France

Mom’s Perspective:

Friday:
I’m going to be first today! Today, we had a visit to the unique area called the Cinque Terre. 5 Lands. This is a series of 5 (surprise!) villages with a total population of about 5000 people. These villages sit on the edge of extreme hillsides bordering the sea. A road goes to one of the villages and there is now a train, but we’re talking about extremely remote! We took a bus from Livorno, our port, to La Spezia, then took a tour boat to the first village, Riomaggiore. We walked the “lover’s lane” to the 2nd village of Manarola, where we caught the next boat. It doesn’t stop at the 3rd village, Corniglia, because it’s situated too high on the hill, but goes to the connecting town of Vernazza. We had time to walk around in Vernazza and then caught the boat to the final, and largest, village of Monterosso. We had some fabulous Margherita pizza, which has only mozzarella cheese (white), basil (green) and tomatoes (red) to signify the Italian flag. Then we poked around in various shops until it was time to catch the bus back to Livorno. We saw the leaning tower from a distance as we drove past Pisa, and the marble “caves” where they gather incredible amounts of white marble. Michelangelo picked his stones from here. It was another very long day, but we saw incredible scenery throughout. This is yet another spot we’d love to spend a few days exploring. Diane, are you ready for that trip to Italy?

Saturday:
Finally, a really relaxing day; strolling the town of Villefranche for an hour or so, then being lazy on the ship. Packing is almost done and we’ve said our goodbyes to the butler, Rogin. We didn’t pick up a lot of souvenirs, with very little time to shop, but we sure have some wonderful memories!

Dad’s Perspective:

Friday:
Another wonderful day on the Mediterranean. As mentioned earlier, we have been having incredibly nice weather and today was a carbon copy of the previous…..82 degrees and sunny. The areas we visited today were very charming. These villages are built next to the water and go straight up. There are no harbors to speak of so the boat just drops you off and leaves and you walk to the next village and wait for the next boat. I could come back and spend a very relaxing week in one of these villages, walking the trails, snorkeling, kayaking and of course eating in all of the small, quaint restaurants that Italy is famous for!

I am surprised by the amount of local agriculture….not sure why because the Italians do one thing very well….eat, so why wouldn’t they have farming? Almost every house has a small plot of land that is covered with a vegetable garden. In addition there are bigger farms with real tractors (you know, the green ones from the US).

Tomorrow is Nice, France and a quiet lay-back kind of day for our last day on the boat. Even a cowboy from Idaho could get used to this!

Saturday:
We visited Villefranche today, a small village just 4 miles from Nice for a couple of hours and came back and spent a quiet afternoon on the ship. The ship anchored in the bay and we tendered into the village while all previous ports we tie directly to the port. This gave us an opportunity while anchored in the middle of the bay to watch all of the private yachts motor by us. Wow! There is a lot of money in this world. As all of you know, Nice is the home of the rich and famous and we saw a few of them today!

Jill’s Perspective:
So I’m last I suppose! For once I really don’t have a lot to add. Friday and Saturday were both great days! The Cinque Terre was quite interesting! It was a good excursion because it was a little more relaxed but yet very fun. The buildings in the villages are amazingly close together! Many of the streets are no more than four or five people wide but the bright colors keep it very bright and cheery! All in all, a great day.

Saturday was also a fabulous day, but in a different way. For once we did next to nothing! We “slept in” until about 7:30am, grabbed some breakfast and caught a tender into port to explore Villefranche. The town is very charming and, as mentioned before, very rich; the yachts and huge houses up on the hills were a telling sign. I’ve been feelin’ pretty on top of the world here in our nice Penthouse, but as my dad always says, there’s always someone with more [fill in the blank w/the materialistic item] than you in this world. It was quite evident in Villefranche that this statement is true since we were seeing yachts that could very well be our cruise ship! Well, maybe not quite, but they were certainly huge!

Sadly, we’re on our way back to Barcelona right now. We’ll arrive early in the morning, but we won’t disembark until 9:30am, another morning to sleep in! Within a couple days we’ll be headed back to “the real world” (whatever that is) and to our lives in good ‘ol Olympia, WA. You guys in Oly better fix that weather! I see that right now it’s fabulous but from the day we get there and on it’s not going to be so great! C’mon!
Well, until later!