Travels with Matthew

Sunday—disembarkation day. Our Mediterranean cruise was at an end, so in the dark Barcelona morning, we dragged our wheeled bags down the gangway and hailed an Uber. It was still dark when we arrived at our hotel, Hotel Barcelona 1882, which I knew was a winner the moment we stepped through the sliding glass doors (to which one had to step lightly close if one wanted them to open; I kept expecting to bump my nose on the glass). I had picked the hotel because it was only about three blocks from Sagrada Familia, which we had tickets to tour on Monday. I don’t have a lot of great shots of the interior, but the website above gives you some, and here are just a couple more.

We knew that we would arrive at the hotel well before our check-in time and had planned to dump our luggage and just hang out for a few hours. On the ship, though, three separate people told use we HAD to make a day trip to Sitges (SEE-jiss) to the south west of Barcelona, we we had decided the night before to figure out how to navigate the metro and take a train down. I’m so glad we added Sitges to our itinerary. What a lovely little beach town! It made me think what it must have been like in the early and even mid twentieth century to take a break from London or Dublin and go to the beach for a day or a weekend. It’s an experience I’m wholly unfamiliar with except from books.

I was hoping to find a piece of street art—galleries were notoriously hard to find in all of our stops—but I never really found anything I liked. (Mark bought a couple small pieces in Florence, which are now happily ensconced our or bedroom wall.) I did, however, see a fair bit of public art, and I bought a shirt. We also stumbled on a  nude beach, but no photos.

The dog in the last photo was a hoot. For at least a half hour, he kept escaping from his owner and running down the beach—on which dogs are prohibited, though no one seemed to care. He clearly loved running in the surf.

I did actually put my feet in the Mediterranean, finally.

Graffiti was ubiquitous in just about every place we went. Most of it was just crap tagging, but every once in a while, I’d spot something like this.

Mark had an unfortunate encounter with King Kong’s hand. (The city was hosting a horror and fantasy film festival.)

We spent a few hours in Sitges, had lunch, and then headed back to Barcelona to check in at the hotel. We went out looking for dinner, but it was Sunday night, and the only restaurants that were open didn’t appeal to us. Instead, we decided just to have a snack in the hotel bar, which turned out to be a nice way to round off the day. For the first time in more than a week, we turned on the TV and watched an American crime show until we fell asleep. (I figured out how to get the thing in English, fortunately.)

So, after a long delay, I’m back at it to finish writing up Mark’s and my Mediterranean Odyssey. I left off after Cannes when I realized that the iPad had been disabled. Our next stop was two weeks ago today in Palma, which is the largest city on Mallorca and capital of the Balearic Islands, which are in turn part of the Catalonian region of Spain.

We didn’t arrive in Mallorca until late morning on Saturday, so we took the opportunity to sleep in (again). The timeline gets a little fuzzy here because I actually spent my first couple hours of the day on the balcony writing up Cannes. It wouldn’t be until Saturday night that I would discover the iPad issue.

I should have taken a picture of it to prove my point, but I have to say that our balcony wasn’t the nicest place to hang out. I remember balconies on other cruises being more, oh, I don’t know, “open” feeling or homey in some way. This balcony had two cheap chairs and the old-style indoor/outdoor green carpet that made it look like a very small putting green. The walls/dividers were clinically uninteresting—even forbidding—so being out there to “relax” felt more like being in an asylum cell. Having said that, though, it was a decent place to write or to look out at the shore as long as you didn’t pay attention to the balcony itself. Norwegian could improve a little here, I think.

Our scheduled excursion in Palma is one I would recommend to just about anyone. “Pedal Palma” is a fun, informative, interesting, and—believe it or not—relaxing bicycle tour of the city. And in our case, it started out with an annoying but funny incident.

The group of people who had signed up for the tour gathered just off the ship until our guide, James, could account for all of us. We ended up being forty-seven—far more than I expected— including an older couple dressed alike, with her in flip-flops and gold chains and he looking dangerously like a cross between Mr. Howell and the Skipper. Mark had noticed them, too, and later admitted to me that he was a little trepidatious about this ride until seeing them, at which point he decided, “Oh, I can do this if they can.” Once we were assembled, we walked for about ten minutes en masse to a nearby park. I’m sure the drivers who had to wait for father goose and his forty-seven duckings to cross the street were rolling their eyes (or whatever the Mallorcan equivalent is).

