much to tip and the total came to €35. That’s probably an average amount of money for lunch for us. We walked out of that building and went two doors down to a another shop that was selling various souvenir kind of things. Rachel was suggesting that we buy hand fans which were nice. But neither Mary nor I were thrilled with that. We ended up buying tiny little plates for our mothers. We did buy a little plate for our souls and Mary did buy a fan for herself. That was our souvenir shopping that took about a half hour or so now we were really up against the time. We quickly walked – or as quickly as we could go – up a few blocks to where the driver was waiting for us.

Could not have asked for a better tour guide. Rachel was amazing. It boggles the mind about how much history she knew. She literally knew the history of just about everything. She made the tour very enjoyable. She asked us what we wanted and she accomplished it well. We gave her a tip. We exchange goodbye hugs and she was off. We did get a picture with her before Manuel loaded me up into the van. The trip back in the van was pretty quiet. Mary and I were tired. She napped for most of the trip. The traffic was a little bit heavier but nothing to be concerned about. We pulled back into Cadiz a little after 4 o’clock. I was very mildly concerned that I’ve misjudged the time. Part of me wondered if the ship left at 430 instead of 530. I was thankful to see the ship sitting there as we pulled up to the port.  Mary got several pictures of a bridge the driver called the Little Golden gate Bridge. I don’t know it’s exact length but it had to be a couple of miles of suspension bridge. It looks very modern so it hasn’t been there very long. It is probably the highlight of Cadiz. We didn’t spend any time in the city itself. By time we got back to the port the ship was leaving within the hour. Manuel pulled up to the spot where he picked us up. He pulled me out of the van. He helped us to the door. Mary gave him a tip. We got his card. We set our goodbyes and he was on his way. We had to go through security at the port building. From there we walked back to the ship. I guess it was about 5 o’clock by time we got back to the ship. It was an amazing excursion. I don’t remember exactly what I paid for it but it was worth every nickel. The history and the architecture and just the experience of a whole different city and country was worth it. Manuel and Rachel made it successful. If our future excursions are even half as good will be successful.

Back on the ship, in the room, I cashed in my certificate for five bottles of beer. Before the crew to say took advantage of this special. About 15 minutes later I had five cold bottles of Heineken. I opened one and drank it all almost immediately. Mary lined up the second one. It took longer to drink this one. We went out onto our balcony and sat there while the ship pulled away. We were out there maybe an hour. We set out there until the ship was gone for about a half hour. While we were still docked a larger crucial point by us. We were amazed at its size. Out on the balcony it was beautiful. The sun was high but the wind off the water kept it nice and cool. The beer helped too. After about an hour we decided to get cleaned up and go to dinner.

We headed down to the dining room. I ordered that special Cabernet that was offered at the wine tasting for 50%. Pine Ridge Estates I think it’s called. For an appetizer I had seafood antipasta. From an entrée I had a shrimp and scallop dish that was very good too. Mary had Caesar salad and pot roast. We both had tiramisu for dessert. It was a nice dinner. We were seated in the same area as we have been seated every night. We ended up talking to the same couple we talked to the previous night – Bob and Barbara I think they’re named. After dinner we walked up to the casino. There was a guy sitting there waiting to play poker so we joined him. We ended up playing for the next 2 ½ hours or so. I think I made about $35. Mary lost some. It was good to play. There are a couple of players that were obviously new to it. There was one guy who said he was new to it but he played pretty well so I’m not so sure all knew he was. Anyway that was pretty much it. By this time we were pretty tired. What manner way upstairs and went to bed. It had been a long and successful day. Day four complete. 24 more to go.