She Sails Away

Well, this is going to be amazing!

Awesome pictures! Those sloths! Precious. Very adventurous with rhe monkeys! There's no way I could do that! So awful that those people were cruel to your daughter! Terrible thing to do. Glad you gave them what they deserve. And that you didn't let it ruin the week. Best excursion ever is high praise and a very happy day.

Awww thanks--it was very special!

Enjoying your blog! Ice skating show and beach club look wonderful. I love the ice skating shows even more than the Aqua Theater shows.

Same here! It feels great to come home a little lighter!

Somehow, I forgot to mention that at the end of our tour of Rome, we visited St Peter in Chains (church), where we saw the chains that held St Peter, and the statue of Moses, carved by Michaelangelo. Both have fascinating stories behind them. in reading back over my blog, I'm not sure I gave enough praise to our all day tours of Florence and Rome. They were absolutely worth every penny and they were not cheap. They were incredible. I would have regretted it so much to make it so close to such famous cities and then not done much of anything. Our day in Rome was just fascinating, every single minute was jampacked. I have to say it was an overwhelming and physically exhausting day but I would not trade it for anything. My recommendation is, if this is your first time in Rome and you don't expect to go back anytime soon, take the most comprehensive all day tour you can manage. See as much as you can see. I did not expect to find the Roman forum that interesting, but when our tour guide explained who lived there, what happened there, all of the exchanges of power and the people and the scandal and politics and everything else, it really came to life and it's just incredible to look at something that old and understand the real history behind it. we equally treasured our day in Florence. If you are an art lover or history lover, this is the place for you. Unbelievable treasures. Another day to do as much as you can and I highly recommend a tour. I do have a few general tips for people visiting the Mediterranean for the first time on this cruise. Aside from all of the obvious things like booking your shore excursions early and stuff, I recommend bringing a really good hat and sunglasses. A visor won't cut it. Bring a full hat to protect your scalp and hair. If you're going to ride around on hop on or hop off bus is, you might want sunscreen. if you're doing the all day tours like I did and like I recommend, make sure you pack a portable battery charger for your phone to take with you. You may also want to bring a few bottles of water from the ship. If you're bringing a backpack, make sure it's medium to small because they will not allow oversized backpacks in some of the historic sites such as the Vatican. it will say so on your tour description, but make sure you look at the level of activity and choose a tour that you're going to really enjoy and be able to keep up with comfortably. When they say strenuous, they mean it. Sixish hours into our tour, we lost a couple who elected to go back to the bus and wait (in the heat, for two hours,) because they couldn't walk anymore. if possible, I recommend mixing up your port days. If you're going to have a long all day tour or maybe two of those kind of days back to back, try to mix up your other port stops with really short days and easy walks. Sleep late when you can. Don't exhaust yourself too early in the cruise because you don't want to miss any of the ports because everything is worth seeing. there's a big time difference over there obviously, and jet lag is real. If you can get there three days ahead of time to get a head start on getting used to the time change, that would be ideal. Don't expect to cram too much into those early days before the cruise though. You may be too exhausted. Plan a few things but also plan to be flexible. anyway, still reflecting on what a terrific trip that was. Thanks so much for following along!

That sounds very fun! I hope you'll share your travels with us. Venice is on my bucket list!

No self serve laundry on Royal ships.

I haven't done this cruise, but have stopped in Vigo and Lisbon. Boiling hot in August--definitely. Lisbon was terrific--so much to see, I recommend a tour. Vigo---not so interesting.

Always! And I've used it three times on two separate cruises. I buy mine through insure my trip dot com. They let you browse policies in your price range or with features that are important to you, compare them, and choose the one you like best.

Team Oasis...I love Boardwalk and the Aqua Theater. It's especially nice to have a balcony overlooking Central Park Or Boardwalk. i did not like the shows on Odyssey at all, and found the pools to be weirdly narrow and small.

Put a hold on one last night. Seven hours later, prices are already starting to creep upwards. I booked for December. Want to try this new ship before it becomes unaffordable, which is what happened when I hesitated with Icon. Not loving a short cruise, but glad to be aboard.

We are headed to Alaska in September and doing the dog sledding adventure in Skagway for the first time. Looking forward to photos from that! Sounds like a terrific trip so far!

So that brings me to the end of our cruise. We had one sea day before it was all over and believe me we needed that time to rest! We toured so much and stayed up so late and tried to do all the things and just had a really amazing week. We were most definitely exhausted though. I had about a 20 hour travel day to get home including my 10 1/2 hour flight which was delayed by three hours. Glad to be home but really soaking in those memories. So glad I went. Symphony is also an amazing ship and I'm glad I got to be on board. thanks to all who read my little review and liked and commented. My next cruise will make me diamond.... i'm not sure if that's going to mean a lot or not, but we'll see! This was an horizon-expanding cruise and I would recommend it to anybody.

