Mallorca, Majorca, Let's Call The Whole Thing Off

Tuesday 29 September 2026. We are close to the end of our cruise. This really is our last day, as tomorrow we will be in Barcelona but will be getting off the ship early morning to go to the airport to come home.

But today we are in Majorca or Mallorca to give it its local name. We have boarded and disembarked from ships so many times here, but today we are moored quite a way from the marina. Nevertheless we decide it's our last day so we are going to get off the ship and walk along the coastal path.

I'm not fast at walking these days, but I reckon we've walked for a good hour without the scenery changing very much at all. We did reach the marina and the King of Spain's yacht is moored in its usual spot, but we are never going to reach the basilica at this rate and already we are facing another hour's walk back to the ship.

By the time we are close to the ship we are both in sore need of a drink. Luckily there were a few benches where I allowed myself a few minutes rest but now we spy a cafe-cum-gift-shop across the road. It's a crew cafe but they don't turn custom away and we sink gratefully into a seat that isn't bare metal and treat the old tonsils to a gush of ice cold liquid...

Hang on... I know that voice... We are sitting behind a potted hedge plant but vaguely I can see Tomas in the shop. We wait for him to come out but he escapes from a different doorway and we miss him!

Back on the ship at the door knob wall, as we have dubbed it. Miss Franny keeps joking she wants one as a souvenir and in places it does look as though someone has had a go at detaching one or two with varying degrees of success. I manage to dissuade her though...

The afternoon is spent throwing clothes into suitcases and making sure we haven't missed anything (though what happened to that shoe horn I've no idea...)

We head for the dining room for one last time and I took this one later as we crossed for the last time from the rear of the ship (the round end) to the Horizons Bar at the front (the pointy end). The island of Majorca is receding in the distance and we are now heading for our final port of call, Barcelona.

A lot of hugs and a few tears as we say farewell to Tom and Maris until another cruise brings us out to their ship. This has been a fabulous cruise with great people. So many passengers willing to chat, a fabulous crew too, for whom nothing was too much trouble

Cases have to be outside the cabins by 02:00am at the latest. We remembered to leave ourselves some clothes to wear tomorrow... Hey - it happens!

Morning. As we leave the customs house in Barcelona we are called. It's an American couple we met on our first day. We haven't seen them since but they remember us and made a big thing about first day/last day meetings which was quite fun.

Also outside the customs house was a demonstration. I'm not sure what it was about but the participants were mostly student age and all of a sudden we jumped as some sort of large firework or small explosive went off with a huge bang and cloud of smoke followed a couple of minutes after by sirens and the arrival of police cars... We got on our coach for the airport and left them to get on with it.

Oceania Sirena Cruise Index

What Happened Onboard in Barcelona

Thursday 30 August 2007. We have had a good brisk walk up Las Ramblas in Barcelona during the morning and it is now around one o'clock in the afternoon.

So we arrive back at the Island Star and head for the Beachcomber Restaurant in search of some lunch. Lunches for me during the week were mainly salad with a bit of cheese and some fruit. I actually lost 4 pound in weight whilst we were on holiday! (Pauses to cheer!) Cissie and Ada are sitting at a table. Ada starts chatting away but Cissie is strangely quiet.
"Are you alright?" I ask brightly. A grin comes over her face but her mouth is still tightly clamped.
"I can't chew my meat!" she eventually confesses. I can't remember whether it was beef or lamb but anyway it had gotten the better of her.

We have some lunch and then together with the ladies we take our usual places again on the Pool Deck. We are chatting about previous holidays and it comes out that the ladies had apparently been cruising on the Carousel around the Canaries as had we.

"We met up with this couple," says Cissie, "he had no voicebox, he could only make noises."
"Did he not have an electronic voice thing?" I ask, remembering a wonderfully lively 86-year-old on a weekend trip to Paris.
"No, he could only make little squeaking noises but you could normally tell what he was saying," Cissie continues. "Anyway we had all got sloshed one night and we went down to our cabins and his wife walked past their cabin and he got all excited and started making these noises really loud and it was just like squeaks. It was so funny I couldn't help myself and I laughed that much I dribbled all the way to our cabin!" She breaks off looking at me in a hypnotising manner, worried in case I haven't got her meaning. "You know? I was weeing!"
"Yes, Cissie, I've got the idea!"
"Well, he or his wife must have had the same problem because the next morning he knocked on our cabin door and gave me a huge pile of incontinence pads!!!"

Both Fran and I as well as Cissie and Ada are invited to a special Captain's Reception for returning cruisers that night. We go down early to get ready so that we can watch the ship leave the port and then not be rushing to get ready. The ship pulls away from the quayside and then... "We're going back!" says Fran. The ship indeed heads back to its mooring, after having swung both ends clear. We wait a moment and an ambuance can be seen heading along the port road. This is the second such night - in Marseilles a crew member had to be put ashore into an ambulance. Tonight it is a woman who is stretchered off and into the waiting ambulance. She has a drip feeding into her arm. We both think the same.

"She's had too much sun!" Fran said it first. It had been an extremely hot day and it would have been all too easy to have gotten too much sun up on the Pool Deck. I can't recommend it simply as a way of getting value from your holiday insurance...

The ship has another go at leaving Barcelona and as we get to the harbour wall we have to chuckle at this graffitied farewell!

The Captain's Party is being held in the Bounty Club on Deck 7. We hadn't been in there too much but the entertainment in there was a mix of nightly bingo, dancing to SP3, the resident band, and recreated game shows such as Mr and Mrs, Deal or No Deal and The Generation Game.