James was our tour leader, but because we were so many, he had two associates and planned to divide us up into three groups. He asked us to count off (it felt a little like preparing for a dodgeball game in grade school), after which we would split up and go get our bikes. Somewhere around “seven,” the Gilligan’s Island couple kind of pushed forward and asked “Go get bicycles?!” James looked at them very kindly (I’m sure he was rolling his eyes now, too) and said, “Yes. We tour the city on bikes. What did you think ‘Pedal Palma’ meant?” That reads more nasty than it came across in person—James was actually very nice and understanding. He told the exasperated couple that they would have to go back to the ship to book something else if they didn’t want to ride, reassuring them that he would call the ship in a minute to let them know the situation. He started to turn back to the rest of the group—and here’s where the annoying part comes in—when she clamored, “CALL THEM NOW!” James laughed and pulled out his phone. I wanted to pop her on the back of her hair-helmeted head. “Hey, lady? You screwed up, not us. We only have so many hours here, and I don’t want you squandering them because you’re so stupid.” I held my tongue, though (well, more or less; I did say as much to Mark, who shushed me).

James got the troublesome couple on their way (she did apologize, I suppose I should admit), and we started counting again into three groups of fifteen; James would be leading group two—our group. We collected our bikes, adjusted the seats as needed, clipped on baskets if we wanted them, bought water, and started on our way.

What is there to say about a bicycle tour? The streets weren’t particularly crowded, so it was mostly easy to get around, and for a good part of it, we were on a designated bike path anyway. We stopped occasionally for James to explain the history about this or that building or monument or to share some cultural tidbit with us about the Balearic Islands, Catalonia, languages, and so on. (James on several occasions said he had to cut himself short or we’d never get through the tour. He was a wealth of information.) I think pictures speak better, so I’ll interject here and there to explain what you’re looking at. Before the pictures, though, I will say that I could move to Palma in a heartbeat. It was probably my favorite city on the cruise, though it was not the only one that tempted me to relocate.

This is “James” holding up a picture of something or other. He had a lot of visual aids.

Part of Palma from the port.

The four pictures above are of the Cathedral of Santa Maria of Palma. It’s the third largest cathedral in Europe, despite being on a fairly small island. According to James, it was built on such a grand scale as propaganda. It was meant to announce to the Moors, “This is a Catholic island, and we’re powerful enough to defend it.” We didn’t have time to go inside, but on a return trip….

This is a Bellver Castle on the opposite side of the bay in in the hills. It’s round, which is kinda cool, and the four tours mark the cardinal compass points. It was used as a prison for a great part of its history. James related that into one particularly infamous dungeon, “Olla,” or “the pot,” prisoners were thrown and left to die on the corpses and bones of the people who had been imprisoned there before them.

Some of our group.

Mark with is basket. Toto got away.

Looks a lot like the old cities of Barcelona and Florence, no?

These last three aren’t great photos, but I included them to show that Palma isn’t all cobble stones, ancient buildings, and narrow streets. There’s money here, so there are some really nice modern hotels, office buildings, and residences. They don’t seem to trade as much on their history as Florence, Naples, and Tivoli or even Barcelona.

We stopped at a working convent (with which I was a little uncomfortable—thirteen years of Catholic schools with nuns) where I mostly stayed in the courtyard. I think some of the others who went in were able to buy pastries made by the nuns. This was a little vignette that I thought was charming. I could have worked more on the composition, but I felt a little like I was invading someone’s privacy.

This was one of our last stops on the bike tour. This is a now-controversial statue of Junípero Serra outside the Basilica de Sant Francesc. Serra was canonized in 2015 despite protests that he was responsible for thousands of indigenous deaths and monumental damage to the cultures in what is now California, and some feel that a statue celebrating him—even though it far predates the canonization—is an unwelcome reminder of the paternalistic attitude of evangelists in the eighteenth century American west.  Some also find the near nudity of the underage native, Serra’s hand on the boy, and the boy’s hand on Serra’s leg to be too evocative of the sexual-abuse scandals that have rocked the Catholic Church—and, to be fair, other denominations—over the past decade.