Ok, so we have arrived at our final port stop, which was Naples. I booked "Pompeii on your own" shuttle tickets through Royal. We had a departure time of 11. Departure from the ship was easy and our shuttle was waiting. It was a full-size bus and it was about half full. It was about a 20 minute drive to Pompeii. Our driver parked the bus and our guide got out of the bus and lead us to the gates of Pompeii, which was about a 10 minute walk from the bus parking lot. He led us to the gate of the site, giving us some information along the way. He said that Pompeii is the largest excavation site in the world, and 20,000 visitors come every day. The entrance to Pompeii lets out into a huge area filled with souvenir booths, food booths, and a couple of small coffee shops. He let us know that he would be back in two hours to meet us in that exact spot. At first I was disappointed that we only got two hours. Pompeii is absolutely huge and I was thinking there's no way we could see much in just two hours. However, after just 30 minutes of being out in the sun, I knew that two hours would be plenty. It was quite warm and late in the day. But to backtrack. I have a tip for folks heading to Pompeii on their own. Get online and buy your tickets ahead of time. We had shuttle tickets yes, but we did not have tickets to the site, so we had to get in line to buy them. We stood in a long line for 30 minutes. Yep, 30 minutes out of our two hours was spent waiting to buy tickets. Meanwhile, there was a prepaid tickets line to our left that had no waiting. So just keep that in mind. We came late in the day so the line was actually considered quite short. It would've been much worse early in the morning. And not to sound like a wimp but let me repeat that it was quite warm, and mind you this is only May. I cannot imagine visiting any of these sites in July or August as I don't do well in boiling hot heat. Many people in Italy walked around with umbrellas for shade. My son went to the café and got us some bottled waters while we were waiting and that helped a lot. So, we added Pompeii to our list of the most incredible things we saw in our lives, and it's a bit overwhelming to have all of those things fall three days in a row of each other. I mean it was just one incredible day after another. I have to say at this point we were pretty tired but just the same, we were excited to see the site. Pompeii was a lot more low-key than Florence or Rome of course, because we were wandering around on our own without a tour guide. It was so much more than I imagined, in both size and scope. And sophistication. This was a large city, with block after block of closely pressed homes, a really big public Square, some kind of temple, a place that look like an amphitheater, and something that look like possibly a sporting area. Not to mention miles of cobblestoned roads. This was not a hodgepodge village of sorts by any means. It was haunting, walking past home after home after home with all the empty windows, missing roofs, empty doorways, and the wildflowers growing up where families lived. One home had just enough wall left to where you could see the decorative fresco paintings, even after all that wall went through. It was also eerie walking on those cobblestone roads and wondering whose feet had been on them centuries ago. If I had to do over again, I would have prepared for the visit by watching some history videos or reading some books about Pompeii, so that I had more of an idea of what I was looking at. We just went into it blindly, and soaked in what was in front of us, but we didn't have much comprehension. Weirdly, right in the middle of the city was a snack stand selling pizza. The place was quite crowded, and it seem to me that there were a lot of locals there with their lunches, either buying pizza or having picnics among the ruins on the grass. It's also kind of a thing that there are a lot of stray cats in the area, and one lady was feeding her sandwich to a cat. We walked all over, took a lot of pictures and video, and ended up in a small museum there. They have some artifacts and statues there, and some reproduced casts from the mummified bodies found in Pompeii. Of course those were horrifying; they had a few people, a baby, and a horse. We left the site with just a few minutes to spare, got some drinks and looked at a few souvenir stands. Our guide arrived promptly. We had to wait a while for two stragglers but then he walked us back to the bus and took us back to the ship. All in all it was a good choice for the day because at this point, we were exhausted from our back to back 10 hour days in Florence and Rome. It did not help that when we returned to the ship each night, we didn't go straight to bed of course. We would eat dinner, see a show, and then both of us would stay in the casino until midnight, telling ourselves we really needed to wrap it up. When we return to the ship it was about 2 o'clock. We had planned at this point to walk into Naples and try some pizza there and look for Christmas Ally. But we were wiped out. Just physically fried, and to be honest, Naples looked really seedy. The area around the port was torn up and ramshackle, and we just weren't feeling like walking another hour or so. We went back to the ship and collapsed for the afternoon. In my cruise Facebook group, there was this certain degree of grumbling about Naples in general. A couple of people complained that it was very inaccessible for wheelchairs or those with mobility challenges. A couple of other people complain about rudeness, aggressive vendors, that sort of thing. I didn't go into the city so I can't comment, I'm just sharing what was said. We had a good rest of the day with dinner in the main dining room, an ice-skating show that was spectacular, and a $100 win on a slot machine!

