A series of articles about our Mediterranean Explorer cruise onboard the Island Star, 25 August - 1 September 2007. Our itinerary is Palma, Majorca > Day at Sea > Livorno, Italy for Pisa > Genoa, Italy > Marseilles, France for Cassis > Barcelona, Spain > Valencia, Spain for Sagunto and the San Jose Caves > Palma< Majorca.
Clicking or tapping the photos below will take you to the articles for each day. A link on each page will bring you back here.
A series of articles covering our first holiday on the Island Star cruise ship. We'll be calling at Palma de Mallorca > Day at Sea > Villefrance, France > Monte Carlo, Monaco > Livorno, Italy > Florence, Italy > Marseilles, France > Barcelona, Spain > Ibiza.
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.
Another article bringing together some of my sketches that individually can be seen on holiday pages. This is the third article dealing with sketches of places outside the UK, the first being published in December 2013, the second in July 2015 and now the third. By gum I'm racing through these!
In 2009 we were on a cruise on the Ocean Village Two starting and ending at Heraklion in Crete, and heading up the Adriatic Sea to Croatia, Slovenia and Venice. At Dubrovnik we opted to do an excursion to a seaside village called Cavtat - a delightful place. It was a Saturday and yet it was very quiet. We walked all along the seafront towards this headland at the far end. There were maybe a couple more boats than appear on the sketch but, remember: trees, rocks, chairs, people and boats - the hardest things I find to draw!
Back at the port of Dubrovnik I sketched the hillside opposite the dock. There was a lot of work going on in the dock at this time, they were being extended in length to make the space available for cruise ships which were starting to visit Croatia more than in the past. This was done from the side rail. Artistic license led to the non-inclusion of a few more modern houses and blocks of flats, but it is still recognisable.
The Old Fortress at Corfu in Greece. We were on an excursion but the guide was just so boring that we dodged away as soon as we got a chance and this was our meeting spot to pick up the coach. We got there a bit early and I sketched the fortress over the wall of the moat.
Later in the year we took our first trip with Thomson (now Marella) onboard the Celebration cruise ship. This trip was called Pearls of the Aegean and was a trip around the islands and mainland coast of Greece. One of our stopping off places was Aghios Nikolaos in Crete from where we did a half day excursion. After arriving back at the ship we walked into the town and came across this old column, broken off, but displayed proudly at the meeting place of two flights of steps leading upwards from the harbour into the town.
We have now been to Santorini, but it's a tricky place to enter for cruise ships due to the prevalent winds and before we actually got there we had four cruises where we were diverted elsewhere due to the weather making an attempt unsafe. This was the first of those and we were given a day in Samos instead. Always these small disappointments cause some passengers to moan as if they are being cheated but they would moan a lot more if the Captain tried it and turned turtle. Samos was a lovely place with a lot to offer and we made the most of it, eating at a harbourside café (well... drinking mainly...) and taking half an hour or so to sketch the castle.
A couple of days later we were in the Horizons Bar of Celebration in the afternoon after having done a morning trip to the site of ancient Olympia. The Horizons bar was - and is - on the deck right above the ship's bridge so it affords a great sea view when the ship is sailing and also an agreeably high viewpoint when you are in port. The port - Katakalon - was a tiny place. Hardly anyone lived there, but there were shops and bars simply to cater for the crews and passengers of those ships. As boarding time came half an hour before sailing time, we watched as the shops and bars closed and the owners all left the port to go home. To our left side the coast road rose up a steep hill with trees to both sides and a drop to the sea which was littered with rocks close to the coast.
In August 2010 we took another cruise on the Celebration, this time meeting up with two fabulous entertainers who have since become good friends, Tomas and Maris who sing together as duo 2 Intense. On this trip the cruise started and ended at the port of Marmaris in Turkey and the trip from the airport in 2010 was a sometimes bumpy 90 minute trip whilst we watched the road being built. The sketch was done from the rail of the Promenade Deck, before we left the port.
The following year we were on the Thomson Destiny as it called into Trapani on the island of Sicily. Again we had done a morning's excursion and we were at the rail with quite a few other people waiting for sail-away time to come along whilst I did this sketch of the buildings opposite. "What will you do if we sail before you've finished?" asked the chap next to me. "Well I've just drawn a few windows so far, but I know how many rows and how many windows to each row and they are all the same so I can draw them in later if I have to," I answered. He looked at me in a sort of shocked horror as though this was the lowest form of cheating he'd ever heard of...
Another wait for sail-away at the ship's rail. This is Ajaccio on the island of Corsica. The town is the birthplace of Napoleon Bonaparte and is full of statues to him, mostly dressed in his favourite fantasy role as a Roman emperor. His birthplace is a corner house with a tanning shop on the ground floor. His parents had the floor above the shop which probably followed a slightly different trade at the time...
In 2012 we briefly moved away from the cruises to spend a week at Lake Garda in northern Italy. A beautiful place, making for a very relaxing holiday, one day we took the ferry down the lake to Malcesine and I drew this scene of the narrow streets from a table at a tiny café. Perhaps the cobbles weren't quite as bumpy as this, but there were a lot of them to draw!