I’m not sure how I feel about the controversies here. On the one hand, I think that it’s unfair to judge past cultures by ahistorical standards. On the other hand, some behaviors are just wrong, no matter the intention that drives the behavior. Well, let’s not get to into that. I could write a dissertation on my thoughts here, but there would be nothing that hasn’t already been wrestled over.

We finished up our tour of Palma with gelato (did I mention that I had ice cream five times on one day or that I’m in love with stracciatella gelato?). On our way back to the ship, we were chatting with some our fellow bicyclers, one of whom too this picture of Mark and me. Toward the end of the cruise, I was feeling daring enough to wear my shirts with two buttons undone. I don’t know what got into me.

Back on ship, we decided to take a few more turns on the waterslides (which you can see in some of the earlier posts). We had dinner at the Irish pub on board (which serves chicken wings and quesadillas! How is that Irish? LOL.) and spend an hour or so listening to some of the wide variety of live music available on the ship. We stopped in one of the lounges to talk for a bit with our new Irish friends, Gary and Owen, and then called it a night on our last day on ship.

In my next post, I’ll sum up the rest of the adventure, which includes the fabulous Hotel Barcelona 1882 (I hit it out of the park booking that hotel.), a day-trip to Sitges, our tour of Sagrada Familia, and our journey home.

Well kids, another tech issue has arisen. Somehow, the iPad has been disabled due to too many incorrect password attempts. I hate to think that our room steward was monkeying around, but I can’t think of any other viable explanation unless somehow my Bluetooth keyboard turned on and my moving around with it in my bag caused it to keep sending keystrokes. In any event, the only way to fix it is to erase the iPad. I have more than 100 photos only there that I lost from my camera, so until I can get it home and (I hope) back up the data using iTunes, I’m without a viable input device. (I’m writing this on my phone, which is too hard to do for long entries.) I’ll have to write up and post yesterday’s, today’s, and tomorrow’s adventures when I get back to Columbus.

We didn’t plan much for Cannes because Duncan, a work colleague, lives nearby and had suggested meeting us there for lunch and a visit. I’m not sure what, exactly, we missed by eschewing the proffered excursions, but I think we probably had at least as much fun as people who had booked tours and shopping.

Cannes is a very pretty beach town, clean and bright and well maintained (as opposed to, say, Naples), but I can’t say it’s particularly photogenic. It’s not filled with ancient monuments or buildings or sculpture. In the areas where we wandered, we didn’t see a lot of interesting flowers or trees. Mostly, we were surrounded by eateries and glittery high-end shops. I can very much see, though, how easy it would be to have a life there—as long as you had the money.

The city does have some public art—both formal and graffiti—that I enjoyed.

Before Duncan met us for lunch at noon, Mark and I had some time to just wander along the beach. City employees seemed to engaged in Cannes’s yearly refreshing of the beach sand—a luxury that I expect only a resort town can afford. If you look carefully in the center of the picture below, you’ll see white square bags. There are actually hundreds of them lining portions of the beach. They’re all filled with clean sand.

I tried to find a restaurant online where I knew I would be able to eat, but it was a little challenging. Once we were in Cannes, I could easily have found a half-dozen places, but most places didn’t appear to have a web presence. Perhaps Yelp! Is not as ubiquitous here as it is in the US. The place I ended up choosing—and to which Duncan perhaps reluctantly agreed—was a hamburger place called Big Fernand. I call it a hamburger place, and it is, but it’s not an Americanized chain like, say, Johnny Rockets. It still felt pretty French.

Duncan joined us right on time and presented us (unnecessarily) with two bottles of wine from his village.

After some idle chit-chat, he helped us order our burgers and we settled at a table. We spent a lot more time talking over and after lunch, which was quite pleasant. Mark is very good at getting conversations going, and he pretty easily broke the ice with Duncan. As I usually do, I mostly listened until I felt like I had my footing and then jumped in. By the end of our three hours together, we were talking like old friends.

We hung out in Big Fernand’s for probably an hour or so and then decided to walk through the town some more. Duncan suggested going up to the fort and church at the top of a hill, so Mark and I huffed and puffed along as Duncan led us.

We talked about cars and the French, about food, our dogs, his children, moving from place to place, accents. I think we could have talked for another couple of hours, but the afternoon was getting on, and we needed to be back on the ship by 5 p.m.

