Itinerary Overview

Our journey begins in one month on Saturday, March 28. We’ll be flying Delta Airlines (shocking to hear from me, I know… not!) from Tampa to Barcelona via New York-JFK. After our overnight flight, we arrive early in the morning and will be checking into the Gallery Hotel. Why the Gallery Hotel? It had good reviews from other travelers and is situated in an excellent location. We’ll be in Barcelona for just one night before the cruise, and we’ve not made any plans other than stating our intention to eat tapas that evening.

The next day, we’ll head to the port to embark on our 11-night Eastern Mediterranean cruise aboard Royal Caribbean International’s Brilliance of the Seas. Here’s the planned itinerary:

Given that we’re rather experienced travelers, we usually explore destinations on our own. For example, last year we only booked one tour organized by our cruise line… which didn’t work out exactly as planned. That said, successfully navigating unfamiliar ports (given the often limited amount of time on shore) requires sufficient advanced planning. But, if “failing to plan” really is “planning to fail,” we’re setup nicely right now to go down in a spectacular blaze of ignorance-laced, ill-prepared glory.

The notable exception to having no earthly idea of what we’re going to do is in Egypt, the raison d’etre for this trip. The primary goal is to get off of the ship and onto the land. Why? Because, it will be our first time on African soil: another continent visited. Our secondary goal is to “see the Pyramids.” I know... how very touristy of us. Our final goal is to return safely to the ship on time for sailing away. To accomplish these objectives with maximum ease (and hopefully minimal stress), we’re currently planning to take the “Medieval Cairo” tour organized by RCI.

At the end of our cruise, we’ll return to the Gallery Hotel in Barcelona and will have two additional days in this fantastic city.

We return home on April 12, Easter Sunday.

Welcome!

Welcome to the blog for our 2009 Eastern Mediterranean vacation!

Last year, I setup the Europe by Sea (2008) blog as an efficient means to share our vacation experiences—in almost real-time—with friends and family at home. As I noted at the time, it was also something of an experiment for me. I wanted to see how I liked the “blogging lifestyle” and chronicling in writing our travel experiences.

Overall, the experience was very positive. I received much positive feedback from family and friends (my intended audience). And, I had a fair amount of participation and supportive comments from complete strangers (a very welcomed side-effect), including some who were inspired to start blogs of their own based on my humble efforts. Libby and I have also found ourselves returning to last year’s blog from time to time to either check details (“what was the name of that pastry in Lisbon?”) or simply to recall memories a little more vividly through my contemporaneous accounts. Most importantly (it is a vacation after all), I found that I loved writing about our travels each day.

Given that, creating this year’s blog was a foregone conclusion.

I'll make posts from time-to-time about our pre-vacation planning and preperations. Once we leave home, I expect to post daily updates during the travel period of March 28 to April 12, 2009. Like last year, I expect the blog will be fairly text rich and image poor: constraints of the painfully slow and rather costly Internet connection available aboard ships. I'll post more images after we return.

I hope you enjoy the blog.