Fran with Cissie (right) and Ada (centre). Waiters are bringing trays of nibbles; canapes mostly. The ladies weren't for trying them. "He'll have some!" Cissie told each and every waiter or waitress, waving at me as though I were some ravenous canape fetishist.

By the time the party is over and it is time to head for our evening meal, all I can manage is a few crackers and cheese...

Return to Mediterranean Explorer Cruise, 2007 Index

Glorious Barcelona

Thursday 30 August 2007. The Island Star reaches Spain and Barcelona is our port of call today. On last year's cruise we opted to do a tour on mountain bikes. That's been well and truly crossed off the bucket list so we'll just hop off the ship and use our legs as nature intended today!

We wanted to see one of the famous Gaudi houses and after perusing the map, we head out confidently up Las Ramblas. If you look at Barcelona close up on Google Maps it is called "La Rambla", so why do we give it the plural form as though there were more than one? For the obvious reason actually - the street is a series of shorter streets, five in total: Rambla de Canaletes, Rambla dels Estudis, Rambla de les Flors (site of a flower market), Rambla dels Caputxins, and Rambla de Santa Mònica. We were warned to keep an eye out for pickpockets, but we saw no untoward behaviour at all.

Well... we did come across a few naked ladies in a park, but they were all stony-faced.

What a feast for the eyes Barcelona is if, like me, you love architecture and beautiful street furniture. Set the buildings against a deep blue sky and some stunning iron street lamp standards and I'm quite happy clicking away!

The sky was cloudless and I always have a polarising filter on my camera which makes the most of a blue sky. Look at the number of statues on this corner building. Even if finding the Gaudi building eludes us, I can't complain that the day has been a disaster!

But then, here it is anyway. This is Casa Batlló. There are virtually no horizontal straight lines whatsoever.

The Catalan artist and architect Antoni Gaudi (1852-1926) has works all over Barcelona, the most famous being the as yet unfinished cathedral La Sagrada Familia, the most-visited monument in all of Spain. Casa Batlló is known locally as the House of Bones as it does look a little as though some of the shaping has been modelled on various skeleton parts. It was built in 1877 and is just one of Gaudi's creations to be granted a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

It is an extremely hot morning. Gasping for a drink we make it back to the coast and find a stall selling fruit juice that is a very welcome sight on our way back towards the ship.

By the port, at the foot of Las Ramblas there is a statue of Christopher Colombus. He is portrayed as though pointing towards the New World, though actually he is pointing south south east, to somewhere in Algeria... Or perhaps, judging from the colour of his head, he is pointing accusingly at a pigeon...

Return to Mediterranean Explorer Cruise, 2007 Index

Mediterranean Spirit Cruise on the Island Star, 5-12 July 2008

A series of articles describing our cruise around the Western Mediterranean with Island Cruises on their ship, the Island Star. Our Itinerary will be: Palma, Majorca > Day at Sea > Messina, Sicily > Naples, Italy > Livorno, Italy > Toulon, France > Barcelona, Spain > Palma, Majorca.

Each article can be accessed by clicking or tapping the photographs below. A link at the end of each article will bring you back to this index page.

Return to Cruise Holidays Index

Ornate Street Lighting

I know I live in - well near these days - Blackpool but I'm ignoring illuminations and to be honest, the UK altogether for this entry. Having travelled around Europe quite a bit we have come across many examples of older or just simply decorative street lighting and it's become a habit to look out for them.

As most of our travels have been on cruise ships, we don't tend to see a lot of places at night, so most of these shots will be daytime. But that does make it easier to see detail on the lamp standards and finials. We'll start gently with this view of St Tropez.

Villefranche nestles between Nice on the French Riviera and Monaco. This street is named the Hidden Street and it runs parallel with the seafront and is totally enclosed. It is lit with what seem to be ancient housings containing more modern electric lights.

Housings that look as though they should be holding flaming pitch-covered lengths of wood or bundles of twigs always get my attention. This one is above a gateway into the ancient city of Rhodes.

Another year and back on the French Riviera; this is Sanary-sur-Mer. Wouldn't it be wonderful to sit on the Promenade and listen to a concert in this band stand with it's old-fashioned lighting?

We had just got off our ship in the harbour at Ajaccio, Corsica and this street lamp stood out against the deep of the blue sky.

Koper in Slovenia. I particularly enjoy looking around those medieval cities where many of the street lights are attached to buildings rather than lamp posts, because the streets are so narrow.

These lights are a touch more modern, but at least a bit of imagination has been applied to the design. They sit on the end of a pier at Limone on Lake Garda, Italy.

Lamp posts this time. This is Funchal on the island of Madeira out in the Canaries.

And another one in Valetta in Malta.

We went a long way to see this one. It's in Walt Disney's Magic Kingdom in Orlando. The flag was a clue wasn't it...?

The lamp standards in Venice have pink glass in their casings. Perhaps to make the most of the colours of the Doges' Palace?

Also in Venice, we found a dragon holding up a bunch of umbrellas! Well just the one wouldn't keep it dry...

The medieval city of Kotor in Montenegro has such narrow streets and nestles so close under the mountain that the light finds it hard to penetrate and the street lights were still glowing when we arrived one morning.

A lovely bit of decorative ironwork in Palermo, Sicily.

Piombino in Italy and a street that I just happened to glance down as we passed it.

For most things architectural it's hard to beat Spain's wonderful city of Barcelona. It's a city where your neck should be constantly stretching upwards to make sure you don't miss anything and for this article I'm going to finish with a second look at Barcelona's magnificent street lights below.

Curiosities - Buildings and Infrastructure Index