Duncan, Mark, and I completed a circuit around the old town and found ourselves back on the main road to the port, which is lined with restaurants. I had discovered straciatella gelato and wanted a bite before leaving Cannes. And after all his kindness, the least I could do was treat Duncan to gelato, too. We talked a little more, reluctant to end the day, hugged, took the obligatory pictures, and said our goodbyes. He headed back to his car (after saying that the veggie burger he’d had at Big Fernand’s was so good that he’d come back just for that), and we reboarded the Epic.

Onboard, we spent some time on the balcony watching tenders ferry passengers back from the port and then return to their berths. One tender is about six feet directly below our balcony, so we got a really good view of the process. Dinner was going to be late because we had signed up for a Cirque Dreams performance (the show was called “Epicurean,” Gary, in case you want to look it up) that included dinner. We did, however, have a bit of a snack while we talked and people watched.

Standing in line awaiting the start of the show, we met a couple from Ireland—Gary and Owen—and chatted with them. The four of us sat together during dinner and the show and had a very nice time, despite the loud room, my poor hearing, and their accents.

The menu was pre-set and a bit of a challenge for me, so I won’t say a lot about it. The show, however, was fun, and because were in a fairly small space in the round (and had ponied up for premier seating), it was very close. The acrobats performed in a 16-foot diameter circular area in the middle of the room and bleeding into the aisles between the tables. There were times when I could have touched the performers just by stretching out my hand. During one, um, let’s say “sexy” performance by a very fit young man in tights and a bathtub, we even got hit with water flying off of his spinning body.

Of course it wasn’t the most elaborate show and didn’t really have a narrative, but it was still very well done. I cringed watching some of the acrobats bend and contort their bodies as if they have no spines, and the scene that included four audience members acting out a scene from a movie made me laugh out loud.

The show let out at about 11:30, and we said goodnight to our new friends and turned in. I am grateful that I slept like a log to awaken pretty refreshed today. We have a late arrival in Mallorca (which is floating past my balcony as I write this) where we’ve booked a bicycle tour. We have to be off the ship early tomorrow, so I’ll try to write up today’s adventures once we get settled back in Barcelona.

We arrived in Cannes this morning, and while we wait for our tender from the ship to shore, I thought I’d take the opportunity to catch you up on yesterday’s adventures in Florence.

A friend of mine had lots of recommendations for muesums and sites in Florence and even lent me a book with his favorites marked. We didn’t do any of it. (Not that I didn’t appreciate the gesture!) Instead, Mark booked us a climb to the top of the Duomo so that we could see the city, after which we intended to wander, get a bite to eat, maybe try to get last minute tickets to see the original David in L’Accademia.

The day started off fine and ended well, but it went a little bit awry in the middle. Our tour bus was running just a tad late, so when Monica, our diminutive guide, announced that we would first make a stop at a gold artisan shop, Mark and I  begged off. Our tickets for the Duomo were for 11 a.m., and it was already 10:30 when we stepped off the bus. Even Monica looked a little worried that we wouldn’t make it there in time, but she gave us directions and sent us on our way. We immediately got lost.

Maybe that’s a little melodramatic. We knew the general direction we were heading, but we probably could have chosen a more direct route. As you can imagine, the streets in the old city are far from straight. It’s impossible to see more than a couple blocks ahead. They are also very narrow (though not as narrow as old Barcelona’s streets), and the buildings along them are three or four or five stories tall. The overall effect of this is that even though the Duomo is quite tall compared to everything around it, you could see the dome from almost no point along the way. We did, however eventually make it to our meeting site, but our guide for the Duomo tour, however, is another story.

We were told to meet outside Aromi Firenze at 10:45 a.m. By 11:05, we were starting to get nervous. Mark flagged down another tour guide who kindly called our tour company to find out what was wrong.

“We canceled that tour yesterday. Didn’t you get our email?”

“Of course we didn’t get your email! We we’ve been on a ship with barely tenable internet access for a week!”

“We’ll send someone over right away.”

So they sent a representative to talk to us about the mix-up. They had no one available to take us on the tour, but he made arrangements with the tour guide who had so kindly called our tour company to take us on if she had any no-shows. Her tour was not quite the same as what we had planned, but it would still climb to the top of the Duomo. Just before she was about to welcome us in, though, her last two stragglers showed. Damn.

