Wednesday, September 3, 2025

Up at 6am again, showered, and partially packed before heading to breakfast. The breakfast here is quite nice, with a selection of frittatas every morning along with usual fruit, pastries, etc. From there it became a lot of waiting. We had misunderstood the directions and thought the bags were due in the lobby by 9:30, but in fact our NCL representative didn’t want them until 11, so we took them back to our room. We went back at 11, and then we sat waiting to be picked up. We were on the main island at the western side where there were cars, but no place for full coaches, so we all got vans taking 10 people at a time to where the coaches waited. But that didn’t happen until after 1, though I don’t know why. Still, the point was that we didn’t have to worry about getting to the ship, that was NCL’s responsibility. But by the time we actually all got on the coaches with our luggage and hit the highway it was 2, and we got to the ship at 4. WE went through passport control and security screening, and got to our cabin on deck 11. There we faced yet another problem, as there were no outlets by the bed, which makes it difficult for plugging in my CPAP, so we had to go down to Customer Service, where the best they could was a couple of 2’ power strips, but I do have a reasonably long power cord on the CPAP so we made it work. Then we got dinner in the buffet. It was nothing spectacular, and not as nice as the one we had on the MSC Seaside, but it was workable. We will try the dining rooms and see if they are any better.

After dinner we checked out some of the other restaurants, and then went to the theater for a Welcome presentation, that largely focused on the entertainment options. They had a core group of 3 singers and 6 dancers for production numbers, a guy with a guitar who did a sing-along that no one sang along to, and then the various dances and games were promoted. This is an older, smaller ship, and it doesn’t have all of the offerings of the bigger, newer ships, but for us that was not an issue. We booked this cruise for one reason, that we could visit these Adriatic and Greek ports that we had never been to and bring back experiences and memories. And we start that tomorrow in Slovenia. At about 9pm our ship pulled out of Trieste, and we will wake to a different port and a different country tomorrow.

Thursday, September 4, 2025

We were up at 6, out to breakfast at 7, which left us plenty of time to eat before our 8:15 start for our excursion. We were in Koper, a seaport of Slovenia, and surrounded by container ships because this is a major commercial port for Slovenia. But at 8:15 we set out on an NCL excursion to the Postojna Cave system. Getting there was a half-hour coach ride, and it was worth the trip. You go into the entrance, and board a train that takes you through a couple of kilometers of cave before you get off the train for the really cool stuff on foot. Unfortunately for my knee, there was a lot of going up and down on uneven and wet surfaces, though I did recover later. Still, the caves were spectacular and well worth the trip. We were in the caves for about 1.5 hours, then it was off to Predjama Castle, whose claim to fame is the the castle was built into a cave in a mountain, and you can see it would have been hard to attack. Outside of the castle there was a little shop that had a couple of little free museums. One was about World War I, and the other was about hunting. Slovenia is covered in forests and has a lot of wildlife, particularly brown bears. We love to find little oddball museums, and these were about one normal sized room each.

Then it was back to the ship. We were tired, the afternoon was warm, and napping happened on the coach, but we were back to the ship by about 2pm. Cheryl and I decided we were done for the day, and I wanted to check out the pool. So we went up one deck just to get the lay of the land, and as it happened ran into Bradley and Mary, who we met in Venice as part of our NCL group at the hotel. We sat and chatted for about an hour when they decided to go get something to eat. We found the towel distribution point and I went back to get into my bathing suit. Cheryl didn’t feel like swimming, but she brought her tablet and sat in the shade while I went in. I did about 15 minutes of swimming in the main pool, which felt cold when I first got in, but it wasn’t really cold, it was just the contrast with the hot sun. Then a 10 minutes soak in the hot tub, and finally a quick cold shower to wash the salt off. Then it was back to the room to get dressed. The buffet wasn’t quite open yet, so we explored a little more of the ship before getting our dinner. A highlight was the roasted cauliflower, which had a seasoning I could not place. We ended the day with a Magic/Comedy show by Basilio Tabacchi, an Italian performer. It was quite funny and we enjoyed ourselves.Tomorrow we will be in Croatia, and the port of Zadar, so we are adding to our list of countries visited at quite a clip this trip.

So far we have had one rainy morning in Venice, but otherwise the weather has been very pleasant.

Friday, September 5, 2025

We were up at 6 again, but we didn’t need to be quite as early today since we got a message that our excursion had changed from 9am to 10am. Instead of being booked through Norwegian this was booked through Shore Excursions Group, and what a difference! Instead of a large group in a coach, there were 4 of us in a van. We drove about 40 minutes to the town of Sibernik where the driver turned us over to  a local guide (Ante). We toured the old city of Sibernik and learned its history from our very knowledgeable guide. It was one of the few places untouched in the civil war that attended the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. The Churches here were mostly Catholic, as Croatia is a Catholic country, but one church had been converted to Orthodox, which is the religion of Serbia. We saw very old monasteries and convents, and the inside of a few churches, but the old town itself was very charming. The streets appeared to be marble, but actually that was limestone that had been polished to a smooth shine by the feet walking on them. We stopped for coffee, which was part of the tour, but it was too hot for a hot beverage so Cheryl and I both had iced coffees. Then we were handed back to the driver (David) for the return to Zadar. 

David had a decent business driving people, but was looking to qualify as a guide, so we gladly accepted his offer to show us a few sites around Zadar. Zadar was the site of a Yugoslav military base (now largely abandoned), and has an airport, so it was the site of significant fighting with the Serbs in the 1990s. David showed us some airplanes, including a MIG, and then a tank that had been destroyed by the Croats. From the outside the tank had a very small hole in its side, but the missile penetrated the tank and then exploded inside, killing the crew. We saw a number of bunkers, many of which dated back to World War II. And a number of the buildings had bullet holes and grenade holes. I found it interesting that David always referred to “the enemy”, instead of naming them as Serbs. Had the Serbs succeeded in taking Zadar, the outcome might have been different.

Then we went into the Old Town of Zadar to see the Sea Organ. This was made by making holes into which the waves would come, pushing air ahead, and making a sound similar to blowing across a bottle, though much louder. I tried to get a short recording, but I don’t know how successful it was. Operating my phone in bright sunlight is not easy.

Then David drove us back to the boat, and this time Cheryl joined me for a swim in the pool and little hot tub soak, though she passed on the cold shower finale. Instead she took a hot shower in the room. We had dinner back in the buffet, then it was time for the evening show, which tonight was a singer, Karl Loxley, who had been on the UK version of The Voice, and he was pretty good. That completed our day. Tomorrow is a Sea Day, so we will probably look for a nice place out of the Sun to curl up with a book, but maybe a dip in the pool again, at least for me. I have been doing water aerobics so much that a day I don’t go in a pool feels odd.