Travels WithJohn and Janice

Travel blog

Every trip we've shared since 2011—filter by where we went, when we traveled, or what we explored.

Showing 3 of 236 posts

John and Janice at the Blue Mosque in IstanbulTurkey
10 min read2016

Dateline June 25, 2016, Istanbul and the End of Ten Weeks

The last leg of our ten weeks took us ashore in Taormina with Gordon and Karen, then off the ship at the port near Rome, where the four of us shared a car to the airport and said our goodbyes. From Rome we flew on to Istanbul, our final stop and the city that was once Constantinople, the Christian capital of the East. We raced the Grand Bazaar before it closed, were welcomed into the Blue Mosque, walked Topkapi and the spice market, and learned afterward that we had stood at the Ataturk Airport checkpoint barely a day before the bombing there. Ten weeks, seventeen countries, and home in time for our anniversary.

#Istanbul#Taormina#Sicily
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A cliffside restaurant in Oia, SantoriniGreece
7 min read2016

Dateline June 14, 2016, Greek Isles on the Oceania Sirena

Chapter 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.

#Santorini#Oia#Heraklion
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The Acropolis lit up at nightGreece
5 min read2016

Dateline June 12, 2016, Athens

Athens opened the last leg of our journey, the part we would spend at sea. We landed from Rome to a hotel right below the Acropolis, watched it glow at night with a glass of wine in hand, and spent a full day climbing through its ruins with a guide named Stavros. We wandered Plaka, made friends over Greek wine with a couple named Cathy and Dino, and then took a city bus to the port to board the Oceania Sirena for twelve days, unpacked at last.

#Athens#Acropolis#Temple of Olympian Zeus
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