The next-best compensation that our original tour guide could offer was two tickets to climb the bell tower and enter the baptistery and the crypt. The bell tower has the same view as the Duomo, he assured us, and is the same height. The height is less important to Mark than the engineering and architecture of Brunelleschi’s dome that is so ingeniously supported, but at least we’d get to see the view. When we entered the baptistery, though, an attendant told us that our tickets were expired.

We never got into the cathedral at all, and we’d wasted more than 90 minutes of our five hours in Florence. I was so disappointed for Mark, but like the optimist he is, he decided that it was a sign that he wasn’t in good enough shape to climb the several hundred stairs and that we should just move on and do the other things we’d wanted to do in Florence. A little dejected, we wandered through the city from plaza to plaza just taking in what we could.

Figuring that we would not be able to get tickets to see the real David, we went to see the replica in Piazza della Signoria, at the Palazzo Vecchio. Monica had assured us that it is identical to the original, although we know that subtle differences in the marble likely made the original even more beautiful. Nearly perfect replica or not, it was incredible. All of my friends who have seen the statue tell me that pictures just don’t do it justice, and they’re right. (I’m going to show some anyway.) It’s enormous, of course, but for me, seeing it in person gave me a much better sense of the youth Michelangelo was trying to capture. In all of the pictures I’ve seen, the David of the statue seems older to me—a late adolescent. Presented with the actual statue, however (well, not actual statue, but you know what I mean), he seems more like a fourteen- or fifteen-year-old.

Many other sculptures, including Rape of the Sabines, Hercules and Cacus, Nettuno, Perseo, populate the square, and I’ve included some of those, too.

We didn’t go in the Uffizi Gallery, but we enjoyed the statuary outside of it and then wandered along the Arno River (for which one of my favorite typefaces is named). We stopped at a little cafe to get pizzas; we expected a slice or perhaps two for the price. Instead, we each got a 13-inch pie! Their crusts were super thin, though, so Mark ate all of his. I probably could have eaten all of mine, but it had more cheese than I wanted, so left about a third of it.

We did more walking after lunch and stumbled on a small gallery/art studio. The paintings weren’t anything earth-shattering, but they were nice and not terribly expensive, so Mark bought a couple. The artists didn’t speak much English, so communication was a little difficult. I’m always amused to watch Mark speaking English to non-English speakers. It’s almost like he expects them to understand anyway. I just go dumb. Mark must be doing something right, though, because he usually gets his point across somehow.

Here are a few more pictures of the city from our wanderings.

Both of us tired and with aching backs—walking on cobblestones for four hours takes a toll—we limped back to Piazza Santa Croce to meet our group and return to the ship. We grabbed a bite at the steakhouse on board and then killed a little time until the ship’s production of the Broadway musical, Priscilla, Queen of the Desert began. I can’t say it was the best show I’ve ever seen, but I laughed a few times, and it was a nice enough way to spend the evening. At 11:30, which is well past our bedtimes, we turned in and slept through until the alarm this morning.

We don’t arrive in Palma, Mallorca until tomorrow afternoon, so I’ll post about Cannes in the morning.

I had in mind several ways to begin this blog post, but in the end, I opted to be positive—well, as positive as a pessimist can be. Despite having trouble with my photos (accidentally deleted all of them from my camera; was able to get everything back except Herculaneum, but I think I can get those when I get home), my keycard (lost it and waited for nearly an hour in line to get a replacement), and my wi-if package (left the iPad logged in and burned through all of my free minutes), Tuesday was a wonderful day overall, and I’m glad I got to spend it with Mark.

We arrived in Naples overnight, and in the morning, I took some pictures of the city from our balcony. I counted 24 domes across the city, but only some can be seen in these pictures.

We spent a leisurely morning on the ship, which was mostly vacant. Most people had morning or all-day excursions, but our trip to Herculaneum didn’t start until 1 p.m. Our tour guide, Massimo, was very knowledgeable and friendly in a weird, reserved way. He explained Herculaneum something like this (imagine the Italian accent). Pompeii was a commercial center destroyed in 79 AD when Mount Vesuvius erupted. Herculaneum was also destroyed in the eruption, but it was a residential community for the wealthy. My take is that Herculaneum is less famous and, so, less crowded, and it has more beautiful objects, mosaics, and frescos more beautifully preserved than Pompeii. (FYI, I was able to recover my photos. These are some. Just a heads up, the last one is a little disturbing.)

