May 15 - Fiumicino Airport, Rome

Well, the cruise  is over and here I sit in the Rome airport.  It’s as big a zoo as I remembered it to be the few times I’ve been here before. The only saving grace is that the people working here are quite charming even though it takes them forever to get things done.

So what happened the last couple of days?  Not much.  I didn’t go ashore in either Calvi, Corsica or Olbia, Sardinia.  Depending on to whom I spoke I either didn’t miss anything or it was the most fantastic place in the world.  That’s always the way it is.  I spent the time sleeping late, catching up on the blog, talking with friends, and playing trivia. Add to that the usual cruise things (eating and drinking and a little dancing) and the days seemed full.  Packing is the easiest thing to do because you know everything in the cabin has to go in the suitcases.

This has been a wonderful cruise in most respects.  The crew seems to be the happiest I’ve encountered in my last few cruises. Their attitude comes through in the smiles and eagerness to meet your every need.  The food seems to have been better than it has been on some of my voyages and I don’t know if that’s because there’s a difference in food quality or if it’s execution of the recipes.  On this cruise the chef also did a lot of local shopping as we went along, so there were always fresh things to try.  The fish especially was excellent. 

I also have decided that despite the fact that I have a soft spot for the Seabourn Quest because it was on her that we did our first Seabourn cruise, I really do like the slighter larger Ovation and her sister the Encore.  On the latter two there is the Solis piano lounge which in my opinion is the most pleasant place on the ship for a drink before or after dinner.

One thing that I did miss a little on this voyage is sharing it with many of my friends.  My English friend Hilary was the only one of my circle of widows that I’ve come to know who was on and she was only on board for ten days.  Another friend Lisa was here but she’s traveling with her husband and naturally spends more time with him.  I did meet some lovely new couples with whom I’ll stay in touch.  There were only a few people whom I met that I truly hope I never meet again.

My next cruise is a little way off so that means a lot of alone time.  I can say absolutely now that I know myself well enough that I know that the most important thing for me about cruising is the socialization opportunities it offers.  That counts more to me than the destinations we travel to. I suppose that makes me one of the women whom I encountered over the years that I thought were a little odd because they seemed more interested in the ship than the places it went.  I don’t mean to dwell on it, but I must say again that one of the worst things about losing your spouse is the loneliness that comes with the loss.

Anyway, that’s it for now.  I have future cruises booked but I won’t write about them until it’s time to sail again.  For now I’m homeward bound.

May 12 - Portofino

Today was another trip down memory lane.  We came here on a couple of cruises and the last time we bought and had shipped home four little paintings I have hanging in my foyer.  I remember we had lunch at a waterfront café and it took forever for our lunch to come so I wasn’t keen on going there again.  I did want to see the art gallery where we bought our treasures.  Unfortunately, there’s now a designer store of some kind in that spot.  That’s okay I guess because I wasn’t going to buy something anyway. 

Portofino is a beautiful little place built around a sheltered small boat harbor.  On the surrounding hillsides there are a castle, a church and a lighthouse you can hike up to on one side and on the others there are houses and some hotels.  This is a favorite place for some of the rich and famous and many of the shops around the little downtown area cater to those visitors.  It’s actually a little funny because mixed in between the Louis Vuitton and Dior stores you can find a store which sells what Al used to call tourist trash and trinkets.  As with most of these places the streets are primarily cobblestones which are hard on one’s feet.  I’ve been very lucky that it hasn’t been raining because if it had I wouldn’t have ventured out.  Cobblestones can be very slippery!

Not a bad little house

I walked around the waterfront and up a couple of the side streets leading to the harbor.  Along the way I took way too many pictures and I did look into a couple of shops.  I didn’t see anything that caught my eye; I’m not a Dolce & Gabbana kind of girl. I found a table right by the water’s edge at one of the many cafés there and had lunch.  I ordered a focaccia sandwich with mozzarella and tomato and an aperol spritz.  The spritz was good but the sandwich was really blah.  I don’t know how you can mess up something that simple, but they did.  The saving grace of the meal was dessert.  This place made its own gelato and I had some of the darkest dark chocolate gelato I’ve ever had and that was fantastic!

