Before leaving our country inn in Realmonte, we managed some relaxing pool time (and they serve cake for breakfast!) and the hour and a half drive to Palermo was absolutely gorgeous. We were on a freeway most of the way and I wasn’t expecting it to be beautiful, but it was. Mountainous and hilly and fieldy and at times oceany. If the Vicar of Dibley had a Sicilian cousin, the aerial views of at the opening of her show would have been filmed there. Unfortunately we were driving fast and didn’t take time to stop for photos. But it was stunning.

Because I can be a very smart traveler (at least about some things) we dropped the car off at the airport in Palermo rather than at an in-town location. I don’t need the stress of driving in a southern Italian city where they traffic signs and markings are more suggestion than requirement. Plus, even in an American city there is something very freeing about getting rid of a rental car. So a taxi into to town and then one afternoon of seeing the sights and an evening of opera before heading home via Munich the next morning.

The cathedral is such a confection of Byzantine influence. It was fascinating to study.

And then it was time for some food. Italian food. After all the fancy food we had on the previous day, all I wanted was a giant plate of pasta. Our hotel directed us to a particular street for good, simple food. There were several al fresco opportunities there, but the one we chose had the most shade and the most empty tables. All the other spots trendy/cute/stylish and were hopping with people. It turned out to be the right decision.

That night we went to the opera. The Teatro Massimo is one of the great opera houses of Italy. Unfortunately, audiences in Southern Italy are, well, awful. Conversation behind me. A 12-year old who couldn’t keep still next to me. An old lady not only holding up her phone and taking a video, but she did it with her flash on. A man behind me humming a tune every so often (and it wasn’t necessarily the same tune as the one on stage. A woman behind me who felt the need to kick my seat every five minutes. I could go on and on, because the noise went on and on. It’s really too bad because the singing was fantastic. And to top it all off, the seats on the main floor are not raked very much if at all. Despite me being 6’2″ the head on the man in front of me blocked about 80% of what was happening on stage.  It was all a bit too much for me and we left at intermission. And lest you think the noisy crowd was an anomaly, a very similar thing happened to me at Teatro San Carlo in Naples in 2000.  The crowd up north at La Fenice in Venice was perfectly quiet. So there. Scientific proof.

After our enormous lunch in Ragusa, we had to drive about two and half hours to get to Agrigento. Some of what we drove through was extremely picturesque. Think hills covered with lovely meadows. But the Sicilians have a trash problem. We aren’t talking about the occasional bit of litter, we’re talking “Honey, can you take the trash out?…Thanks babe, and while your at it, drive it out to a lovely country road, throw it out the window, hide the car and wait and see what humans or animals eventually come along, rip the bag open and randomly distribute the contents along side of the road. What’s that? Well I love you more.”

We were going to just go straight to our country inn (with pool!) to cool down and relax after a long day. The whole point in coming to the area was to see the Greek temples at Agrigento, but we thought we could see them the next morning before heading to Palermo. But as we drove to the hotel, we literally came across the Valley of the Temples site and it seemed silly to go past it only to have to back track the next day to see it. Plus it turns out that visiting in the early evening is a great time to see it, not just because of the nice light and cool breezes, but because there were hardly any people there.

[Somehow I forgot to publish this post about Siracusa which was our first stop in Sicily. This happened the day before that amazing lunch we had in Ragusa.]

Siracusa is a bustling, charming city on the southeastern coast of Sicily. I failed to take any pictures of its relationship to the ocean, but trust me it’s there. The ship stayed in port for three days, but we left it after one night and headed inland to see some Greek temples and then the day after that made our way to Palermo.

After one night on the ship in Siracusa we disembarked and barked our way to Europcar where we picked up our Alfa Romeo Giula. Our goal for the day was to make it to Agrigento about three and half hours by the scenic route. But before we went there we had lunch reservations at Ristorante Duomo. It was a place John had come across online before we left the U.S. It was too close to Siracusa to make it our stop for the night so we had to make it lunch. A tad bit tired of fancy food by this point in the trip, I gladly would have cancelled the reservation in favor of something much more rustic. Thank God we didn’t. I would have missed one of the best meals of my life. The drive to Ragusa was uneventful and finding parking there in a brand new municipal garage was pretty easy as well. But then again the garage was not exactly next to the restaurant. We had about 30 minutes to walk on, yes, another hot day. The walk to the Ibla part of Ragusa was scenic and happily we found an outdoor table at a cafe with a lovely strong breeze to cool us down before making our way to the restaurant.

I didn’t know that the restaurant was a 2-star Michelin establishment until I went to the bathroom about halfway through our extensive meal. Although we were tidy, we had on shorts and sneakers and I would have been a little self conscious about that. However, despite the formal appearance of the staff and the elegance of the dining room, we were made to feel right at home. They even brought a little stool on which I could place my messenger bag. The interior was sophisticated and chic and we decided on the tasting menu. I think they told us it would be seven to nine courses, but we literally lost track and left the place feeling stuffed and very happy.

Old town Dubrovnik was such a visually stunning town. Easily one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen. And it got even nicer as evening fell and the tour buses began to leave. (I’ve never seen an episode of Game of Thrones in my life but the hordes of tourists in Dubrovnik certainly have and every tour guide we overheard seemed to be talking about it.)

While we were there we picked up our picnic that we had arranged ahead of time with Alexandra at Piknik Dubrovnik. It was full of delicious, carefully packed, local food and wine that provided the perfect repast when we took the ferry out to the island of Lokrum.

And more pictures of the old town. Couldn’t get enough of it.

It’s quite a surprise to wake up in the morning to find that someone has placed mountains outside your window. Makarska is a lovely little town with a spectacular setting but it wasn’t as interesting as Hvar. And like other stops on our trip, it was hot. Granted, there were amazing breezes that were refreshing if one was sitting in the shade, but overall it did put limitations on our interest in exploring. We did take one very pleasant walk through the park just opposite the harbor on a hook of land that fronts the ocean.  However, after a day of sweaty sightseeing, one bad meal, and being in town as Croatia was gearing up to win their World Cup match against Nigeria, we decided to spend our second day in Makarska on the ship reading, puzzling, pooling, eating, and watching the scenery change as the anchored ship drifted into different positions throughout the day.

Hvar was a magical place. We were there for about two and half days. I did a guided walking tour on the first afternoon while John took a sunset photography tour/class. (The better pictures below of details are likely the result of his camera.) For a day and a half we had been hot as heck and surrounded by the aquamarine gorgeousness of the Adriatic, but unable to actually get in. On our final afternoon we were desperate to get into the water and we made it our mission to do so. It was amazing. Very refreshingly cool and quite salty. Turns out the Adriatic is a very floaty.

We also visited a lavender farm and Stari Grad (Old Town)

 

Our first port of call after Venice, and our first time in Croatia, was the city of Rijeka–Croatia’s third largest. Rijeka itself had some great old Belle Epoque-era architecture, of which we took no pictures. I think it would have been an interesting place to explore but once again the heat did us in. And let me say something about that heat. We get hotter in DC but we also don’t go traipsing around the city taking pictures. Plus the sun in Croatia felt particularly strong. Maybe all the haze we get in humid Washington dulls the fierceness of the sun. In Croatia we felt like ants under a magnifying glass.

We took an organized tour to Mošćenice and Opatija. The former was a tiny little village where we were able to take a picturesque photo or two and the latter was a rather upscale resort town but didn’t really lend itself to an organized tour. Our tour guides seem to have nothing interesting to say. I know that can’t be true but I found myself so bored. And I like boring things. I think part of the problem was that I had taken a preventative Dramamine  (which I didn’t need) so I was sleepy and hot. In Opatija, John and I left the tour group and sat ourselves at a shady table on a beautiful hotel terrace and had ourselves giant ice creams.

When we got back to the ship we headed straight for the pool and a cocktail or two before cleaning up to go to dinner at Kukuriku in the charming nearby village of Kastav. When we arrived a grade school graduation was just wrapping up so the square in front of the restaurant was buzzing with local life.