Where I was standing in this shot is on the top of what I thought was just a hill. In actuality, I was on the top of the fifty-foot high mudflow that buried Herculaneum. Those arched portals you see in the foreground are boat slips that used to be right on the Mediterranean. The shore is now about 800 feet behind my back.

This is what’s to be found in those boat slips I pointed out above. Dozens of people tried to flee the mud flow from Vesuvius’s eruption in 79 AD by sailing out into the sea. What they found, instead, was that they were trapped between the turbulent ocean and tons of falling ash and the mud bearing down upon them. The sea proved to be no escape route. I think we’ve become accustomed in our culture to seeing skeletons in Halloween displays and cartoons, but it’s something entirely different to see actual bones that were once actual people. And it’s horrifying to see the remains of real people who died in agony and despair nearly 2,000 years ago.

Our overall impression of Naples as we drove through it was that it was poor and in disrepair. It is possible that we only passed through a rougher part of the city, but it’s clear that the buildings there are very old and could use some love.

After Herculaneum, we returned to the ship, got cleaned up, had a nice stroll on deck and then a nice dinner in the ship’s Italian restaurant. My dietary fussiness gave our waitress and the restaurant manager a bit of a fit. After I ordered and told them that I can’t eat onions, first she and then he came out to tell me that all of their sauces had onions that couldn’t be scraped aside. They were very kind about it, and the manager had the kitchen make up a special spicy aioli for my pasta.

We turned in fairly early knowing we had to get up early this morning in Civitivecchia and get down to the pier to meet our driver. Turns out we didn’t need to get up as early as we’d thought, though. He was 45 minutes late picking us up. After yesterday’s rotten luck, I got more and more nervous that I had done something wrong in booking our excursion and that we were going to be left with nothing to do today. About 20 minutes after our driver was due, the tour company called to tell me that he had been delayed by an accident on the highway and an unusually aggressive port security that, today, was slowing everyone down.

Needless to say, we were a little disgruntled when Mauro finally arrived, but we were determined not to let the delay ruin our day. He apologized profusely and was really quite nice. And while I was somewhat comfortable interacting with Spaniards for whom English was a second language, I was not at all sure I could communicate with a similarly equipped Italian. I didn’t know enough Italian to fall back on if my English was not clear enough. Turns out, though, that Mauro had lived in Sydney, Australia until he was 16, so his English was nearly perfect.

Mauro made good time—much better than the guides we’d read suggested we would—and we arrived in Tivoli around 10:15. Tivoli seems to be a very nice town. It was definitely more well cared for than the part of Naples we’d seen the day before, but it was still obvious that the old structures needed a lot of care.

I should probably clarify for those of you whom we haven’t already told that today was marketed by the cruise line as a day in Rome, but early on, Mark and I decided that Rome was just too much to see in six or eight hours and that we’d only be haunted by what we’d missed. Instead, we decided to go to Tivoli to see the Villa d’Este gardens and Villa Adriana (aka Hadrian’s Villa).

Mauro suggested we see Villa d’Este first because it had an earlier closing time. He got our tickets for us and sent us on our way. He is not a tour guide—he only drives—so he waited in the car. I hope he had the AC on, because we were in the gardens for nearly two hours and could have done more. If you check out the hyperlink above, you’ll learn that the Villa d’Este gardens are filled with fountains and waterfalls and other beautiful water features, all of which are gravity fed. Not a single pump is used to produce the water ballet in these photos.

Villa Adriana was not at all what we expected. Mark and I both thought that we would be touring the inside of a palace. Instead, we found ourselves in a compound so large that “Village” Adriana would have been a more appropriate name. It was a very large property—several acres at least—filled with lots of ruins with barely a roof to cover any of them. That’s important because about 20 minutes into our visit, a thunderstorm rolled it, and we had to huddle against a wall to keep from getting soaked. We did have our umbrellas (oddly fortunate!), but it was pouring for at least 20 minutes. It was much darker and greyer than it looks in these pictures.

We didn’t see all of Villa Adriana partly because it was soaked with large puddles forbidding entry into just about every ruin and partly because we wanted to be back on the ship well before we were due. What we saw, though—at both Villa d’Este and at Villa Adriana—were beautiful and interesting enough that when we finally do spend a week in Rome, we’ll make a day trip to Tivoli to take a more leisurely stroll through each.

