Nikki, I kept forgetting to take a camera to dinner with us, and the night I remembered, I still forgot to use it until the desserts came. So, here are the only pictures of food I managed to get. It's the best kind, anyway.
This is the dining room- it's very...Siamese? There's a lot of gold and dragon-y things.
On the last 3 nights, the wait staff performed, either dancing or singing.
This is the Schooner Bar. It looks like a boat. I love it so much. This is where Dane and I rocked the trivia that we won the second day, and where we dominated with Peter and Jayme (pictured below with Dane) at movie music trivia (they'd play a snippet of the song and you had to name the song and movie). They were on their honeymoon and are both high school math teachers and were our table mates for dinner. We hung out with them a few different nights, and it was nice to have people to talk with.
Here we are at one of the theater production. It was a ballroom and Latin dance show, which was pretty good.
After the show, we went upstairs to the Top Hat lounge for an interactive game that basically involved finding items (scavenger hunt style) or performing tasks (like the one Dane is doing; linking arms with another gentleman and skipping- he's wearing a shirt with horizontal stripes and is in the far left of the picture). It was basically a race; they would ask for something and the first x number of people to do it got points. We were the second team up there for 'a lady doing the splits'. When I grabbed the team number and started running, I wasn't even sure I could still do the splits. Thankfully, my pants and muscles were loose enough, and the floor helped out by being pretty slick so once I started there was no way to stop anyway. which led to a kind of hard landing.
This was the result of that task the next day.
But back to the evening before my knee was purple... After the game Dane and I walked around on the upper deck to admire the stars
but we forgot that there was a dance party down by the pool. So instead, we danced.
The last port of call on our trip was in Katakolon, Greece. On all the signs in town, there was no 'n' at the end, though. This town is tiny. Its main tourist attraction is that it's 40 kilometers from Olympia, but Dane and I had just done 3 days of excursions and we needed a break (vacationing is just so tiring). We decided that we would walk through the town, try to find a place to swim, perhaps look through some shops, and maybe get a snack. We wound up doing all of that, having to really control ourselves in one shop specifically, swam in a cove with perfectly cool, clear water and little fish that nibbled at your feet, and had an amazing PORK gyro (we asked about lamb and were educated: lamb gyros are Turkish, in Greece it is pork. Daphne's has been lying to you all). We didn't have the camera with us for any of this, so I took pictures from the boat to try to show where things were.
Olympia is somewhere out this way.
This is the port. One of the things we loved about it is that we were the only cruise ship there and the port was tiny and relaxed. Every part of this day had a slow, gentle pace. We decided that if we ever came back to spend a month in Greece, we'd come here. Almost in the center of the picture you can see some rocks in the water and possibly people swimming. That's where we swam. There were large rocks, but they were covered in some kind of plant so you weren't getting all scraped up on them. There were also fish that would nip at you if you stood still. For the first few minutes, Dane didn't like it. Then he was sad when they stopped for a while, and excited when they came back.
This is a closer shot of the town. We fell in love with a store that specializes in crafting with olive wood. They make beautiful bowls, trays, trinkets, jewelry, chess sets (if we weren't continuing to travel, I think we would have wound up with one of those). Luckily for us (?) they have a website. I never thought I'd come home and immediately order something from Greece, but it is so beautiful.
We ran into Peter and Jayme when we were going back to the boat, and they asked us if we had breakfast in the cafe at the top of the ship. Yes we had. Had we seen the hundreds of jellyfish in the water? No. Shiver down my spine. And it's probably good because I would have been too freaked out to swim otherwise. But I had to see if there were any left. There were only a handful that I saw, but they were pretty and large enough to be seen from 30 feet above the water.
On the last morning, we grabbed breakfast before disembarking. It was sad. So we decided to go take pictures of our favorite place on the boat: the Solarium.
It was on the top closed deck, had a pool, hot tubs, a cafe, sunbathing and air conditioning all in one place. Plus it's decor was ancient Grecian temple. We loved it so much. Here's where we could sit in the frigid ac while watching the ocean go by.
This was our spa of choice. No kids allowed.
See how there is skid proof (ish) tape on the marble steps leading down to the water? And see how there is not tape on the ones in the water? And remember how I kept pointing out how slick marble is, particularly when wet and when the front of the step is rounded? I almost landed flat on my back, even after Dane's admonition to be careful.
This was the pool that was sloshing amazingly when the boat was pitching a little in the choppy water.
and this was the cafe. Isn't this tiling cool?
The luxury of the cruise came to a grinding, screeching halt when we arrived at the airport in Venice. Five cruise ships had docked that morning, and the airport is not well equipped to handle crowds (it seemed to us that Italy was not well equipped to handle crowds efficiently in general). After waiting an hour to check in, it was finally our turn. However, there were two lines originally, but only one check in person. So she had just been alternating between them. They closed the back of our line, though, so we were the last ones in it, and when we walked up because it was our turn, the woman in the front of the other line starting yelling and calling us rude people, presumably because it looked like we just walked out of nowhere. I explained, firmly, that we had been in line longer, a fact I knew because I had seen her husband attempt to line jump about 20 minutes before. She called me a liar and said that i was rude and didn't deserve to talk to her. Meanwhile, Dane is getting us checked in and the employee has lost her will to not quit her job.
Checked in, we headed upstairs to go through security (at this point with less than 40 minutes until our flight is supposed to leave). What we find there is something that used to be a line, and it stretches on as far as the eye can see, but in two directions, and a crowd of people just merging into the middle. We had noticed this trend earlier in Rome (first with the bus and then other places as well) and I even heard one Italian guy explain it to a British persons behind us who was complaining. "in your country, everyone is polite and waits their turn in line. In Italy, we say forget (to keep it pg) the line. And if you try to make it work, you'll never get there. That's how it is in this country." We found this to be true, so we let ourselves get swept up in the crowd cutting into line (which I suppose proved the snide French woman correct, but she didn't know that; plus, they somehow beat us through security, so she had to have also cut in). It was chaos.
When we finally got to the front of the line, Dane's patience had run out and he said to the security person checking our passports in a perceptibly sarcastic tone, "love you airport here." I was sure we were never going to make it through. Who does that, harass security? He did get flagged to be patted down after he went through the metal detector.
After all that, we still had to wait to get on the plane, and take a shuttle out to the Tarmac to get on. Easyjet has free seating, but we've managed to get seats together on each of our flights. We took off only 40 minutes late. :)
We were hoping that the craziness of this travel day was not indicative of our post cruise vacation atmosphere. When we got to Paris, though, it worked out ok (even though I hadn't figured out beforehand how to get from the airport to our hotel because I didn't have Internet access as I'd expected to). We were a little tired, but basically coherent enough to use the metro without getting pick pocketed (though there was an attempt, we think) and had delicious chinese food for dinner while we made our plans for Paris.
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