Wine Tasting in Spain

The last port of our trip was in Palma, Spain!  This port wasn’t attached to “a big city” so we did more of an experience than a tour.  This was actually my favorite day of the cruise.  My Dad and brother stayed on the ship while my Mom and I went wine tasting! 

We did a mini-bus tour through the area since the winery didn’t open until 10.  Once we arrived, we had a brief tour of the facilities where the wine is made and stored.  Then we took the bus a few minutes down the road to the tasting area which was beautiful.  It was covered with vines and grapes above our heads to shade us from the sun.  We tried a white wine, a rose wine, a recently made red wine, and an aged red wine. 

I didn’t take any pictures of the red wine because at that point I was excited to try everything and forgot to take pictures.  The bread, cheese, and olive oil were delicious and did a great job of soaking up the wine!  I’ve been wanting to do a wine tasting for a while now, so I was really happy to get the chance to do it

TODAY IS MY FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL!  Up early to start off the school year on the right foot!

Rome, Italy

The morning we went to Rome, we actually docked in the port of Civitavecchia, Italy.  Which wasn’t too exciting.  After about an hour or so, we arrived in Rome. 

This day was very very hot.  Our first stop was the Coliseum.  Unfortunately, Rome is a small city with small streets and a ton of tourists, so at most of the stops we were dropped off and picked up a decently long walk away from the attraction we were viewing…this made me a little “mini-me” like…

When we saw the ternary, we were pretty pleased that the totally outdoor activities would be in the morning.  First up was the Coliseum and then the Trevi Fountain.

Next up was the Trevi Fountain.  I don’t really know why, but I was most excited to see this stop!  We learned a little about the history of the fountain from our tour guide before taking some coins and tossing them in..wishing for luck in life! 

After tossing my coin, we walked back to the bus…which seemed to take years.  (Mini-me warning…)  I couldn’t tell if we started some kind of walking tour or we just had an absurdly long walk back to the coach since our tour guide was going into great detail about everything we passed.  He was a very informative tour guide, and I give him a lot of credit.  If I were giving this tour, I’d be like here’s the Vatican…ok lets go it’s hot.  I almost wanted to throw him a few Euros to shorten it up a bit…

We went to lunch at the Marriot in Rome since it was included in the tour we purchased.  It wasn’t really that “Italian” so I would have probably rathered that we had an hour of free time after the Trevi Fountain where we could find our our restaurant since there was a ton of them in that area.  Still, the food was good, and the wine was free!  We all drank up, which may have made the afternoon a little more bearable since we had a nice wine face on…or less bearable since I wanted to take a nap the whole time.

The second half of the day was all about the Vatican.  I unfortunately was suffering from extreme exhaustion and heat stroke, not really, but I was pretty tired and hot.  So there are not many pictures.  We toured St. Peter’s Basilica, the Vatican Museum, and the Sistine Chapel. 

We knew this day was going to be a tough one on us.  Most of the tours we chose were “half day” tours and 6 hours or less.  This tour was over 11 hours.  We all made it through in one piece and were definitely happy to get back onto the ship and suck in some air conditioning! 

Rome was a great place to visit, and I was really happy that I can say that I have been to all these great historic places.  That being said, I’m not sure if I would go to the “tourist” places again if I found myself in Rome.  I definitely would not do another August trip…oy vey so so hot.  I think I might have gotten a little more out of the trip (especially the second half of the day in the Vatican) if it had been in the spring or fall, but I still really appreciated the beauty and history that Rome had to offer.

Pisa, Italy!

Our second port visited on the Cruise was La Spezia, Italy.  The port itself wasn’t really that great at all, but we had a fun tour of Pisa planned which is a little over an hour away.  I was pretty tired the morning of this tour, and it was really really hot outside.  We got to the bus area super early before the tour started, so we did a little tour of the port in a “little train.”  Almost everything looked run down and closed, but my Dad said maybe it was all closed up for the month of August when many Europeans vacation.  Who knows?

Before we knew it, we were on the bus going through Tuscany on our way to Pisa.  The bus portion of the tour wasn’t as great as it was in Nice, but it was comfortable and cool.  On a day that’s 100 degrees air conditioning is the best thing ever invented.

I was a little surprised with Pisa.  It appeared to me to be just a big area that held the leaning tower, a cathedral, and a baptismal building.  I thought there would be houses, shops, hotels, etc just like normal cities.  I think those things might have been beyond the area we were in (we parked pretty far away and walked into Pisa so I really only got to see the square which held all the tourist attractions).

First we got the mandatory “holding up the Pisa tower” portraits.  Taking these pictures is definitely an art form!

We didn’t climb the tower of Pisa, but our tour of the are included the churches.  We walked through the big church, and it was very old, very similar to all the other churches we have seen on this trip.  One thing that I found interesting is that the tower isn’t the only thing leaning…these buildings are made out of marble which is very heavy.  The ground sinks a bit under all the weight and the churches are leaning a bit as well.  Our tour guide told us they recently moved the tower of Pisa back a little bit, but they deliberately didn’t make it straight since then they would lose their big tourist attraction!

The second, smaller church, that we went into was a baptismal church.  The tour guide said that no one was able to enter the main church until they were baptized, so that was the purpose for the small dome shaped church.  Every half hour, someone comes in to sing/chant a song and we were able to hear the amazing acoustics of the baptismal church. 

On our tour, was a family with two children, one of whom was not pleased to be in Pisa.  She was maybe around 6, and she honestly reminded me a bit of myself as a young tike…aka whiney.  I named her “mini-me” and we referred to her as that throughout the rest of the trip.  When I heard her complaining to her Mom that it was hot and she didn’t want to walk that much, I though, hey…me too sister!  Lets get us some segways.  She was very upset about the whole thing, until we spotted her later with a gelato in hand and a big smile on her face…she really was a mini-me!

Were you a whiney kid?

I can’t even deny that I was.  I still am a little…just wait until I tell you about Rome….