Our drive back from Tivoli to Civitivecchia (about 60 to 90 minutes) was pretty uneventful, and we boarded the ship dog tired but extremely happy with our decision to skip Rome. If you can’t tell, I’m hurrying through now because it’s late, we have another early morning, and I’ve been writing up yesterday and today’s adventures for quite a while. We got cleaned up and had an early-ish dinner at the ship’s steak house where the maitre’d gave us a wonderful window seat with a view of the harbor (and the eight—EIGHT—other cruise ships in dock). After dinner (and ice cream, which we’ve eaten at least one time every day since boarding), we wandered though the entertainment, including a couple live game shows and an Elton John tribute. It’s now about 11:30 p.m. local time, so I’m going to copy and paste this entry into WordPress, activate the links, insert the photos, and call it a night. See you tomorrow.

Today is Monday, our day at sea. I didn’t post yesterday because we were boarding and getting settled. Those of you who have traveled with me (and probably the rest of you from reading this blog) know that I find the actual process of travel very stressful. Once I actually get to my destination, I need a day to settle in and destress. Yesterday was a destress day because even the relatively simple process of checking out of our B&B, getting a cab, and getting to and aboard the ship tied me in knots. Now that we’re here and I’m settled, I’m ready to get back to writing.

As I said, yesterday morning was tied up in extricating ourselves from Barcelona. We made sure we’d collected our possessions and emailed the manageress of the B&B to tell her we were heading out (and to tell her that one of the posts on the toilet paper holder had popped off the wall bracket and needed to be reattached). Then we dragged our luggage a couple blocks over to hail a taxi. All throughout the area where we stayed, the sidewalks are patterned. I wish I’d thought to take a photo of one, but I didn’t. Most of the ones near our B&B look like six-inch square tiles with circles carved into them. They’re fun and interesting but a pain to drag small-wheeled luggage over. I”m sure we woke some residents up as we clattered along.

Of course, the usual stress ensued when we found a cab and had to figure out how to tell him we wanted the cruise port. As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I realized that it might be tricky. “Cruise” sounds like “cruz”—“cross” in Spanish, so his first thought might have been that I wanted the cross-port. I couldn’t think of the word for boat (“barco”?) or ship (???), so I started to do some sort of “Walk Like and Egyptian” dance move—I suppose to represent trying to steady oneself on a rocking boat. Fortunately, the driver was smarter than I am gesturally creative and figured out what we wanted. We didn’t say another word to each other until our parting “gracias.”

Because we’d arrived a little before our boarding time, we didn’t have a lot of delay getting on the ship. The lines were relatively short, and we were at the head. The downside was that our rooms were not ready, but the upside was that we could hang out on the decks relatively unmolested and look back at the city. Here’s some of what we saw.

After we sailed, we went down to the LGBT meetup to meet some people on the ship. We’ve always found it nice to be able to know other people on the ship besides ourselves, and indeed, after eschewing the six very loud, very young gay men who were having a lot of fun, we met three fellows around our age and had a nice chat.

We eventually wandered off to dinner and then to bed. We overslept again this morning until 9:30 and then got cleaned up and made our way to breakfast. I forgot to pack a swimsuit, so I’ll probably go look for one after I finish writing.

More tomorrow after we get back from Herculaneum.

I’m sitting in the little living room of the B&B that Mark and I rented through Sunday morning. It’s a tidy, quiet little place in a bustling area—perfect for a few days in Barcelona. It’s a second-floor walkup with two bedrooms and one bath, a laundry room, a living room, and a kitchen/dinette.

While nice, it’s mostly unremarkable except for. A very pretty tile in the kitchen and bathrooms. It’s so shiny it almost looks like glass.

How we got here is perhaps not as pretty, though it certainly could have been worse.

When we originally decided to do this trip, I was scouting for airfare. Tickets were routinely coming in at $1,200, $1,400, or even $1,600 per person. Our cruise cost just barely more, so I was starting to think we had a problem. I kept looking, though, and stumbled on an American Airlines fare through justfly.com for $720 per person. I jumped on it. Unfortunately, I wasn’t paying attention to where I landed.

