Earlier this month, I had an AMAZING opportunity to sail aboard Holland America's Neiw Amsterdam in the Mediterranean with a friend of mine from CCM (Yay Linda!!) It was an incredible week and I have so many memories from the trip that its a little overwhelming to try to put together this post, but here goes! I'm sure I will miss a lot of details, but hopefully I can share how much fun I had and how incredibly blessed I was to have this chance! :)
Our cruise left from Barcelona, Spain so I flew in the night before and stayed overnight at a very chic and fancy hotel (thank you free night from hotels.com!! lol!) I picked the hotel mostly because they had a free shuttle service from the airport to the hotel and then from the hotel to the cruise ship, which made me much more relaxed since I wouldn't have to rely on my AWFUL Spanish that I was trying to remember from high school (that has since been totally messed up by learning Danish!) The first thing I noticed about Barcelona were the palm trees!!! They were everywhere and definitely set the mood perfectly for a (late) summer vacation! It also helped that I was going from the coldest week so far in Denmark (mid 40's all week leading up to my departure) to temps that were closer to the highs of the Danish summer! :) The sun felt WONDERFUL!!!
Once I got on board the ship and found Linda who showed me around to all the important places (cabin, dining hall, life raft, the theatre where she works, and of course the pools!) I spent some time exploring the ship and trying to figure out where everything else was before settling in on a lounge chair and soaking up the sun!Our first day was at sea while we headed south to Sicily, so I spent a good portion of that day still wandering around the ship (I can't tell you the number of times I was walking to the "bow" instead of the "aft"...)
I also found some very nice places to hang out and read, including "The Crows Nest" which was on the top deck at the front of the ship which had an amazing view of the sea as well as some SUPER comfy reclining chairs- pretty much every time I went up there every chair was taken by someone who was sound asleep!! ha! The Crows Nest was also home to the library, coffee shop and board games, so there were always people up there to talk to, which was fun for me to get to hear about so many different people's travel expierences. One couple was telling me that this was their 3rd cruise THIS YEAR!! It was always funny when I told people this was my first time on a cruise ship because so many of them are veteran cruisers, they'd all say something along the lines of "I remember my first cruise..." :)
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| Palermo! |
Our first port of call was Palermo in Sicily! :) It was soooo WARM! And SUNNY! This Texas girl was so happy to be wearing a tank top and shorts again! :) Linda and I spent the day exploring on our own which was really fun, and a bit challenging since neither of us knows Italian. But we managed to find our way around and back to the ship before it left so I count that as success! We found a really sweet pottery store with all kinds of hand crafted items. The owner of the store was able to give us directions to the opera house (Teatro Massimo) and we headed that way. :)
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| Pottery Shop |
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| Teatro Massimo |
From there we headed to a local open air market that reminded me so much of what you see in the movies, loud Italian men shouting at each other and using a lot of hand gestures, tons of scooters squeezing through the narrow streets and weaving among the pedestrians and cars alike!As we made our way around the city we got to see a lot of incredible architecture as well as some very interesting looking trees that were like nothing I had ever seen before. The city itself was very busy with a lot of traffic and people out and about.
We found our way back to the port and stopped to have lunch at a café, I was SUPER jealous of Linda's calzone (darn gluten...) and afterwards we both had some very yummy gelato! :)
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| This is only about 1/3 of the selection! |
Next stop, Italy- specifically Pompeii, Rome and Lucca! :)
XOXO,
Joy
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