We just returned yesterday evening from a wonderful 7 day long Eastern Mediterranean cruise through our favorite cruise line, Costa! We left early Saturday morning for a 5.5 -6 hour drive to Venice, Italy to board the Costa Victoria. (The drive alone is nice as we were treated to beautiful landscape after landscape as we drove through Germany, Austria, and Italy.) Our cruise included excursions in Italy (Venice and Ancona), several stops in Greece (Santorini, Athens, Mykonos, Corfu), and Dubrovnik in Croatia. We enjoyed them all but my personal favorite stop was the small town of Oia on the Santorini islands. The houses built into the cliffs, white washed with beautiful blue domes against an equally stunning sea were amazing. Marco enjoyed Athens the most. The Acropolis was well worth the hike we took to get there. There are no words for me to describe the feeling I had standing on the steps of the Parthenon while Kalynn played with rocks as we took it all in.
Kalynn loved the Squok Club the most it seems. This is the cruise ship's onboard kids' club (kinda like a cruise kindergarten) that offers various activities, crafts, and entertainment. Before we left for the cruise I told Marco that there was no way I was going to leave Kalynn at the club and I was sure she would not want to be left. Boy was I wrong. From the time we told her about the club, she begged to go by herself even before the club opened on the first day. Before we set sail, the first thing she wanted to do was go see the Squok Club room. I relented and we let her go for a couple of hours each day (though we took her with us every time we left the ship). She made quite a few friends on the ship, most were Italian and German. Luca and a girl who's name she could never remember (I think because it was so hard to say) were her favorites. On our excursion in Corfu, Kalynn held Luca's hand and wanted him to go with us. It was so cute. Everybody we met both on and off the ship fell in love with Kalynn. Everywhere you look people were snapping photos of her. One older gentleman in Dubrovnik (a store owner) came out of his store to see and talk to Kalynn. I was shopping in another store at the time and Marco and Kalynn were waiting outside. The store owner told me that he fell in love with her. He asked Marco if he could take a picture pinching her cheeks. He gave her a leather key chain with her initial on it for free!
There was a little bit of rain in Ancona, Italy that stopped almost as soon as it started but after that Kalynn enjoyed sunning it up on deck in the pool. This is in stark contrast to our drive home after our cruise was over... can you say SNOW in the Alps. We took photos of her playing in the snow and the snow capped mountains, lol.
We had a great time!
Sorry the pictures aren't labeled/categorized. You can visit my Facebook page where they are in albums for each placed visited.
