Going to try out our first cruise ever. Leaving next Saturday to fly to Barcelona, then sail to Sicily, Greece, Rhodes, Cyprus, Turrkey, Egypt, Malta, and then back to Spain. Have a side trip to the pyramids of Giza, which I think should be a real experience. Not sure that I'll see any Deere's, but you never know. So I'll probably be on limited internet from Feb. 14 to Mar 1st. Stay warm everybody.

Good luck and Bon Voyage Frank, I bet you will love it,,,,,,,,,, Same as you Ive never cruised, next year is the first wifes 40th anniversary maybe then?? Im kind of a tightwad but when I look at alllllllll you get and alllllllll the meals and room n board n all the scenery........Ima thinkin a cruise is a pretty good value

Later,

John T

hi f.i.t, i'd get bored stiff with all that sitting around. you might want to take you a deep sea fishing rig with you and trol off the back of the ship. now that would be fun! i don't know how you'd get anything on board, but i'm sure the captain would stop the boat and help you get it on board. heck, they might even cook it for supper at the captains table. just kidding. have fun. the rest of us will see how much mis info we can pass out so when you get back you'll have plenty to do to get things straight again.

John T:

Yes, it seems to me be a pretty good value. We have used tour company's (Trafalgar) in the past to go through the UK, Italy, Switzerland, and I really like that method of travel so that I can take in the views without worrying about how to get from point A to point B. They get you to and from important attractions, and generally provide 2 of the daily meals, so it's one less thing to arrange. But, that daily packing and unpacking was a chore, so this time, we'll try to the ship method, and since these countries are predominant with a history of sea goping civilization, it ought to be decent. I want to go through Europe on a river cruise, and my wife isn't too sure on that, fearing that you see the dingy side of towns that way, but I think we'll end up trying that probably next spring. As to cost. 2 people, balcony room, 12 days of their food, fuel, room (Royal Carribean, "Brilliance of the Seas"), cost was $3900. I spent another $1200 on some side excursions. That's roughly what I have to spend to keep myself fed and housed on the road in Pasadena each week....

johns48b:

I fly 22 hours a week and spend 50 moreat the client, so I really NEED some boring time. I'm in Florida, and the neighbor begs me to go deep-sea fishing with him, and I keep putting him off. Old F-I-T is gonna spend two weeks sleepin and drinkin', and sleepin'and drinkin.......fishin' can wait.

Frank

Read up on the ailment called the Pharoah's (Spelling?) Revenge and whatever you do don't even put your finger in the Nile.

While in Cairo you gotta go to the Museum and also if you have a "reputable" guide the Kon El Caliel (that is how it is pronounced but not sure on the spelling). Used to be great prices on gold, if you knew that was what you were buying. Fix the missis up with a Cartush while there.

Enjoy

My daughter was on a 3 month world tour for her architercture class a couple years back, In Egypt (Pyramids) the group had to hire an armed guard with an AK 47 so the women werent openly molested and robbed....... In Spain they had to walk only a block from the bus to their motel so the boys formed a circle with girls in the middle yet the muggers formed around them (cussin n screamin at them and obscenities) tryin to reach inside anywhere to steal anyhting they could grab,,,,,, In an airport some laptops were stolen right out from under them yet authorities did NOTHING,,,,,,,She said in the Moscow they were all hated n ridiculed...... The son was recently in Budhapest (spelling??) and a taxi driver lets them off at a nightclub where once inside big burly bouncers circled them and forced and extorted n robbed them of several hundered bucks before letting them out.....

I have NO desire to go anywhere over there but still like the cruise idea no problem I would ONLY use a reputable tour company that had excellent security and NEVER go out on my own anywhere......... best yet Im staying in the USA or on the ship if I pull a cruise

John T

You guys are real up beat.

anything to make you feel better frank. seems like you should have a lot of frequent flyer miles built up. i don't see how you have time or energy to do all you do here and on your job and on old tractors. i had to give up fishing several years ago because my back just wouldn't hold up to it. they ran die down my spine last wen and i'm waiting on the results. probably going to break down after 30 years of back problems and get the surgery, if my lungs will hole up to it. you can get robbed any where. today i was finishing up a meal at the local hardees and a motorcycly rider came in and left his helmet on. we had the local bank robbed a few weeks back just like that. i got up from my table and positioned myself where i could see what the guy might pull out of his pockets. i cary a pistol with me every where i go and i had my hand in the pocket with it the whole time the guy was there. he turned around and looked around a few times and each time he looked at me i was looking stri=aight at him and had my hand in my pocket. i don't know if that had anything to do with him getting his meal and leaving or not. i was a deputy sheriff at one time, but pulling a gun an using it on somebldy is a different store. my first cousin was a sergant with the sheriffs dept and was put in a garage behind some boxes with a 12 ga pump loaded with buck shot. seems like a rapist was going around this neighbor hood and had twice to get in the same house. two night in a row and he came back the third night and my cousin shot him after he started at him with a tire tool. something he never talks about, but his wife says 25 ears later it still brothers him. he actually had to shot another guy who came at him with a butcher knife when there was two depouties standing there. moral: keep you r eyes in the back of your head open. americans aren't liked every where and just because a business lines you up to go some place, may not mean they have your best interest at heart, i'd check with the state dept about each one of the stops i was planning on making. good luck

