After much delay....... Cruise Photos!

Now that it has been a month since we took our Eastern Mediterranean cruise, we are finally getting around to posting some pics. Sorry for the time lapse, but we have been busy with our french classes and organizing our apartment. It is surprisingly more complicated to unpack and organize when your apartment has no closets and very little kitchen cabinet space! Luckily, Peter is currently putting together a buffet that we bought at IKEA to help store our dishes. And I must say, he's doing amazingly well considering the thing came with about 200 different parts.

Anyway, about our cruise.....It was definitely one of the most incredible trips of our lives and so very different than our drive around France in May. Probably because our room was always clean and there was constantly someone offering me another frozen drink with an umbrella in it. Seriously though, in addition to the beautiful ship and all the fun we had enjoying its amenities, the ports on this cruise were definitely the highlight. We left from Rome (we spent a day and night there after we returned from the cruise and we will post some pics of that soon.) and stopped in Messina, Sicily, Athens, Greece, Kusadasi, Turkey, and Crete, Greece before returning to Rome. Before I describe the first ports though, here are a few of the pics from our time on the ship.

This first one is of us sailing through the Straights of Messina. (Sicily on one side, Italy on the other.)



In addition to fruity drinks and reading by the pool, we enjoyed other activities like the rock climbing wall: (Peter was most impressive because he completed the climb despite the fact that he had stayed out extremely late the previous night in the piano bar with his 70+ year old Irish friends.)


And we tried our hand at Shuffle-board:


Of course, you have to love the "Formal Nights" on a cruise:




Especially when formal night includes running into a star of one of your favorite guilty pleasures; the reality tv show "The Real Housewives of Orange County." That's right ladies and gentlemen..... you can believe your eyes..... it is really Vicki! (I hope all of you who thought I was a half-way intelligent, respectable person will be able to keep that opinion of me in spite of this.)


The sunsets were breath-taking every night and definitely one of our favorite parts:




Our first port-of-call was Messina, Sicily. The town itself wasn't too exciting, so we decided to take a bus to Taormina, which is a charming little town that is carved into the mountain side and provides great views of the Mediterranean and Mt. Etna ( Sicily's active volcano). The bus ride turned out to be pretty miserable......no, that isn't accurate. VERY miserable is much more accurate. (narrow, curvy, steep roads combined with bumper to bumper traffic, literally 40 stops in the two hours that we were on the bus until we made it to Taormina, and the fact that I desperately needed to use the rest-room were the cause of our misery) But, it was all worth it when we arrived in the town and enjoyed the amazing views.
Here are a couple of pics of Mt. Etna:




And here are a couple of the town and the views of the Mediterranean:





Next stop: The Acropolis.