This article look at views of the Thomson (later Marella) Spirit cruise ship. She was the sister ship to Thomson Celebration and was almost but not quite identical.
Here she is in Corfu. We boarded her for the first time in 2011 for a cruise named Adriatic Explorer.
This cruise started from Corfu, which is both an island in the Ionian Sea, part of Greece but stretching off the coasts of both Greece and Albania and a town facing the Greek mainland. From the shore the Spirit and Celebration look just about identical. Onboard some of the public areas are slightly different, sometimes by name and sometimes by colour scheme and in a couple of rare instances by dimensions or purpose.
The cruise took us up the Adriatic Sea and called at several countries we hadn't visited before, namely Montenegro, Croatia and Slovenia. This shows the Spirit docked in Kotor in Montenegro which was reached via a long fjord - the most southerly fjord in Europe. That's Europe the continent - Montenegro isn't in the EU.
The Spirit at Gruž - the port for visiting Dubrovnik in Croatia.
In 2013 we found ourselves onboard again and this time we were going up a few more fjords, this time in Norway. Moored in Stavanger on a rather wet day a local launch passes the stern of the Spirit.
We had a wander around the Old Town, then the shopping streets, then came by a roundabout way back to the Spirit.
There were a few wet days on that Norway cruise but the dryer days made up for them. We had been on a full-day excurion from one fjord to another and from the top of a mountain had a wonderful viewpoint of Thomson Spirit at anchor in Geirangerfjord.
To get back onboard we had to use the ship's tender boats.
Yay! Sunshine! Getting off the ship in Bergen in Norway for an unaccompanied wander about this fabulous and very historic town.
Adriatic Explorer Cruise, 2011
Fjordland Wonders Cruise, 2013
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