Since this was my very first cruise, and also my very first trip to Europe, everything was uniquely new and, in some sense, like drinking from a fire hose. Here are a some of the things that stood out for me throughout cruise. ---- CRUISING EXPERIENCE ---- Good to excellent food (and lots of it). Very comfortable bed. Tendered ports (as opposed to docked) are a pain. (Unfortunately) There were difficulties between the guests in the stateroom between us and...

We're a little behind on the blogging, but since we finished the largest segment of our trip a bit ago, we thought it would good if each of us had a blog entry of our cruise highlights. Therefore, the next four entries (hopefully) will be from each of us individually, starting with Tom.

Walking around Split we encountered the Grgur Ninski Statue - he was a national hero - where it is supposed to be good luck to rub his big toe. Of course, it has been done so much that the finish has been entirely worn off. The women could not resist touching what looks like gold. Near the end of our cruise, the weary start wilting :-). This was the last stop on the cruise and then it was two sea days steaming back to Barcelona for disembark and the next leg o...

Split Croatia was another fairly short day where the ship was tendered in the bay rather than docked. We ended up only spending a few hours on shore, primarily walking around the Diocletian Palace. It is more inconvenient to spend money here since they are not part of the EU (their base currency is the Kuna where 1 Euro = ~7.8 Kuna). Graffiti around the city leads one to believe the people are very much opposed to the EU.

Yup. Yet another blog post from Venice. You can probably tell it was our favorite city to date (actually, of the entire cruise). The streets of Venice reminded us of the streets of Florence - a windy maze of claustrophobic to wide passageways to get lost in (sort of like that ancient Adventure computer game - real geeks will understand :-). Remember to check out http://dyecegla-europe.tumblr.com/ for other better photos and videos.