Frank,

You'll enjoy that trip. I've been there, done that. Not on a luxury cruise ship, but aboard an aircraft carrier(s).

Only advice I can give is, EAT ON THE SHIP. Be Careful on your side excursion to the pyramids. We anchored in Port Said, Egypt and took a bus across the desert for an over night trip to Cairo, then to the pyramids. (About a 3-4 hour bus ride, if I remember right. Was back in the 70's & 80's) If you DO eat in Egypt, take lots of toilet paper. Every single person on our tour had a severe case of diarrhea. Don't drink any thing that don't come in a bottle, that you've not taken the lid off. One more piece of advice....don't let the camels spit in your face. It's NASTY!

John T makes a good point. Watch your back. We'd always go ashore on the buddy system. You'll probably be okay in those ports with other folks from the ship, but be careful on that side trip when it's just you and the wife. There are lots of people that don't like Americans.

Have fun when you - eat, sleep & drink. I had that experience over there too, and had a blast. (When I wasn't on the pot.)

Guys, I've been around a bit, or as they say, this ain't my first rodeo. Remember, between the bad air and the absurdly non-potable water supplies on airplanes, coupled with the SARS exposure that I live with given that many of my flights eastbound have 10% flyers who just got off a plane that came in from the Orient, I do all right....Got stuck up by pistol in Sidney....Ohio. Got rousted by gypsies....next to the Coloseum, and as far as eating or drinking, I have never got a case of anything, but my sister give all of those who ate her re-warmed thanksgiving turkey food poisoning, and that was in '98. I ate the ham. You can't eat US peanut butter for the salmonella, the burger joints all over the country can't even spell E.coli but they are successful in giving it to you for the price of a sandwich, so I got news for y'all. The US ain't all that healthy, or SAFE, either.

Johns48b: Had my back surgery for a 3 disk laminectomy when I was 37, for an injury suffered when I was 14. Best thing that I ever did. Folks thought for years that I had had polio. I still don't walk completely straight and tall, but I get by. Secret to getting things done is to keep going. Once in a while I take a day off. Fixed the neighbors SC last weekend, and the parts came in for his Super A, except for the carb kit, this week, so I hit that project this weekend, also took out two stumps and cleaned up a brush pile for the other neighbor yesterday. Have the Farmall sparking now, waiting for the final fuel system repairs, so he will get that back I hope, before I leave. Replaced the rear main seal in my 855 over the holidays between bowl games. I get a bit accomplished in limited time, but you need a plan, and then you need to get out of bed on time and go to work on it.

I told my wife when we were young, that my plan was to travel the world in my 50's, the states in my 60's, the state in my 70's, and in my 80's I just wanted to be able to get to the bathroom. So far we are doing all right, though we cancelled a trip to Antarctica two T-givings ago because of family committments, and it was karma, because that was the very ship that hit an iceberg and sank. Everybody got off, and my wife, who had less than enthusiastic about that trip, said "SEE!". But I think it would been the ultimatel party story. Someone starts yacking...."We had such a terrible time on our last trip to Florida, hurricane....."....and then we say...."You think that's bad.....Our ship sank!" Had to skip a few trips because #2 grandson had some surgeries, but now that he is right as rain, it's back out to do it. Had a million and a half frequent flier miles when I booked these first class flights overseas. That takes a cool 250,000 apiece. My wife stopped flying coach about 20 years ago. She doesn't seem to mind if I do, says she has her standards. I guess she needs the perks to continue to put up with me.

Hey Frank & Mrs.

Have fun! My sister once lived in Italy and everyone in my family went to visit her but me. I went to college instead and studied the pyramids in art history class. Take some photos that you can post. Also if you get the chance I want to now how the soil is everywhere you go. I am convinced my corner of Vermont is where all the rocks in the world are.

Take care & enjoy!!

