Every trip we've shared since 2011—filter by where we went, when we traveled, or what we explored.
Showing 15 of 236 posts
PortugalOff on another adventure, this time with Kieran, John's daughter, who booked the whole thing on a week's notice. Three days in Lisbon before a sixteen-day crossing to Puerto Rico. The Alfama, the walk down to Praça do Comércio, the Time Out Market, and Pink Street.
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OmanThe last leg of the cruise, ashore on the Arabian coast. Muscat and the vast Sultan Qaboos Grand Mosque, the Sultan's Palace and the old Al Mirani Fort, and one of the largest private yachts in the world. Abu Dhabi from the top of a sightseeing bus, all gleaming and new. And Dubai, where we said our goodbyes, skipped the city over a vaccine rule, and flew back to Cairo.
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JordanA short call at Aqaba, Jordan's one seaport, and a reminder of how glad we were to have given Petra a proper visit weeks before, while shipmates got only two rushed hours. Then four days at sea, down the Red Sea and out into the pirate waters of the Gulf of Aden: the Martini Bar that became 'our bar,' the crew's Covid stories, two fine couples, and a boat in the night that gave everyone a fright.
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EgyptA day off the ship at Safaga, driven inland to Luxor, the ancient Thebes. The vast temple of Karnak with its avenue of rams and its Great Hypostyle Hall, the remarkable story of the pharaoh Hatshepsut, a boat across the Nile, and the painted tombs of the Valley of the Kings, where Janice walked the ledge into the burial chamber of Merneptah.
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IsraelA new corner of Israel at Haifa: the closed Bahá'í gardens, the Byzantine mosaics at Shavei Tzion, and Rosh Hanikra, where the world's steepest cable car drops to the sea grottos on the Lebanese border. John's leg, skinned in Wadi Rum, kept us aboard rather than bound for Jerusalem. Then south to Egypt and a long day's sail through the Suez Canal, under the great bridge to the Sinai.
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GreeceThe land half of the journey behind us, we flew from Cairo to Athens to begin the cruise we had planned for years, from Greece all the way to Dubai. Two days at Piraeus and its bitter orange trees, then aboard the Norwegian Jade to our first stop in Turkey: the House of the Virgin Mary, the vast Roman ruins of Ephesus with its Library of Celsus and great theater, and the lone surviving column of the Temple of Artemis.
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CaribbeanOne of the first cruises after COVID nearly sank the whole industry, which made for a comedy of dos and don'ts: three negative tests just to board, a ship built for forty-two hundred carrying a thousand, and islands where you couldn't step off the boat without a chaperone. From Old San Juan and its great Spanish fort out to St. Thomas, St. Maarten, Antigua, Barbados, St. Lucia, and St. Kitts, with monkeys, a water slide, an America's Cup memory, and a lot of shuttered shops we hope reopen soon.
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Falkland IslandsA small set of islands with a big history. In the harbor, Chinese squid boats, the catch that earns the Falklands much of their living; on the land, the wreckage of 1982 kept as remembrance, and a people firmly British and glad to be. Janice took a rough two-hour drive across roadless country, past cowboys working the sheep, to Volunteer Point and a colony of King penguins balancing their eggs on their feet. John, under the weather, had to take this one on faith.
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ChileOff Punta Arenas we went ashore on Isla Magdalena, where 120,000 Magellanic penguins nest in the heart of the Strait of Magellan, and walked among them past a lighthouse from 1902. Then the ship carried us around Cape Horn, calm and kind to us for once, though the old shipwreck stories were never far from mind. The Falklands were next.
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ChileFrom Peru we flew to Santiago and, with Steve and Marilyn, boarded a Princess ship at San Antonio for fourteen days around the bottom of the continent. Our balcony looked out on the Chilean coast as we sailed south: a day among the volcanoes and falls near Puerto Montt, and a slow, breathtaking pass by the Amalia Glacier off the Patagonian ice field. The Horn and the penguins lay ahead.
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GreeceChapter four began with a gut-punch: a memo at check-in telling us the Egypt stops were cancelled, the very reason we had booked the cruise. We swallowed our disappointment, met a couple named Gordon and Karen over lunch who would become lifelong friends, and set off to see the Greek isles. Over four days we rode the cable car above Santorini's caldera, hunted a wine pitcher in Crete, were thoroughly ruined out in Cyprus, and walked the medieval streets of Rhodes. Then came a day at sea we will never forget, with a galley fire and fighter jets buzzing the ship off the coast of Syria.
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DenmarkWith St. Petersburg given its own post, this is the rest of the Baltic cruise. Copenhagen was our hub, a city we came to love over three partial days, with its Nyhavn canal, the surprisingly small Little Mermaid, and a memorable dinner of smorrebrod and snaps. From there the Norwegian Star carried us to Warnemunde and the old town of Rostock, the medieval streets of Tallinn, and the rock-hewn church of Helsinki, before bad weather cost us Stockholm and we said our goodbyes to the ship and turned to the trains.
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RussiaSt. Petersburg was the stop we had most looked forward to, and we drew two rare sunny days to see it with our guide Marianna. Peter the Great's city gave us Peterhof, his answer to Versailles; the Hermitage, the third largest art museum on earth, with its Peacock Clock and its Rembrandts; the mosaic-clad Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood; the Romanov tombs in the Peter and Paul Fortress; and a room of imperial Fabergé eggs. Two centuries of Romanov history, a city rebuilt stone by stone after the siege of Leningrad, and a guide who calls Putin a rock star.
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NorwayFrom Copenhagen the Norwegian Star carried us north along the west coast of Norway through four ports in a row. We toured art nouveau Aalesund, rebuilt after a 1904 fire with materials sent by Kaiser Wilhelm II; rose at four in the morning to watch the cliffs of the Geirangerfjord slide past; rode the Flam Railway, the steepest in the world, up through tunnels cut by hand; and climbed Mount Floyen above old Bergen. A jammed camera, a fisherman playing chicken with our ship, and new friends from Germany rounded out the week.
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PortugalThe first leg of our ten week European adventure was the crossing itself, thirteen days on the Norwegian Star from Tampa to Copenhagen. Between long stretches at sea we paused in Bermuda and spent a glorious day touring Sao Miguel in the Azores with our guide Josef, from the twin crater lakes of Sete Cidades to a mountain lake the wind unveiled just for us. We rode out a storm with waves as high as forty-five feet, sailed up the English Channel past the White Cliffs of Dover, and made friends with three couples we hope to see for years. Crossing the Atlantic, as we found out, is not for sissies.
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