We missed our own bed so much! It’s nice to be home again. It’s going to be hard to leave again next weekend.
Since we last wrote, we visited two more Spanish ports. The first was Ibiza. It’s another one of the Balearic Islands. It’s a lively party spot for singles. Elisa and I walked around the old fortress walls. It was cool, but the sights weren’t too different from the other ports.
Our last full cruise day was our stop in Barcelona. We went to the Sagrada FamÃlia right away, of course. Then we went to the Park Güell. We really liked looking at GaudÃ. (But we didn’t like it enough to pay the 18 euros to see Casa Batlló also. We wouldn’t have had time anyway.) We wish this port stop was longer than just a few hours. A whole day would have been perfect. As our time ran out, we strolled on Las Ramblas. Then we rushed to catch a subway in time to get on the boat again. Barcelona was my favorite port. It offered something unique.
Most evenings we saw the ship’s singing and dancing entertainment. The best show though was Karaoke night when Elisa worked the crowd with I Will Survive. I was a little disappointed at the English selection. That was the only song that I could even try to pull off. The others I hadn’t heard of or didn’t know well at all. And then there were the French, German and Italian songs.
We were happy to get off the ship. We had a great time, but we were ready to go home. One of the 16 English passengers asked us if we were sad that the cruise was ending. I replied that we don’t get sad when our vacations end anymore. 🙂
Genoa has really good Focaccia bread. We tried to make the most of the fact that we had to leave the cruise ship after lunch but our train wasn’t until after 4 pm. It was so irritating that they made us leave our rooms on the ship by 8 am, so really we were homeless all stinking day. Our train ride home went well because we met the nicest couple–they are from São Paulo and have also lived in Switzerland and Austria and Ecuador. They talked about Chad’s three favorite subjects: religion, the presidential race and computers. We chatted in Portuguese too. It was so cute!