Cruising the Mediterranean

After finishing a project that will be my first journal paper contribution (yay!) Adam and I dropped James off with my mom, picked up my in laws, and headed to Europe.  

We flew to Venice, which I've never been to. Venice is a great city.  We wondered around all the little streets and went to St. Mark's Square and Basilica. When you first enter the basilica, you see these incredible gold leaved ceilings that tell the story of Adam and Eve.  It rained and was gorgeous.  We stayed at this little place right on one of the main streets by the Grand Canal (it even had a little view of the canal).  Venice is a great city to walk around and experience.

 

The next morning we bought a fresh loaf of bread and wandered around a little before taking the train to Trieste.

Trieste is an Italian city that is on the border with Slovenia and is where our cruise was leaving from.  It was raining and super windy so we went straight to the port and got on the boat. The boat was awesome.

The room was pretty small but there was a great gym and three or four pools, one of which was inside. I had a great view off the front of the ship from my favorite spot in the gym.  The food was delicious.  For breakfast and lunch there was a buffet and for dinner there was a great fancy sit down restaurant style thing (which was all included so we could try really interesting new foods with out worrying about how expensive they were).  Unfortunately for me, there was lots of fish and muscles and shrimp on the menu but Vovo and Vovo would have loved it. All the food and all the atmosphere was so European.  Adam and Steve and I loved it, the languages and high expectation for bread and the types of seasoning and everything.  The company was Italian but there were also lots of French and German people.  Some Portuguese.  More Portuguese than English actually.  

Our first stop was in Bari Italy, which has a cool little castle and cathedral that we saw.  It was a Sunday and they were having a ceremony dedicating some wooden relics (from the cross of Jesus maybe?).  It was so cool.  There was a parade with old school drummers (medieval costumes) and a procession.  I'll probably also remember Bari for sitting in a free wifi hotspot approving my figures for a paper before the other authors sent it in. I love wandering around little walled cities like Bari.

Our second stop was in Corfu, Greece which was a little Greek Island that's right by Albania.  There were some cool old forts and it was a fun little old Greek city to walk around. Adam and I climbed to the top of the old fort and saw amazing views of the harbor and the island.  We ate hot Slovaki off the street that was amazing. Adam found a book binding shop (one of his dreams) that we spent a good amount of time in while Adam asked all sorts of questions and I perused their collection of old books that were in English.

 

Views from our breakfast table of Corfu.

 Entrance to the old fort (left) and a modern Greek Orthodox Church in the ancient temple style (right). Views of the harbor (below)

Awesome backdrop, too bad we couldn't keep our eyes open!

Our third stop at the island of Mykanos was my favorite. Mykanos is the Greek island with the windmills. There is a little island off of Mykanos called Delos where the Ancient Greeks believed Apollo was born that is loaded with temple ruins. We waited too late to buy the cruises's excursion to Delos but when we got off the cruise ship, we found the local Greeks who were  driving the  boat to be very open to added passengers. It ended up being us, another small family who did the same thing as us, and the people who paid for the excursion (who paid significantly more than we did...). 

Delos was the highlight of the trip for me. The temple ruins, the museum, and a hike to the top of the island peak were all never forget experiences. There were wild flowers everywhere and the Mediterranean was the most amazing shade of blue. We spent most of our stop on Delos, wandering through ruins of temples built over hundreds of years. At the height of the Greek Empire, a small population lived on the island. The houses and plazas were beautiful. We even got to see where Cleopatra had briefly lived. At the island peak, you could see all the ruins on the island. Only Adam and I went to the peak where the wind blew like crazy and it felt like we were at he center of creation.

 We got caught up in everything and almost missed the boat back to Mykanos. Once there, we still had a whole evening to wander around. We ate delicious gyros and wandered around the white washed streets. Mykanos is all white with blue or red trim. We saw the windmills up close.  It was really windy out on the peninsula, windmills make a lot of sense. We tried to hike up Mykanos, but ended up running out of time and had to head back to the cruise ship.

The next morning we stopped in Santorini, the ancient volcanic island with white washed buildings with blue domed roofs. Most of the Santorini sites are on the rim of the ancient volcano so we took a donkey ride up. I felt pretty awesome using my long dormant horse riding skills. Once we got up we took a bus to Oia where we experienced an incredible white washed city. Santorini is full of beautiful Greek Orthodox Churches and white washed buildings.

After Santorini we spent a day at sea before stopping in Dubrovnik, Croatia. After Italian cities and beautiful Greek islands, Dubrovnik was a fascinating new fortress of a city. A large wall surrounds the city. Inside are endless little streets with brick buildings and red roofs. One interesting church has a garden inside one of its alcove.

We spent our last night on the ship before we had a crazy morning waiting two hours to get our passports before we ran off the ship to the train station and then to the Venice airport. A quick exit to an awesome trip!