This pair swam by as I was eating. I should have fed them the focaccia. They would have liked it more than I did.

When I was finished I wandered back to the other side of the boat harbor and caught the tender to go back to my ship.  The ride wasn’t nearly as rough as yesterday’s which I think everyone was grateful for.  Back on the ship it was nearly trivia time (we’re still in the lead). I had dinner with a lovely couple I’ve met most nights at the piano bar before dinner.  The evening show was a performance by a great pianist who played a wonderful selection of pieces.  Late night visits to the Club (where the music was terrible) and the Observation Bar topped off my day.  In other words nothing really exciting happened today.  It was a relaxing  cruise day. The next two will be the same because I'm not planning to get off the ship.  Tomorrow we're stopping in Corsica (third time  just on this cruise) and the last day we'll be back in Sardinia.  They are both different towns but they offer pretty much the same things.

May 11 - Nice and St Paul de Vence

We anchored off Monte Carlo this morning (a Viking cruise ship was docked in the berth we had a couple of weeks ago) so we had to tender ashore.  It was a beautiful sunny day and not too hot.  I booked a tour to Nice and St. Paul de Vence.  I really booked it to get to the latter town to take a trip down memory lane.  Al and I went there several times and bought a couple of paintings there and I guess I just wanted to remember those lovely times.

Prince's Palace in Monte Carlo from the tender

We drove on the high corniche to our first stop, the old part of the city of Nice. Our guide Mimi (she had a long French name and told us to just call her Mimi instead) led us through a warren of alleys including one through the red-light district to the market. This market is an outdoor one consisting of many vendors selling everything under the sun.  There were lots of food vendors, including fruits, vegetables, olives, cheese, pastries, etc.  There were lots of flower stalls.  There was a man carving wooden figurines and an artist painting watercolors. I passed vendors of leather belts and table lamps.  The place was crowded because it was a Sunday during a long weekend.  I walked a little and then found a comfortable chair at a café in the shade and people-watched.   I heard lots of different languages spoken by the passers-by and saw a variety of attire.  Unfortunately I wasn’t as quick to get my phone and take photos of the most unusual.  You’ll have to take my word for it that there were some pretty strange sights, including a young woman wearing s hot pink top adorned with feathers, cut-off denim shorts that revealed most of her rear end, and purple fur-topped boots.  (Maybe she was a resident of the red-light district out for a coffee and croissant.) A group of people dressed in long red hooded robes walked by and I did catch the tail end of their procession. Mimi told me later that they belong to some church in old Nice and they may have been celebrating the confirmations of some church members since today was a Sunday they did that.

These are scenes of streets in old Nice.  For some reason I like pictures of these old houses with their laundry hanging on the balconies so I take lots of them. 

This was above the entrance to one of the houses in the red-light district.

From the café in which I was sitting I could see the building where the artist Henri Matisse worked and died in 1954.  Many of his paintings were done as if looking out of a window and that was a representation of his window there above the Nice market.  As with all these places the old city buildings are painted in a variety of colors with shutters on the windows also in lots of different colors.

Matisse lived on the top floor of that house.

Some of the vendors

Look at the different ways the shutters can be opened

The tail end of the red robed procession

There were lots of police on both bike and foot in the market

Traces of human habitation dating back hundreds of thousands of years have been found in the area around Nice. An archaeologic site nearby has found evidence of the use of flints to build fires and crude tools for the construction of houses. The present location was probably settled by Greeks during the fourth millennium BC.  Modern day Nice really began to develop in the late 19th century when wealthy people from northern Europe, especially Great Britain, sought warmer climes in the winter .  The main street along the seashore is the Promenade des Anglais.  It’s along this street on which we drove  that we saw many of the hotels and a few of the old mansions still remaining.  That street is where the wealthy and nobility came to enjoy the mild winter weather.

