Monday 16 August 2010. We were up early as the airport taxi picks us up at 4:30am to head for Manchester where we catch a flight to Dalaman in Turkey. Once landed we pile onto a coach and swap excited banter with fellow passengers about the heat.
An hour and a half later finds us in Marmaris to embark for a week on the Thomson Celebration cruise ship. The itinerary is a day at sea, Istanbul, Dikili for Troy, Kusadasi for Ephesus, then Santorini and Rhodes.
It's our second time on the Celebration and we find ourselves in the cabin next door to where we were last year on the Pearls of the Aegean cruise. This year we are taking the Ottoman Treasures cruise.
This is Cabin 016 up on Deck 9. Spacious enough for a week's wandering around exotic ports! Ok, let's have a look where we are!
There's a marina to our port side and looking forrard (how these nautical terms just slip easily onto the keyboard...) we see the gorgeous blue of the southern Turkish coastal waters. Lunch. We find a few faces amongst the waiters who we recognise and, astonishingly, who recognise us from last year. Was I so badly behaved? Surely not!
There's a castle off the starboard side, aft of the ship but the low sun coming from behind it makes a photograph impossible. I have my trusty sketch pad with me however and spend half an hour scribbling until something vaguely resembling the scene appears. There may be one or two more buildings, their sizes may be a little more comfortable for their occupants than my depiction of a model village on the front corner and there were certainly more boats, but hey, whose sketch is it anyway?
And what's this on the intercom? The engineering crew are struggling to fix a faulty generator and are having to fabricate a part! There could be a bit of a delay to our sailing...
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