It was the best of days, it was the worst of days.

We spent a lazy day at sea yesterday (4/20) to allow those new passengers who joined the cruise in Rome a day to get acclimated to the time change. Out of 2000 guests on the first voyage from Fort Lauderdale, 600 of us stayed on board for the next cruise. I think we must have said goodbye to at least 500 walkers, canes and wheelchairs. This 2nd set of passengers is a much younger crowd. There are lots of families with children and the demographics seem much younger and more agile.

What do we do when we have a whole day to do nothing? Just that. We are offered many things to keep us busy if we want to. Since this is a new cruise all the port experts had seminars on what to do in port if we want to do it by ourselves and the Holland America excursions were outlined for those who might want to see the ports that way. Of course there is always the token kitchen tour, bingo games and Shop sales going on.

When we were in Corfu, Greece 4 years ago, our experience wasn’t the best since the language is so “Greek” and foreign. It was hard to understand anything and I felt a real sense of frustration trying to experience the city on our own. Because of that I don’t think our only exposure to Greece was fair and enjoyable.

I told Jim that for us to truly enjoy the Greek Isles we needed to participate in the ship’s shore excursions so that we could fully understand what we were seeing and doing. So I spent the day picking out shore excursions for us to participate in and I feel that we will get a really good idea of the layout of the places we will be seeing. Of course most of the places will include huge amounts of walking uphill and down stairs so I hope my knee will behave.

This morning, Tuesday 4/21, we woke up in Dubrovnik, Croatia. Since we were touring on our own today we didn’t hurry to get upstairs. Once upstairs we could see that our “sunny day in Dubrovnik” was actually a rainy day in Dubrovnik. That meant umbrellas and ours isn’t very good.

Dubrovnik is an important seaport and tourist resort which has emerged in recent years. In 1991-1992 Dubrovnik withstood damage while under siege by the Yugoslav army. Because of this most of the rooftops have been replaced with red tiles. Almost all the homes have red tile roofs.

We took the shuttle to the old town (inside a fortress to defend the port), which is a UNESCO world heritage site because most of the medieval walls are still in intact from the 15th century and still stands. You can walk the entire circumference of the fortress walls which is over a mile long, 80 feet high and in some places the wall is 20 feet thick. At one time there were 4 gates into the city. Now most people only through one gate, the Pile Gate. It was a little crowded with umbrellas everywhere and people trying to squeeze through narrow passageways.

We found a nice place to sit and eat lunch and keep out of the rain. We are in town here for awhile but of course, we are hampered by the rain. Oh well, we will survive. We are hoping for sunny days tomorrow in Corfu, Greece. Print this post