Crusin' Greek Style

Six cities in three countries in seven days while riding in-style on a Royal Caribbean cruise ship....ahhh...living in Europe is AWESOME!!! For our first cruise ever, I have to say that we got to see some amazing places, had some wonderful experiences, and we really enjoyed our whirlwind tour of the eastern Mediterranean. This holiday was our combination relaxation and adventure, but we found that there's not much time to relax when you are trying to entertain a 15 month old on a big boat.

We really enjoyed cruising with Royal Caribbean because we got to enjoy an international crew with an American twist - American classic tunes playing on the deck, breakfast and lunch buffets with loads of food, real lemonade (not the fizzy stuff that tastes like 7-up), paying for drinks in US dollars. Addison had a great time smiling and waving at everyone - the staff seemed to adore her and I think everyone on the ship knew who she was by the end of the cruise. It's nice when people help entertain your child to a point, but it's also hard to tell people to leave her alone so she will actually eat something.

Our boat ported out of Venice, Italy and we spent our first full day cruising so we enjoyed life pool side and catching up on sleep from our early morning flight. Our first stop was in Athens, Greece where we made our way to the top of the Acropolis and got a great view of Athens while walking around the Parthenon. It was pretty cool to finally see the actual structure that I tried to reconstruct out of cardboard as a grade school project when we studied Greek mythology.

Tuesday we tendered just off the coast of Mykonos. We did some shopping around Mykonos town and made our way to Ornos Beach where Addie had a blast playing in the sand (more like very tiny pebbles, but she loved it). We also got to see our first "Bourne" site as the windmills on Mykonos island are featured at the end of The Bourne Identity when Jason Bourne walks into Marie's shop and says "Is this your shop?" Pretty sweet!!!

Next we ported in Katakolon, Greece which allowed us to do a quick trip into ancient Olympia to see the site of the first Olympic games. We were told that in the first games that men competed in the nude...that had to be pretty interesting.

Corfu Island was our next stop and the port was beautiful. We really enjoyed the shopping in the markets of Corfu town, but it decided to start raining on us half way through the morning. It turned into a torrential downpour as we ate lunch and we got pretty bummed out because we were packed up to head to the beach after shopping. Also by now we lost both of Addison's passies and we were in desperate search to find some replacements. Kevin searched out three pharmacies and we actually found the same silicon Nuks that she likes (it was a long shot finding one because I've only seen them in the States). We decided to walk back to the boat thinking the rain would let up, but it didn't and we got soaked. On the bright side I stubbled across our missing passy laying on the ground where Addie dropped it on our way into town. I know I should wean her off the whole passy thing but it has been a life saver when we get in some pretty sticky situations.

Our final port was Split, Croatia which is a beautiful city. We stumbled upon a fresh fish market, a crazy-busy food market, and everything-else market...it was insane on how busy they all were. We attempted to find a beach to hang out for the rest of the day but the city beach was a little shady and we didn't feel like stranding ourselves on a beach 20 km away with only a few hours left before our ship left.

We got back into Venice early Saturday morning and wanted to make the most of our last few hours our holiday. We hopped on a water bus and continued with our trend of whirlwind tours into Venice city centre. We got to spend about 1 1/2 hours seeing some sites. We got pretty scared waiting for the next bus to show up because you feel a bit helpless when your only mode of transportation between two points is a small boat. We did end up making it to our "land" bus with about 5 minutes to spare.

When we made it home, we were very glad that we had two days over the May Bank Holiday to recover because we were pretty tired. It was a great trip and we look forward to doing it again...next time with two kids we'll look at bringing along our babysitter to help us out. (By the way...I had a really awesome mini-movie put together to show you all more pictures but it must have been so good of a production that Google wouldn't post it because they thought it was copyright infringed.)