May 10, 2011
Santa Cruz, Tenerife, Canary Islands.
Land at last. We haven’t touched land since May 2! Everyone onboard is excited to go ashore.
Santa Cruz is a lovely city nestled between the mountains and the sea on the northeast part of the island of Tenerife. We are about 100 miles off the coast of Western Sahara, Africa.
We really enjoyed the city. It is modern, sparkling clean and has interesting architecture. It is not hard to get around in. We walked for four hours in the beautiful weather, visiting the African Market and the pedestrian friendly downtown area. It appears to be a prosperous area and nobody pushes you to buy things. Our Spanish served us well, although many people speak English here. There was very little in the way of tourist goods to shop for.
We hit the ATM machine and now have enough euros for several stops. Donna needed a new battery for her watch and we bought some toothpaste, a Spanish brand we will soon find out about. WE found an internet café and got a few pieces checked, but did not have time to read any yet. May 11-12 aboard the Navigator of the Seas. 4371 nautical miles completed so far.
We have continued to buck powerful headwinds since leaving Florida, leaving the open decks unusable much of the time.
We completed our last two of nine lectures with overflow crowds and rounds of applause. Thursday’s lecture, Our roman Legacy, received many wonderful comments. We are relieved to complete our lecture series. Only one day off in nine days is starting to seem like work, but we love it!
Thursday morning we passed through the Straits of Gibraltar at about 7:00 am. Everyone was up to see the Rock, but darkness, fog and high winds made it pretty much invisible.
We are now nine hours ahead of Pacific Time.
We are looking forward to visiting Mallorca tomorrow.
May 15th-Rome Italy
We had two more wonderful ports of call for our final two days at sea. We visited Palma de Mallorca and it was lovely on this island paradise. It reminded us of a miniature Barcelona. We walked for about four hours throughout the town and enjoyed the lovely city and wonderfully warm weather. They have a lovely La Rambla with lots of gorgeous flowers for sale. We also found a central marketplace and a supermarket so we purchased some wine and gin at super reasonable rates. The wine cost about 75 cents for a liter! It was very good too. This was probably our favorite of all of the ports that we stopped at as it was so charming. It was also nice to be able to use our Spanish one more time.
Our next port was Ajaccio Corsica. This is a French owned island and is also very lovely. Lots of tourists here and lots of things to see on our walk about town. We spent abut 3 and a half hours walking around this lovely city trying to understand the language spoken here. It is a combination of French and Italian and Corsican so very odd sounding. They have some lovely beaches and great shopping areas but the prices are very high here just like other French areas that we have visited such as Tahiti so the only thing we bought was a loaf of very good French bread which we had for our lunch as we walked around the city. There was a car rally in town which was part of a larger European rally so it fun to watch the cars from all over Europe as they left the starting gate right near our ship. We got back in time to have a few hours sun bathing on ship as the weather was perfect.
Our first part of our adventures ended today as we disembarked in Civiavecchia Italy and shared a town car with another couple into Rome. We have had so many great comments on our lecturers that we feel we had a very successful two weeks as lecturers on this lovely ship. We are now at the Hotel Montreal in the heart of Rome and will be here for four days of exploring the area.
We leave you with areviderce Roma,
Donna and John
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