From Nice we made the short drive inland to the beautiful medieval village of St. Paul de Vence. I think this place is one of the most beautiful I’ve seen.  The walled town is perched atop a hill in the Provençal countryside. At one time the surrounding countryside was planted with fields of lavender which must have been beautiful to see and wonderful to smell when the plants were in bloom.  Now sadly there are houses everywhere, but they aren’t high-rises and they are built out of stone and stucco with red-tiled roofs so they maintain some of the charm of the area.  We had to park our bus pretty far away from the gate to enter St. Paul.  I had forgotten how steep the climb was both to get to the town and within its walls.  Everything is cobbled, winding and with lots of steps.  My knees and stamina are not what they used to be, but I managed by taking it slow.  

The first glimpse of beautiful St. Paul de Vence

These and the next are just streets inside the walled city.  They are more beautiful than I could ever describe

Part of the wall surrounding the village with some nests tucked away in the stonework

My intention was to find the restaurant where Al and I had lunch the last time we came, but it was closed.  I don’t know if it closed because of Covid and never reopened or if was just a current thing.  I was disappointed but maybe it was better that I didn’t get to eat there. Thomas Wolfe said you can’t go home again so maybe it’s just best that I have the wonderful memories.  I did find the little art gallery where we bought paintings and lo and behold the artist was actually there.  He didn’t speak English and my French is very limited (that’s an overstatement!), but we had a sort of conversation using google translate on his phone. I must remember to figure out how to use that on my phone.  After meeting him I walked around a little more and I made my one purchase, a beautiful scarf that looks like it could have been painted by Van Gogh.  I’m getting quite a collection of scarves; now if I could just become proficient at tying them I’d be in great shape.  By then it was time to get down to the meeting point for our departure.  I sat at a café with a woman from Canada and her two daughters who are also on the ship and had a croque monsieur sandwich and a glass of local rosé.

On the way back to Monte Carlo we passed a 1000-meter hill topped with the summer palace of the Prince of Monaco. It was on a ride back from that place that Princess Grace died in a car accident in 1982.  There has been a lot of speculation about the cause of the accident and even who was driving, whether it was Grace or her daughter.  I guess we the public will never really know.

That's the Prince of Monaco's summer palace way up there

This time around Monte Carlo looks all prepared for the upcoming Formula One race which will take place in about ten days.  Mimi and our driver dropped us off at the tender pier and there we had a new twist – the wind had picked up since the morning and the tender ride was like a thrill ride.  The number of people for each ride was limited to 30 and there was a long line.  I lucked out because there was room for one person on the first tender and since there aren’t many of us solos I got to jump the queue.  I actually didn’t think it was too bad – I’ve had rougher rides – but many of my fellow passengers didn’t feel the same way.  It’s the getting off back at the ship which is more difficult.  I heard, but don’t know if it’s true, that there were a few injuries.  Hopefully that’s just shipboard rumor.

Anyway, it was a nice day if a bit nostalgic.  This part of the world brings with it many memories of good times that we had.  In my head I can still remember the delicious salad niçoise and carafe of house wine we had.  Perhaps it was good that the place was closed and I couldn’t relive those moments because they probably wouldn’t have been as wonderful because one half of the picture was missing.  Wow, I’m sorry.  I don’t often get so carried away, but I just can’t help it today.  Oh well.  Life goes on.

May 10 - Cassis and Cap Canaille

We docked this morning in Toulon, France which is east of Marseilles on the Côte d’Azur.  It’s a pretty large city with a population of more than half a million and it’s also the home of the French navy. It was here that during WWII after the Allies invaded North Africa, the Germans occupied what previously was part of “free” French (meaning Germans hadn’t occupied it) territory.  To prevent the Germans from getting the French fleet, it was scuttled  off Toulon. Only 4 French submarines escaped.

But, I didn’t stay in Toulon. Instead I took a tour to Cassis, a small town about 15 miles east of Marseilles.  It is essentially a fishing and boating village.  The ride from the ship was through lovely green countryside planted with vineyards and fields of vegetables.  Our tour didn’t involve seeing any churches, museums or historic landmarks.  It was just to give us an opportunity to enjoy this charming town.  Frédéric Mistral, who was a French writer and a winner of the 1904 Nobel Prize for Literature, wrote “Who has seen Paris but not Cassis has seen nothing.”

