Land Cruisers

Top right: Hiking in the Connestee Falls community. Top left: At the trail head on one of the community trails

Next photo: Near the Blue Ridge Parkway in the Pisgah Forest. Looking Glass Falls, from a roadway lookout.

What excitement!

We have made our second payment for the cruise and now have only one more payment in the fall. Time is rushing and the sail date keeps getting closer and our excitement grows. We are excited about being on the QE2. Rumor has it that she will not be sailing much longer for Cunard. She is an older ship and still grand, but Cunard has brought out both the Queen Mary 2 and the Queen Victoria which appear to be giving the grand old dame much competition. My less than expert opinion is based on the status of a search for Cunard World Cruise on Vacations To Go. The Victoria is pretty much sold out and the QE2 is not. So with that evidence, I quickly buy into the rumors about the QE2 not sailing indefinitely. The rumors make it that much more exciting to be on board a legend while she is still sailing.

We are also excited about the itinerary since neither of us has been to most of the places we will visit. Not only the ports are exciting on the itinerary though. We are also excited about the days at sea. We have been only 5 consecutive days at sea so far on transatlantic crossings, and that was not too many, in fact, it was not enough. The longest stretch of sea days will be the 6 days from Osaka to Honolulu which we expect to enjoy as usual just sitting in a comfortable chair and watching the ocean pass by. For those of you who do not sail, it is not boring. It is delightfully relaxing, like nothing else I have ever done.

Six sea days is the longest uninterrupted stretch, but most of February will be 2 and 3 days at sea interrupted by a day in a port. Overall the cruise is very well planned to provide a variety of sea days and port experiences.

And finally, I am excited by the prospect of 85 sunsets and the possibility of once again seeing the green flash. As you will see if you read of the scientific information, the green flash is a real phenomenon with explanations relating to optics and physics that are over my head. But, it is not necessary to understand it to be excited to see it. I have twice seen a green flash. Once was when we were sailing past Cuba and another time on board a ship somewhere in the Caribbean. Both times that I saw it, the green flash looked something like it does in this photo and this photo.

Always thinking about it

With over 7 months to go, we are doing much more planning now. I have begun to research the ports we will visit and with so many that alone will take some time. I had decided to do the research in order of the stops we will make, so Barbados is first and finished. In Barbados we will find public transportation and visit a beach for the day.

My plan was to research the ports in order, but that worked a short time. Online, of course, I can research them in any order I choose to, but the books I reserve at the library will arrive in the order they arrive. And Easter Island has arrived. I guess I will just have to be flexible!

I am also participating in the message boards at Cruise Critic. The posts there have been quite helpful because so many of the participants have been on many QE2 cruises before. One of the suggestions they made was to check out the deck plans on another website. The deck plans on the Cunard site are quite small and hard to read. The plans on Deluxe Cruises website are very helpful, including square footage for most of the QE2 cabins.

And, of course, my abiding interest is in the clothes and what everyone else is planning to take with them. I found out on the last cruise that I really don't have enough clothes! And with 50 formal nights (that's what the message board says!), I definitely do not have enough formal clothes. So I plan to get to some stores this week and do some serious buying.

I am still not-buying-it in 2007. (See my other blog if you don't know what I mean.) Cruise clothes was a category on my allowable list of buying because we had already booked the QE2 World Cruise and I knew I really needed to have more clothing to take with me.

Barcelona

We arrived in Barcelona from Alicante and were off the Voyager of the Seas by 9 am. It didn't matter though because the Hotel Continental Barcelona on Las Ramblas is frequently booked by cruise ship passengers. The Hotel has a secure baggage storage room, so we stowed our luggage, had a quick breakfast at the Hotel's 24 hour free buffet and headed off.

The Bus Turistic was perfect for us. We bought the pass and boarded just around the corner from our hotel on Placa Catalunya. We rode on the upper deck, enjoying the great view of the city. We saw Park Guell, Gaudi's unfinished garden city, Montjuic, and the rest of the sights along the bus route.

For lunch we had vegetarian paella at a little restaurant just west of Las Ramblas and got right back on the bus. Dinner was looking bleak as we walked up and down Las Ramblas in search of food without animal products. Just as we had decided it was going to be back to the 24 hour breakfast buffet at the hotel, we spotted Maoz Vegetarian. We had fabulous falafel sandwiches with wonderful salad toppings and splurged on Belgian chips (French Fries). The splurge being the calories, not the cost. There are not many of these restaurants in the world, but we discovered one about 10 miles from our house and have eaten there twice since returning home.

This amazing work by Gaudi in the photo above was the only place I had my camera! I took twenty photos at Sagrada Familia which I uploaded to Kodak Gallery. If you really want to see them send me your email address and I will send you an invitation so you can view them. I can't seem to find an easy way to upload that many photos here.

This is the last post for the 2007 cruise. Future posts will be about planning for the 2008 QE2 World Cruise.

Alicante Spain

Alicante is a beautiful city on the east coast of Spain, one quite popular with European tourists for obvious reasons. It is usually sunny, has a wide and tree canopied boulevard for strolling and shopping. With a population of 340,000, it is a place that can provide everything necessary, yet retains the charm of a seaside town.

The top photo is a sand sculpture with the artist in the shade on the right side of the picture.

The lower photo is a little playground area that I would love to share with my grandchildren.

Alicante is definitely a place I would like to return to. Click the link below to see all of my Alicante photos.

http://www.kodakgallery.com/I.jsp?c=98z172gf.7a82o65v&x=0&y=-6pdkkq

On board

If you cruise, you also have had your cabin inhabited by strange animals - the handiwork of the cabin steward. We had several cute ones, but I keep forgetting to take photos. This was a practice/learning experience for the big cruise next year, and one learning has been that I have to take my camera with me and use it!


The Voyager of the Seas has a enormous indoor mall - The Royal Promenade. At first, I said that was the last place on the ship that I wanted to be, but then we were increasingly attracted to it. Seattle's Best Coffee was one big reason. Each morning before going to breakfast,we would stop at the Cafe so Jerry could have a cup of really good coffee. Plain coffee is free; if you want the Starbucks' type fancy coffees, they have those for about what you pay on shore at home.

With cool and windy weather, we were drawn to the space by the warmth, the glitz, the buzz of the people. We even shopped - once. Jerry found a bargain of a treasure to bring home as our memory of the trip - a dolphin, sea turtle, fish and coral in a sculpture reminiscent of Weyland's marine pieces.





This was also the perfect place for meeting people - which we did many times. With the calm seas that we had, it was impossible to remember that we were aboard a ship. I guess that is the idea from marketing to try to attract a younger audience. But we are young at heart and we loved it.

Voyager of the Seas in Bermuda

The Voyager of the Seas docked at King's Wharf in Bermuda, where we boarded this ferry and rode about 15 minutes to Hamilton. Along the way we passed spectacular houses sitting on hillsides overlooking this gorgeous bay. But, for Floridians, Bermuda does not a beach vacation make. It is way too cold to consider getting into water!


Hamilton's shopping area was charming. We browsed through a few stores, but this is my year of not-buying-it. And we didn't buy a thing.


The water was a beautiful color even when there was not really a beach in view.


After returning by the ferry to King's Wharf, we walked along the quay back to the ship. The color of this fish enchanted me. I took about a dozen pictures of this one fish. And of course, they all look pretty much the same.