Monday 4 June 2012 Venice
After breakfast this morning we did some preliminary packing before attending the disembarkation briefing at 10. You would be surprised how detailed the procedures are, but I guess it makes sense to get about 1,500 people (about 600 are carrying on to Istanbul) off the ship in a somewhat orderly fashion. We have to have our bags outside our door before 1 AM and leave the ship between 8:15 and 8:30. Our flight to Barcelona doesn’t leave until 6 PM, so we changed our plan a bit. We were going to go into the city today and take our time getting to the airport tomorrow. Instead we are going to finish packing, blogging, use up our internet minutes, and eat our paid-for meals on the ship today, then go ashore to check out our transportation options. Tomorrow we will store our luggage and tour the city before going to the airport.
After the briefing we went back to our room for a bit to
download pictures before going topside to observe the sail-in to Venice. The
ship sails right by all the sites. Like the onboard tour guy says, it is like
floating by on a hot air balloon.
As we started to dock at about 12:30 a few scattered drops of rain began to fall. We killed some more time packing then went for lunch about 2. During lunch it began to rain steadily, so we returned to our room. I started culling the 300 pictures I took yesterday while Celeste watched some TV and had a short nap. At 4:30 I checked and it wasn’t raining, so we decided to go check out the transportation. Of course, as soon as we stepped outside, a light drizzle started, but nothing our umbrella couldn’t handle. We found our way to the main bus transfer point and bought tickets on the airport shuttle. A bus ride for 5 euros each is a much better deal than a $79 each ship to airport transfer package the cruise line offered or the 50 Euro cab ride! Then we wandered a few blocks into the city to pick up a few souvenirs and take some pictures.
We returned to the ship and made it to dinner about 6:30, sitting with two American couples. Although the menu items changed every day throughout the trip, today they had baked Alaska on for the second consecutive day. If you guessed that we both had it again, you are right. We returned to the room where I tried to use up our last 25 minutes of time. In that entire time I was not able to upload one picture. In the past, I always shrank our pictures before posting, but I thought the extra time spent uploading larger pictures would be offset by the time saved by not having to shrink them. It didn’t work that way in this case where the bandwidth was too small to handle the large pictures.
Celeste had a sore throat this morning and became stuffy in
the afternoon. That does not bode well for the air travel and time changes
ahead.
As we started to dock at about 12:30 a few scattered drops of rain began to fall. We killed some more time packing then went for lunch about 2. During lunch it began to rain steadily, so we returned to our room. I started culling the 300 pictures I took yesterday while Celeste watched some TV and had a short nap. At 4:30 I checked and it wasn’t raining, so we decided to go check out the transportation. Of course, as soon as we stepped outside, a light drizzle started, but nothing our umbrella couldn’t handle. We found our way to the main bus transfer point and bought tickets on the airport shuttle. A bus ride for 5 euros each is a much better deal than a $79 each ship to airport transfer package the cruise line offered or the 50 Euro cab ride! Then we wandered a few blocks into the city to pick up a few souvenirs and take some pictures.
We returned to the ship and made it to dinner about 6:30, sitting with two American couples. Although the menu items changed every day throughout the trip, today they had baked Alaska on for the second consecutive day. If you guessed that we both had it again, you are right. We returned to the room where I tried to use up our last 25 minutes of time. In that entire time I was not able to upload one picture. In the past, I always shrank our pictures before posting, but I thought the extra time spent uploading larger pictures would be offset by the time saved by not having to shrink them. It didn’t work that way in this case where the bandwidth was too small to handle the large pictures.
Weather: Overcast with occasional light to moderate rain showers in the afternoon, temperature 72F/22C, wind not noticeable.
posted by Celeste at
3:41 p.m.
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