In five days, we board our plane to Amsterdam, then Rome. One week from right now, we will be asleep on our first night of our cruise, somewhere along the NW coast of Italy.
Recently the cruise-line emailed to notify us that our second port of call had changed. Originally we were going to the small Northern Italy port of Portofino on the second day of our cruise, but apparently the Italian government has changed some cruise ship rules around anchoring in certain areas (Insert Costa Concordia joke here). This made enough changes to how and where the cruise could anchor that they had no choice but to change the port of call to something more accommodating.
This should have been where we were going:
Now, we are going to Portovenere – which looks beautiful and sounds interesting too, so we don’t really mind. There seem to be some castle ruins, and there is an excursion to Cinque Terre! Of course we were in Cinque Terre in 2008, but we loved it and would love to see it again – this time via boat and random stops for the regions famous focaccia bread.
Our port of call Portovenere:
The Cinque Terre national park; we visited here in 2008:
We have also been trying firm up what we would like to do after we disembark from the cruise. The plan is right now to visit Eze, Nice and a few of the other towns in the riviera region of France before we make our way over to Mont St. Michel and then to Paris. Ah Paris in the spring time, what could be finer? Notre Dame, catacombs, la tour Eiffel! il ya tellement de choses à faire!
Obviously we do need to get to Amsterdam and must ensure we leave enough time for that leg of the adventure.
It hardly seems real, it’s really a dream vacation… We are so lucky to be able to have these wonderful adventures!