In my haste Alt-Tabbing from website to website, I got a little lost with the “Back” button and ended up booking only my tickets. I started to book Mark’s separately, but when I got to the end of the process, the website asked me to select seats. Hmm. It didn’t ask me to select seats for my tickets. Mark decided to take over his ticket purchase while I tried to figure out how to add seats to my booking. Turns out I couldn’t—at least not on the website.

I called American and explained the situation to a gentleman who seemed disturbingly confused by what I was asking him to do—add seat assignments to my flight adjacent to the seats Mark had selected. He told me that he would reassign Mark to new seats and put me next to him. He didn’t sound convincing. Mark and I had dinner plans, however, and so I was in a hurry. I let him reseat Mark and me and thought, “I’ll check on this in a couple weeks.”

A couple weeks became a month before I finally got around to calling them again. While I was on hold, I discovered not only that I didn’t have any seat assignments, but also, Mark had misunderstood what flight I’d chosen for the Columbus–Charlotte leg and had booked himself on a different flight. Gah! Now I know that the fellow from American a month before didn’t know what he was doing. He couldn’t have sat us next to each other on the first leg of the trip because we weren’t on the same plane!

The customer-service rep that took my call this time asked how he could help, and I laid out the whole, long, complicated mess we’d made of our booking. He was charming and knowledgeable and was able to truly rebook us in adjacent seats on three legs of the flight. On the Columbus–Charlotte leg, however, he didn’t have any options. Both of our flights were reading as full, so he couldn’t move one of us to the other’s plane. He was very sweet, though, and booked both of us in seat 17A on our respective flights, so at least we would share that. (I’m pretty sure he’s gay, too, and went out of his way to help “family.” I’m grateful for him.)

So, blah blah blah. Mark flew to Charlotte two hours before me, but we both got there and spent the rest of Thursday shuffling from Concourse A through Concourse E killing time. Our flight to Barcelona was scheduled to leave at 8:15 p.m., but it got delayed to 9:15, then moved to another gate, then delayed again to 10:05. By the time we actually got on board, we’d eaten too much, walked too much, and run out of things to talk about. Staring us in the face was seven hours trying to sleep in tight seats.

Mark got a few winks, but as usual, I pretty much didn’t sleep at all. Any sleep I did get was not restful. I was, however, lucky to be in an aisle seat, so at least I had a tad more room. Korean Air this flight wasn’t.

I watched a couple movies—Tolkien (illuminating and entertaining, but not particularly earth shattering, despite the writers’ attempt to inject pathos in to it à la The Theory of Everything), and Men in Black 3? 4? Whatever number it was, other than Chris Hemsworth, meh.

By the time we arrived in Barcelona, my feet had been in shoes—shoes, not sandals—for 24 hours and were killing me. My back hurt, my mind was foggy, I had developed a rash, my breath stank, I was dehydrated. All I wanted to do was get to the B&B and rest. Fortunately, the travel gods were through tormenting us, and I was able to check in quickly, send the manageress of the property on her way, and take a two-hour nap.

When I got up, I felt well enough to do a little exploring, so Mark and I walked around to start getting our bearings. Like a black hole, however, the Basilica of the Holy Family (aka, “Sagrada Familia”) drew us to her gates. I have a tour booked for us on Monday after the cruise, so we’ll get to see inside for quite a while, and I’ll talk more about the basilica then, but we took this opportunity to look around the outside. Pictures don’t do it justice (though I’ve shared some of mine below anyway).

After our little excursion, we went back to the B&B freshened up and had a nice birthday dinner (yes, today’s my 51st birthday) at a little Italian restaurant near us called Galú. I’ve been trying to practice my Spanish here and did so tonight, even though the waiter/maitre’d/bartender spoke perfect English. I hope to have goaded Mark into trying to practice his, too. While in Rome, eh?

Well, Mark and I are in the Charlotte airport waiting to begin our first foray to continental Europe. Booking the trip has been a challenge, but hey, nothing worth doing is easy. We flew down on two separate planes due to a miscommunication when each of us was booking the flights, but we both made it. Elvis still has two dads.

My layover will be around eight hours—ten for Mark—so we’re just cruising around the concourses. We got this view from the concourse A window wall and thought it was a fun picture with which to launch the trip blog.

Look for more posts over the coming days. First up, Barcelona!