Ben

Ben, I'm here to tell ya that there are some places where rocks to go die! Northern Scotland comes to mind, and the coast of Ireland is pretty stony, too. That's one thing I never had to farm around much, but in Ireland and Scotland, they have miles of stone fences from the centuries of picking up rocks and placing them at the fields edge. They even have local tradesmen who specialize in the building and repair of those non-mortared walls. We had a demonstration in Scotland. It's really pretty neat. Just like a big jigsaw puzzle. I hope to have some decent photos when I get back. Been spending the day packing and getting all of the batteries, chargers, and digital video and still cameras all checked out. Now just to get there and find the boat. Then I think that I'll be able to begin to relax!

BTW, I was watching a show on the Discovery channel and the geologist said that the Catskill Mts. were from rocks that originated in Scotland

Starting out with a bang. Weather cancelled our flight out of Tallahassee today, so we would have missed our ATL-Barcelona connection. Try again today, through JFK. Lost our outbound day in Barcelona, so it will be a 24 hour+ trip with no sleep. We shall see.

FIT,

I think Northern Scotland and Ireland were once attached to VT way back when. They broke off and floated away before we collided with the continent of Africa nearly a billion years ago which left us with the Great Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island. So what I am saying is I think your rocks In Scotland & Ireland were once in my back forty. Hope you have caught up to your group.

Ben

Made it home safe and sound, after a several hour delay through Atlanta due to the late winter storm. All in all, not a bad trip home, just 24+ hours straight awake. Had a great time and the sites were awe inspiring. It's tough to put history into perspective when you see things that go back as far as 8,000 BC. As to cruising the Mediterranean, it was a bit cool this time of year, but I highly recommend that itinerary.

FIT, the wife and I have thought about taking the same cruise you took, when you get time and if you don’t mind could you describe it and give your review of it and maybe even post a link to some pics you took? I think it would be a good way to tour the Mediterranean, how did yall like it?

Without typing too very much, which is tough for me, it's really a good news/bad news sort of answer. We have been to Europe three times now, the first two being land tours via motor coach. This lets you drive right up to a site, get your looks and your photos, get back on and drive off in pretty quick fashion. Great for cramming in lots of sites in short order, but it also means that you are packing and unpacking every day to every other day. That gets old in a hurry. That's why I wanted to cruise this time. I thought that it would be more leisurely, which it was, knew I would probably see fewer sites, which I did, but come back the most relaxed, which is what a vacation is for, and that was indeed the case.

Is it a good way to see the Med?, Yes, but you see only the port cities. But they do offer land excursions, and we took several, so that you can see a complete island like Malta or Cyprus, most of Sicily, etc. Also we took a 13 hour, 2 1/2 hour each way on a nice tour bus, trip, in order to get from Alexandria to Cairo to view the pyramids, Sphinx, and the King Tut items in the National Museum. That and the visit to the Acropolis in Athens, really made the trip special. We are already planning our next major cruise for maybe mid-2010 which will probably be to the Baltic countries, and include St. Petersburg, and maybe a train side trip to Kiev. We're not much on Caribbean sites, and figure that they are so local to us in Florida, that they can wait until we are older and will want to stay closer to home. Someday, I'd like to do something out of Hawaii to a point in the south Pacific, maybe an extended trip on over to New Zealand, and then to Australia where we have some friends to see.

The cruise method of travel is very nice, but if you want to see lots of stuff in a few days, the land tours are probably more efficient with your time, but you pay for it in other ways.

Here are a couple of photos to prove that I was indeed there.

The first one was near to two large pyramids at Giza....



And the Sphinx is nearby....



Outside the hotel where we had lunch, and a really impressive place it was, right out of a Kipling type story (They had a brass band outside in Egyptian costume, playing a march on our arrival, and a bagpipe serenade...)




Anyway, it was a great trip, and I might do that same itinerary some day and just go on different excursions along the way.

That’s about how I figured it would be.
We’ve taken a couple small cruises like a 3 day from Fort Lauderdale to Nassau and a 4 day from Mobile to Cozumel, they were fun and economical but nothing real exiting.
Our best trip so far was an 8 day trip to Hawaii, we went totally on our own and I loosely planned out the trip months in advance. We rented a jeep and just explored two of the islands. I took over 400 pictures and everyday was simply amazing, we spent less than an hour total on the beach. We went from around 7am to near 11pm everyday just seeing the sites. That’s a great way to travel but I guess it wouldn’t work as well in a foreign country. Both of us are really interested in historical stuff like ancient Greece, Egypt, and the Holy land. If the economy and my finances ever stabilize again I really want to plan some trips to the Mediterranean area, the cruise you went on seems like it would be one to add to my list. Thanks