Advertisement
Published: June 26th 2017
Edit Blog Post
Geo: 38.1157, 13.3612
We spent Anzac Day at sea. We did get up and go to Dawn Service that they held on the ship. There are a large number of Australians and New Zealanders on board. This was good and we saw quite a few of our fellow travellers from Adelaide there.
After that there wasn't a great deal to do. We had booked into the Pinnacle Grill for lunch. This is the premier restaurant on board and usually costs extra but we had a free voucher courtesy of Phil Hoffman Travel. The food was very good. The steak I had was cooked to perfection and melted in the mouth. We made up for the cost by having a couple of excellent wines.
The weather outside was very stormy and we could feel the ship moving beneath us. I had awoken during the night to thunder and lightening. So the afternoon was spent reading. That night we joined our friends, Tulli, Linda and Jim for the nightly quiz. We had met them on the first night and we are quite a formidable team. They are all American so we have a wide range of topics covered. We won again!!
The next morning we awoke to
the very sad news that our visit to Tunisia had to be cancelled. La Goulette is a small port and it is a tight squeeze for a ship our size to dock. The winds were gusting so high that the Captain explained he couldn't manouevre the ship safely. I was so looking forward to visiting Carthage and had booked this particular trip precisely because of this port. However, there was nothing to be done though by consequent announcements it was obvious that the captain had received numerous complaints. This meant another full day at sea heading for Palermo.
Again we spent the day mostly reading and eating although we could sit on our balcony and enjoy the sunshine. We did go to the 4pm quiz and with Linda and Jim won again!! That night we had booked for Le Cirque dinner. This uses the menu from a New York restaurant, Le Cirque which is supposedly one of the best in NY. Again our dinner was very nice but I thought nothing better than we could get at the Rising Sun back home.We did have an excellent American Shiraz,Sequel, made by John Duval who used to produce Grange for Penfolds.
The next morning
we arrived in Palermo in Sicily. We decided to use the hop on, hop off buses here as we had in Barcelona. We caught the first one easily and enjoyed the the trip through the city, the port, up to Montreale and back. We got off near the old quarter of the city which had pedestrian only streets.We stopped at the church and statue of St Dominic for photos and then walked to find a wifi cafe. These seemed non existent. We had lunch at Le Vera Cucina Siciliana which was OK and then walked to catch the Blue route bus. At the bus stop we were faced by a 2 hour wait as there were very few buses on this route and it had only started at 2pm.
We gave up and walked back to the ship. That night we had another gourmet dining experience with a special dinner and wine pairing. This was held in the Tamarind Restaurant. We were seated with two Australian couples who were great conversationalists so the night progressed happily. However, though the food was plentiful and interesting, we were a little disappointed with the standard and variety. Anyway a good end to an up
and down day.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.045s; Tpl: 0.011s; cc: 13; qc: 23; dbt: 0.0263s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb