Section Three Destinations

Yesterday afternoon we exited the Suez canal, and began our journey through the Mediterranean. We have left the desert behind, and its warm temperatures, too. Yesterday’s weather turned windy and cold shortly after we entered the canal. We even experienced a haboob sandstorm which has left the decks and outside surfaces of the ship covered in sand and mud. It has continued colder and breezy today, with everybody donning vests, jackets, long sleeves and long pants. We have our fingers crossed that the weather will hold for us for the next week or so. The weather channel is not too optimistic, but we’ve seen them wrong before.

Now that all of us passengers have been properly trained for three weeks to a schedule of a port day followed by one or two sea days, we’re about to change everything by having nine port days in a row. If you’ve not done much cruising this may not sound like anything too difficult, but it’s the cruise travel equivalent of doing an Olympic triathlon after a training regimen of late nights filled with lots of drinking and sleeping in. A port day usually involves a scramble to cram as many sights as possible into the limited amount of available time, but still be back well before All Aboard time. We’ve learned to pace ourselves, do fewer sights in a more generous time and ‘assume we will return’ someday. But it’s easy to fall into the ‘as long as we’re here let’s see this too’ trap.

I predict very few of our fellow passengers will cross the finish line. Most of them won’t make it three days, much less nine. Fortunately for us, we’re only doing the half triathlon; four days and then we bail out at Rome to rest up for three days before we fly home.

In case you are interested, the triathlon ports are: Malta, Sicily, Naples, Rome, Livorno (Pisa), Monaco, Barcelona, Mallorca and Gibraltar.

But first, we have a practice day in Athens, followed by our last sea day. We plan to revisit some of our favorite sites and restaurants. Hopefully in the sunny Med.