Mark and I have been blessed to have had the opportunity to travel a lot but neither one of us had ever been to Sicily. Having never been there, we were not burdened with preconceived notions. WAIT! Scratch. Cross out. Do over. We both had PLENTY of preconceived notions. Like Sicily is dirty. Sicily has brown and scrubby landscape. Sicily is one big blistering volcano. Note to self—visit a place before you become sure you know it. We woke up early (6 a.m.) because our tour met at 8 and we needed to clean up and eat breakfast before we went to the meeting spot. Did all of that—breakfast was the buffet in the Veranda Dining Room, a buffet with all kinds of eggs, breakfast meats, continental breakfast meats, fruit, cereal, yogurt, jams and honey. It ... read more

After getting our feet sucked clean by fish and the like last night, Liz and José went to see about getting the group to Gozo and Comino, the other two main islands in the Maltese archipelago. They texted us: Breakfast at 8:30, on the bus at 9:15. Great! We had breakfast at the buffet—the amount of food was amazing! White bread and wheat bread and pumpernickel and raisin bread and brioche and croissants and ham and salami and cheese and butter and honey and eggs and bacon and on and on and on. Malta is known for its honey and I had honey in my tea—it was delicious. I am going to scout some of that out to take home before we leave. Mark went down to the hotel beach club to get a couple of ... read more

One day I will learn. I walked into my assistant principal's office today and said, "Sage advice. If you are leaving on a two week European vacation, even if you're leaving at 10:00 at night, DON'T GO TO WORK THAT DAY!" to which she replied, "I wondered what you were thinking..." Well I was thinking that I'd have time!! At the moment I am draining my phone battery by creating a personal hot spot so I can relearn how to use this blog site. So far so good. Of course this isn't actually ON the web yet. A word about what's to come--As I said in the introduction, we are traveling together as a family (minus Andrew, our son, Erika, our daughter-in-law, Nicholas the world's cutest grandbaby--Seriously. I have pictures. I can prove it--and John That, ... read more

We learned a few things from yesterday’s start—at dinner last night we made it clear: meet outside of Quasar (a disco lounge) on deck 4 at 8:15. We were to meet our guide at 8:45 and this was a docked stop. Miracle of miracles, everyone was in place by 8:20. Love it when a plan comes together! We exited the ship with no problems and were actually waiting at the bus when Ana, our guide, arrived. She apologized for being late (we told her she wasn’t, we were amazingly early!) and the bus pulled out at 8:42. The itinerary was to go to the village of Santa Margareta, see the village church and then board a ferryboat to Porto Fino. Santa Margareta is a beautiful old fishing village which has been redone into a tourist destination. ... read more

Mark and I both woke up with ever so slight hangovers. I, we both said, are too old for this. We met Andrew and Erika in the lobby at about 9:25 and set off for La Sagrada Familia. The bus left pretty quickly and we were at the square across from the church by 10:00. We went to Starbucks and got a light breakfast and got to the church by 10:20. After we got in (walking by all of the people who were waiting in line for most likely 1½ hours), Mark got in line to get our audio tour headsets. While we were waiting for him, Andrew said that he’d read about a stations of the cross on one side of the church and then said, “I’m not really sure what that is.” I started ... read more