Greta: I've Got A Lot To Say!

I know it has been forever since I've been on here to update the 2 people that read this blog about my uneventful happenings in my life. I last wrote all about my adventure in Barcelona. I had never been to Espana before and I am really happy I got to experience a bit of it! Barcelona was crazy but wonderful! There was so much to see and so much to do there was no waaay that we could do everything! We got to see a light show the last night underneath a beautiful sunset! For me, that was the highlight of my time in Spain!

We left Barcelona and got on a huge ship, where we set up house for the following 12 days. I think the best thing of the entire trip was that my sisters and I enjoyed each other's company for over two weeks! That alone was such a miracle and blessing! It was kind of a joke that one of us was going to take a side trip from our balcony to the ocean floor.

Our room was quite small, but we had a cute little balcony where we were able to open the sliding glass door in the evening to hear the ocean as we tried to go to sleep! Our room attendant was named Emerson and he was soo cool! A 30 something year old from Honduras who really missed his ten year old son. All the staff on the ship always had to greet us with a huge fake smile and ask how our day was going, so my sisters and I made it our mission to try to bless Emerson. Here is a picture of me and Emerson in Venice!

Our dining room man was named Joselito and he was from the great nation of the Philippines. He was really cool but you could tell that he was totally overworked and overstressed. Poor Guy!

We were assigned a dinner table with 3 other families-so they became our family away from home on the ship. We'd come together every night for two weeks to share all about our adventures for the day. Funny enough--we'd also run into them at almost every port somewhere out in the big city. For instance, in Rome--population 2,656,000--along with the millions of extra tourists that are around every day---it was amazing that we would run into someone we knew!

Our first day we went to Cannes, France--and it was awesome! It was very hot, but we got the opportunity to tour a perfume factory!

Rome, Florence and Naples were OK, but super hot and sometimes stressful to make it back to the ship. In Rome we made it back to the ship with 18 minutes to spare before the boat left! Whew! We tried to catch a 3 o'clock train, but it was an hour and a half late, and the train ride was an hour and a half, and then we had to run 5 blocks in 106 degree weather with high humidity to catch a bus to take us to the ship. Talk about stressful.

Naples was gross--it reminded me of downtown Oakland. Blah.

Venice was my most favorite stop. Even though I had been there two other times, there was something so beautiful and magical about being in the city at night! St. Mark's square flooded and the reflections of the beautiful buildings on the water was awesome!

Dubrovnik was beautiful, but then it rained and turned into quite the adventure. We went to take my grandfather's ashes to Croatia---and we did that too---but that was quite the story getting the ashes into our suitcase and onto the boat. This is a photo of us before we got hit by the rain.

This was after we walked the wall. It was really like we had been swimming in our clothes!

Corfu, Greece was beautiful with gorgeous blue water--but because we're only there for a day--we didn't get to see tons! There was lots of great shopping though, and after awhile I started to ask--"VISA?" I bought some beautiful pieces of jewelry and a really loud and obnoxious horn.