The only time I had ever been to Venice was over a lovely weekend in October of maybe 1998 or so. Well Venice looks the same, but it was hot and humid. We had had plans to walk like fiends and really explore nooks and crannies. Instead we were in search of shade, breezes, and air conditioning.

While we were in Venice there was a protest against all the big passenger ships that come into port. There are a whole slew of reasons to be opposed to the number, size, and location of ships that call. Many cruise lines start and end Adriatic cruises in Venice, often staying in port over night so guests have an overnight in the city. From my observation, at any given time there are about 5 to 7 ships in port at once at the main cruise terminal. Our ship, not strictly a cruise ship, is about half the size of most of those and has a fraction of the passengers. When we were on there were only about 250 passengers on board as opposed to about 3,000 for the typical cruises that come through. Still it is big. Venice should probably make some decisions about where and how ships access the city, but for now, you come and go right past San Marco. It’s pretty spectacular.

 

John and I have been on two cruises. It was not the kind of vacation we thought we would like. But we ended up liking our first 7-day cruise in 2009 so much that four years later we went on one for 14 days. The trick for us was finding the right ship. It was so, so, relaxing. I think I read 12 books in 14 days.

So flash forward five years to a different kind of experience at sea. Friends of ours bought a residence on what is billed as the world’s largest private residential ship. What does that mean? Well, it isn’t a cruise ship and it doesn’t mean time shares. It means people actually own a residence on a ship, much like a condominium. They own their unit and a share in the ship. Some of those units (like the one we were in) are studios and look much like a cruise line cabin, but others have two and three bedrooms and have kitchens just like a place you might live. The size of the ship is about 644 feet which is about half the size of the Celebrity ship we were on. The Celebrity ship hosts about 2,800 passengers, this one only had about 250 aboard while we were on it. It felt gloriously un-crowded to us, but apparently 250 is a higher than usual number of passengers.

So where does the ship go? Well, that is perhaps one of the most romantic parts of it for me. I often pore over cruise line catalogs for so-called “world voyages” where a cruise line literally goes around the globe in about 90 to 120 days or so. I don’t think I would actually like to do that, for one thing I’m not sure I have the sea legs for it, but I love the idea of it. Imagine being free of work and being able to spend 120 days seeing the world and never having to change hotel rooms. It sets my pre-airplane nostalgia meter to high. Well this private ship is a bit like that except it takes the whole year to go around the world. And because it doesn’t have to follow the parameters of the cruise industry that needs to keep their ships full of revenue-producing passengers, it can go as slow as it wants to. It goes to out of the way places like St. Helena, Napoleon’s final island of exile smack dab in the south Atlantic. Instead of one day in a port, the ship almost always spends the night and more often spends 2-5 nights in a given port. There are also parts of the itinerary that say things like “Captain’s Choice” with no set itinerary other than the general location of where the ship will be at the time.

Another aspect of this ship that I totally loved is that, although it has some great restaurants on board, unlike a cruise ship, the food is not included, you pay for it as you use it. This means that when you are in a port of call with fabulous food onshore, there is no incentive to run back to the ship to eat your meals. And when you are in the Mediterranean there is a lot of food on land to tempt one.

What about the residents? Our friends who own a unit were not on board while we were so we weren’t sure what to expect. We kind of expected the residents not to want to mingle with temporary guests like ourselves. Well, not only did we meet other temporary guests who were friendly, the residents we came across were extremely friendly and went out of their way to introduce themselves. While one would certainly need to command a certain amount of wealth to own a residence, the owners we met were not even remotely flashy and were, dare I say, down to earth. Some spend a few months a year on the ship, others spend most of their year aboard. I think if there was one common thread among the people we met it was that they were all rather intellectually curious and had a sense of adventure.

In the days to come I will show you all the places we went. For now I will show you some aspects of the ship itself that had me never wanting to leave. Our voyage started in Venice, sailed down the Croatian coast, around the boot of Italy and ended in Sicily. But after we disembarked in Siracusa, it kept sailing west through the Med, up around the bend to Amsterdam and then was headed up for several weeks cruising the coast of Norway and into the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbad…and then…well, you get the picture.

 

Lots more pictures of the trip to follow. Stay tuned.