Well, as you can see we’ve made it. Although our trip has not been without its perils. First off, when we left for Spokane at 4am Saturday morning, it was just starting to snow. I managed to sleep for about 2 hours while Lorien powered through the night and packed (she still forgot her swimsuit, though). We got to Spokane and boarded the plane for Salt Lake City, our first connection. Everything went fine, and we switched to a flight to New York’s JFK airport. We got to JFK about an hour and a half early. Everything was fine there, except when we got out on the tarmac, they held the plane for around 45 minutes while they “loaded more luggage on board”. You can guess why I quoted that… They were down to one runway when we finally took off for Venice.
But we got there all the same, albeit somewhat tired. I have a real hard time sleeping on planes—it just doesn’t work for me. So when we arrived at Marco Polo airport in Venice (at 8:45am), we went to the luggage carousel and, lo and behold, no luggage. When the luggage stopped coming out and the display said All luggage has been delivered we were left just sitting and thinking about what were were getting in to. Then a lady comes over and says for everyone that was waiting for their luggage to follow here to the claim area. We immediately followed here, while most people just stood around talking to their families. We were first in line. We were told that our luggage was still in New York (that turned out to be incorrect, though, so Thanks, Delta Airlines for lying to us).
Being the great travelers we are, though (well, not great enough to pack an extra night in our carry-ons), we toughed it out and took the Alilaguna boat to San Marco Square. After wandering around for about an hour and a half and nearly getting hopelessly lost, we purchased a map and found our hotel within seconds. It was, literally, about 100 meters from San Marco Square, the Comfort Hotel Diana. It was cheap (81 Euro) and noisy. I swear I heard every time someone went to the bathroom in the hotel. I think the plumbing went directly through our room. The room was dark, though, which made it easier to get some sleep. After being up for nearly two straight days, it was welcome. We saw a lot of Venice, and even went on a gondola ride (they’re expensive, if you were wondering). I got some lovely pictures.
It is now that I must digress and talk about the thing I hate most about Europe—smoking. Everybody, and I mean freaking everybody smokes here. It’s disgusting. Even on the ship (which I’ll get to later), there are areas you have to walk through to get to certain places (like the Internet room) that are exclusive smoking rooms. It’s disgusting, and I can’t believe Carnival would do that to us.
Anyway, on with the story. We explored Venice the next day since we didn’t have to be at the ship for check-in until at least 12 noon. I think our most memorable part of Venice was feeding the pigeons in Piazza San Marco. There are vendors all over that sell you a bag of dried corn for 1 € and the pigeons go nuts when they see it. Lorien and I both fed the pigeons, and at one point we developed a case of head pigeons.
We took the Alilaguna boat to the cruise boat dock, and got in line for the boarding process. It took quite a while, but went fairly smoothly. As soon as we got on, we went to the Purser’s desk and told them about our missing luggage, and they had us identify it and sign a waiver to allow them to pick it up.
We went to our room (it’s very nice) and relaxed for a while. We took a walking tour of the ship (we still get lost though) and attended a good part of the orientation talk by our cruise directory, John SomethingOrOther (Heald).
On our way to our first dinner on board, we spotted our luggage on a luggage cart—much to our relief. Dinner was excellent, and so was dessert (Lorien had the Warm Chocolate Melting Cake, it was superb, and I had a wonderful Creme Brulee). The next morning we smelled much better, and shared a private taxi with about 8 other people back to Piazza San Marco to track down a Geocache and drop off our travel bug. We had a brisk 20 minute walk to the park from the square, found it easily, and returned to the boat station, where we found out that the Alilaguna boat didn’t go back to the dock that day. So we took the public slow-boat all the way up the Grand Canal to the last stop, where we hopped on a bus and took a short ride back to the ship. Dinner was even better than the night before, and they had some leftover Warm Chocolate Melting Cake for dessert that Lorien and I both had this time.
Which brings us up to today. We just pulled in to Dubrovnik, Croatia (it’s beautiful here), and I got up early this morning to catch the sunrise over the ocean. The winds were extremely strong, around 50 mph, and I had to lean in to my tripod just to keep its three legs on the deck.
Dubrovnik was nice, we just got back. It was a bit cool here because of the rain. The temperature is 62° F outside, but the rain and wind makes it feel colder. We took a shuttle bus down into the “old town”, where they have about two kilometers of city walls that surround it. During the last war (I think it was around 1992), those walls didn’t protect Dubrovnik from the artillery on the mountains nearby. All the homes that have been rebuit because of the damage done now have orange rooves. If you see any pictures of Dubrovnik, most of the buildings have orange rooves.
Since I’ve been snapping my pictures in RAW format, I run the processing on my laptop, which isn’t done yet processing the batch from Dubrovnik. You’ll get to see more later anyway.