Friday 13th October 2017. Ignoring all superstitions about travelling on a Friday 13th, we leave the house at 3:15am for a taxi ride to Manchester Airport.
From Manchester we fly out on a Boeing 767 to Corfu, where we find the Thomson Dream cruise ship waiting for us.
Our timetable for the week as described in the daily bulletins we receive in our cabin. This is the second time we have cruised this tour, the last time being on Thomson Spirit in 2011. This time we are doing the ports in a slightly different order and our itinerary for the week is: Corfu > Day at Sea > Koper, Slovenia > Venice, Italy > Split, Croatia > Dubrovnik, Croatia > Kotor, Montenegro > Corfu. An added bonus this time will be having the company of our friends, Tomas and Maris, who are singing onboard as 2 Intense.
Corfu's fortresses, the Old Fortress is the further one and the New Fortress - by comparison - is to the right.
A look at some of the ships in Corfu, we start with an industrial ship. Dinah is an oil products tanker built in 1982 as Eridan. Flagged under Togo, she has also held the names Inzhener Rozhkov (1983) and Moneron (2003). She is still shown as Moneron on some maritime websites, so I presume her new name is fairly recent.
A small cruise ship, Crystal Esprit. She was built as Lady Diana in 1989, and served with New Frontier Cruise Line from December 1991 as Aurora I. In 1994 she was sold to Megastar Taurus (Isle of Man) and in the same year was registered to Esprit Holdings Ltd. undertaking cruises from Singapore and also some charter work. She was laid up in 2008 and emerged in 2015 having been transferred to Crystal Cruises.
Saturday 14 October 2017. After our early start yesterday we have a leisurely day ahead of us at sea whilst we sail into the Adriatic and up to Slovenia for tomorrow's visit to Koper. We spend the bulk of the day on the top pool deck, Deck 11. We sit and watch the word challenge game and then it's time for a spot of ice carving.
What could it be? Tonight will be the Captain's Formal Night and this carving is destined to be given pride of place outside the entrance to the Orion Restaurant on Deck 4. The carving takes shape after much abuse with pointy sticks into a turkey or something similar. Apparently, the carvers practice on blocks of soap before attempting the huge blocks of ice. We use liquid soap at home so I am spared the temptation that would only lead to me being shouted at...
Tom and Maris come to Sirens Deck 11 to perform two sets interspaced with the daily Trivia Quiz. Some of those questions are decidedly not trivial...!
It was quite breezy up on the top of the ship. After Tom and Maris finished their second set we chatted for a while then disappeared to get ready for the Captain's night. We found ourselves sitting with two couples from Wales who discovered during the meal that each couple had been told by mutual friends to search out the other couple. Happy coincidence!
After the meal we made our way up to The Water's Edge bar (as we did every night) to spend our nights listening to Tom and Maris.
Whoa! Now who would have thought that this would have happened...?
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