The second half of our day in Rome, with the Colosseum and Roman forum. It's kind of hard to look at these photos and feel anything, but when you are walking among them and hearing the stories of what you're looking at, it's pretty humbling. So much turmoil and violence and of course, unbelievable cruelty. So much wealth and power. True ancient history brought to life.

Vatican Overwhelming, as I call this set. Opulence and history everywhere you look.

More Florence! Swooning just revisiting my photos. Note the final photo for crowd reference. This level of crowds is just something you need to expect. If you're fine with it, great. If you are claustrophobic or can't stand being smooshed, coughed on, or stepped on, then you need to give some thought into what you're going to do in both Florence and Rome as far as tours.

Marseilles! We don't know what the big orange bear is all about, but naturally we had to have a photo. We finished our day with Campfire Cookie!

Palma photos! This was a fun and easy day of walking, touring the city, souvenir shopping, and sampling some gelato.

Whew, photos are sorted! To celebrate, a few pictures of beautiful Symphony.

Thank you! Yes, definitely a lesson learned as this was the first time I tried using a phone flash drive. I spent the day sorting out the mess and I'm thankful that the hundreds of photos and videos I have are still there, I was able to download them properly into JPEG format, and all is well. I have often thought about switching to galaxy myself.

Just got off a two week Disney Transatlantic. Pricey, yes, but those transAtlantic's are marginally cheaper day to day than a Caribbean cruise. Still, you pay for the mouse for sure. Enjoyed my cruise but can't afford to do that more than once in a while.

Oh my goodness thank you for this information. I have literally about 800 photos and videos I would like to keep forever, not to mention I can't put them into my video software and I'm needing these for my YT channel. Here's what I did, I put a phone-flash drive into my phone and put the majority of my photos onto that flash drive. When I downloaded those onto my computer, apparently they got converted this way. Do you happen to know if I have to go through each photo individually to try to fix it? Or if I can just re-download the flash drive in some other format? I realize that you maybe can't answer this question and I'm going to need to get on the computer and do some research, just hoping for a fix that doesn't take weeks long!

Continuing on with our day in Rome. While we ate lunch we saw two priests and a Cardinal walk by, which sounds like the lead up to a joke, but it was pretty cool. After lunch we went back to the bus and went to the Colosseum. We got off there and began about two hours more of walking and looking. Our guide explained a lot of history to us about the Colosseum, it was very interesting, all that she told us, and it helped that she passed around illustrations of what it looked like back then. She warned us that she recognized two women who were.....she didn't finish the sentence, she just abruptly said "Everyone hang onto your belongings tightly." After a while looking at the Colosseum and hearing stories, we began walking through the Roman Forum, which was block after block of crumbing ruins and fallen pillars, and so much of it was just amazing. It made all the difference to hear the guide tell us what we were looking at, of course. So amazing. So much history--and to look at it while she is telling us who was murdered there (for example) was something else. One couple left us at this point because the walking was just too much. And it was hot. And there are no benches or any places to just pull out and sit down for a quick minute. None. But we continued on for a long time, soaking it in, taking pictures. Then we had a frantic restroom stop at a few different gelato shops--which was a disaster because the bathroom was barely functioning and could only take one person at a time, you had to buy something and I didn't have quite enough euros, etc. We were pretty much on our own to figure it out and get that restroom break in, then we walked about thirty minutes more back to the bus. We boarded just as it began to rain. I looked at my watch and we had walked over five miles. But it wasn't just the walking--we spent about eight hours or so on our feet that day. So keep that in mind, if you are considering this tour. It was OUT OF THE QUESTION to sit down if you needed to, there was simply no place to do it. No benches, no nothing. And of course, the group kept moving along all day. So just be prepared. That was by far our favorite day--seeing Vatican City alone was just incredible, and then to top it off with Roman ruins....wow. I didn't expect to be as awed and entranced as I was, but it was spellbinding, and well worth the long day. Whew, I am going to take a break and finish off this review tomorrow. I will see if I can figure out my photo situation--everything says HEIC, and I don't know what that means, but they won't load. Why aren't they in JPEG? I will strive to figure it out, because I really want to share my photos with you guys. Maybe @twangster knows what HEIC means? Help? More soon! SSA IMG_2324~photo.HEIC