Our guide (who was German) took us to the main square on the promenade along the small harbor and told us what time to meet there.  It was a gloriously sunny Saturday and there were lots of local people out strolling along.  This was part of a long weekend for the French.  Thursday May 8th was the 80th anniversary of VE Day and a national holiday in France.  Many people took Friday off too and made it a long weekend.

I walked through some of the little back streets, alleys really, and took photos of doorways and flowerpots embedded in the stucco walls and decorative tiles placed here and there by old wooden door frames.  After I’d explored the few streets that didn’t require a march up the hillside, I walked back to the waterfront which had one café after another, most very busy, and found a table in the shade and had lunch.  I asked the waitress what was good there and she recommended the dorade, which is a type of seabream.  She didn’t steer me wrong.  After a short wait I was presented with a whole fish which had been deliciously grilled along with a grilled fennel bulb and some polenta.  The waiter expertly deboned the fish.  It was absolutely delicious.  I sat and watched the people go by with a slight breeze blowing and had a very enjoyable lunch.

I had to put this one here because the name tickled me - It's "Jeff's Fish Store"

Every French town seems to have a plaza with a fountain overlooked by an old fort and Cassis is no exception

Lunch

Just to prove I was there

At our appointed time we gathered and made our way to our bus for the ride back to Toulon with one additional stop, Cap Canaille.  Our driver Jean Phillippe did a remarkable job taking us up a very steep and very winding road to the top of what is the tallest sea cliff in France.  Cap Canaille is not quite 1300 feet high and from the top one can see the town of Cassis on one side and Le Ciotat on the other.  There are no handrails at all at the cliff's edge and the ground is rocky, loose sandstone.  There were people who walked right to the edge to take pictures, but I’m way too big a chicken to do that.  I got as close as I dared which was not that great for getting a spectacular view, but that’s all I could manage.  The area around the summit is a national park and there were lots of bushes with pretty wildflowers.  I don’t know what they were but they looked beautiful against the backdrop of the blue sky and the rust-colored ground around them.

That's Cassis as we made our way up to the summit

These are the crazy people who got right up to the edge

This is the best view I could get of Cassis below

This was what the terrain looked like.  It didn't reassure me at all.

Don't know what they are but I thought they were pretty.

After a short stop we reboarded and drove back to Toulon.  On board I had a nice evening spent with friends and a show with a hilarious British comedian I’d seen on last year’s cruise from Australia to Vancouver.  He made me laugh a lot then and tonight I was just as entertained.  Laughter is a wonderful thing.  So that was my day. Tomorrow I’m taking a trip down memory lane. À bientôt.

May 8 and 9 - At sea and Sète, France

 This is just a quick post so I'm not terribly behind in writing.  We had the last of our sea days on May 8 between Mallorca and Sète, France.  From now on we have a port every day until I get off on Thursday and so time to write becomes more limited.  In fact as I write this I just came back from a day in Cassis (it's late afternoon May 10 here).  This cruise has really made me remember how much I dislike port intensive cruises.

Anyway, Thursday was a day at sea with all the usual sea day activities.  It was quite a bit cooler than it had been but sunny.  I played trivia and Name that Tune and we did well.  I got more Seabourn swag to give away to staff onboard who take good care of me.

Yesterday we docked in Sète, France.  I came here with Al 10 years ago and we went on a tour to Aigues Mortes, an old walled city.  I was scheduled to go shopping with the chef but I had a bad night tossing and turning and when I looked out at 7 AM it was pouring rain, so I decided to go back to sleep and stay on the ship.  These old European cities have lots of slippery stone streets and sidewalks and I really don't want to fall and break something.  I took a few photos from the ship so you can see what Sète looks like but I can't say much more about it.

This is a Club Med ship that came in after we did.  I didn't realize they were still around.

We did play the last of this series of trivia games and we won, but it wasn't a pleasant experience actually.  There's someone on the team who takes it quite seriously.  He got ticked off because the majority of the team had a different answer than his and his turned out to be right.  Mind you, we won anyway, but he began cursing and being generally obnoxious.  We start a new series today for the last few cruise days and I hope he doesn't come. The rest of us play for fun, not for blood.

I'll write about today's outing when I get a chance.  Meanwhile ciao for now.