Venice With Wet Feet...

Monday 24 September 2018. We sail into Venice. We leave the ship directly into a covered walkway leading into the Italian dockside customs. Then we buy tickets for the local water bus to St Mark's Square. "Will it be flooded?" someone asks. "Well, we have been here five times before and we've never seen it flooded," I say, truthfully but perhaps a little prematurely...

The unmistakeable and familiar sight of the Doges Palace and St Mark's Basilica. The cafes are fairly exclusive here...

The major buildings of the square are covered in posts from earlier visits. I always like a stroll round the arcades. If Miss Franny makes appreciative noises at any shop window it's best to put on a bit of a forced stroll if you know what I mean...

There are a couple of these tiny cafe rooms. The tables all bear a reserved sign.

These are what many come to Venice to see. There are around four hundred gondolas in Venice as opposed to centuries gone by when there were thousands. Before the 20th century many had covered cabins for passengers with windows having shutters with louvred slats - hence Venetian blinds...

You should do this in any large city but especially in Venice. Look up! You will be rewarded many times by many beautiful carvings, statues and architectural features. I was spellbound right up to the moment when we reached the steps up to a bridge over a canal and I tripped up. Ah yes... look up occasionally!

Each time we are in Venice we try to find some place we haven't been before. Usually by finding new routes between major sights but having now been six times, we may have to venture away from these in future! This time we found a free music museum and went inside to look at violins, contrabasses and mandolins from 500 years ago.

We ventured down a couple of dead ends leading to private gates and necessitating U-turns, but inevitably we found ourselves eventually at the Grand Canal.

We have our favourite cafe at the foot of the Rialto Bridge, which does our beloved latte machiatto and always has a tempting selection of hand-made sandwiches. Moreover they profess to understand my attempts to speak Italian and so have earned my undying love at least until some future point when they might say "what was that???"

Ooh! This caught my eye! A guitar made of Murano glass! It has real strings - but were the pickups real pickups or more glass? And I must admit my first thought was not "How much does it cost?" (enough not to display the price ticket) but "How much would it weigh?" I'm not sure I could wear that around my neck for hours on end!

The Rialto Bridge is, with St Mark's Square and the Bridge of Sighs, one of Venice's major attractions. It is the latest of a number of bridges on this site, and dates from 1591. Oh... well done, that young lady on the right... Nice gum bubble!

Looking up! Just at this point there are far too many people pressed against you for you actually to fall over anyway. Keep focussed on the pressure of your pockets and grip on your valuables!

We return to St Marks... Square... Oh... there's water, there's crowds milling about unwilling to paddle. There's crowds paddling. There are police officers herding people onto a far too narrow walkway expecting single-file traffic in each direction. With the unrelenting pressure of people being forced onto each end, idiots in the middle are trying to stop to take photos. I just pointed the camera without even looking at it and clicked as I walked.

"Uno oro!" said a news vendor, throwing his arms up in exasperation at my question that he must have heard a million times. So, one hour at high tide. Nothing to see here, keep moving...

We caught a water bus back well before the crowds would leave us panicking that the next boat would be the last that the ship would wait for. Then a relaxing hour before we gathered on the Promenade Deck on Deck 6 to watch the sail away.

I actually took this from the windows of the dining room as we were eating dinner.

Songs tonight included Creedence Clearwater's classic Bad Moon Rising and Herman's Hermits' sing-a-long favourite I'm Into Something Good.

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A Day in Zadar, Croatia

Sunday 23 September 2018. Marella Celebration docks in Zadar in Croatia. Another of several places we have not been to before this cruise.

Zadar has a traffic-free medieval and Roman centre and a shuttle bus takes us from the ship to the seafront so that we can explore on our own. There is a sea organ here with the pipes leading to holes in the paving along a 70 metre stretch of the coast. Wave action blows air through them so that random notes sound as you walk along.

We ignore this path that leads into the town in favour of walking the full length of the seafront which our map told us would lead to one of the old city gates.

The latter part of our route took us alongside the medieval city walls and a couple of times we thought we were heading for a dead end only for the path to reveal itself almost at the last minute.

You can see what I mean here. The gate itself is now in sight, but how to reach it?

Not until we reach it is the path revealed, narrow, but passable.

The gate bears the almost inevitable Venetian winged lion symbol. To the right of the photo atop the wall are five wells, but we missed them this time.

Instead we passed through the gate immediately looking right to the walls of the Svarog Bar and the Captain's Tower.

Narodni Trg or Peoples' Square. The building is the home of the Town Guard. It's ok, I wasn't causing trouble...

We turned right 90 degrees at the Square and, passing through a gate, came to a waterway with a pedestrian bridge to the opposite side. It turns out that the old town of Zadar is built on a peninsula or promontory, so the water on both sides of it is the Adriatic Sea. Over the bridge was the modern part of Zadar. In this view we are facing back towards the old town and the two figures on the banner over the gate are Zadar's medal winning rowing team from the 2016 Olympics.

Looking towards modern Zadar over the inlet of the Adriatic Sea.

We returned to the Peoples' Square and once again turned right 90 degrees thereby continuing in our original direction through the town. We were now walking along a well-to-do shopping street. At the far end, the bell tower is that of St Anastasia's Cathedral, which dates from the 1100s and contains the saint's relics.

Next to it, once we reached it, is the unusual circular Byzantine church on the left; St Donatus, dating from the early 800s CE. It is one of a very few Croatian churches to survive the Mongol invasion of the 13th century.

So a Mongol invasion, the Ottomans and Venice. Before them all were the Romans and these two churches stand over the site of the Roman Forum.

Some original Roman stonework is contained inside the churches and in the pavements and gardens to the west.

Making a selfie was a tough proposition in the Roman days...

We sit admiring the Roman remains and gardens then walk back to the pick-up point for the shuttle bus back to the ship. The bus leaves as soon as we have sat down.

Songs tonight include Halfway To Paradise by Billy Fury and I Saw Her Standing There by The Beatles.

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Calling at Korčula, Croatia

Saturday 22 September 2018. The ship has sailed overnight to Korčula in Croatia and we are anchored offshore which means using the ship's tender boats to get to shore.

Transferring at sea from ship to tender boat is not as bad as it might sound. You walk down the usual sized gangway but instead of stepping onto land, you step onto a square platform against which the tender boat is securely tied, so tight that it is a simple step onto the smaller boat. Crew members are there to help and you are normally onto the small boat without even realising it!

The tender boats reward you with the best view you will get of the ship. Here is Marella Celebration looking much larger from the waterline than it does from a dock!

As we head into the landing stage, Korčula entices us onwards with some lovely scenery.

Onto dry land and the scenery does not get any less spectacular! Korčula is a medieval town and so built on the summit of a hill. We are walking around that hill here with a view to seeing bits we missed when we were here last in 2009.

One of the narrow streets leading to the old centre of town. We will see it later on!

Carrying on, we come to a couple of guns. These are evidence of the need to protect the island in the past from pirates and the Ottoman Turkish empire.

Around the corner from the gun emplacement a small harbour witnesses the sailing of a ferry to the many Croatian islands of the Dalmatian Coast. There are plenty of people still queueing.

Following the path round from the harbour brings us to the opposite side of the old city and the magnificent gateway with its sweeping staircase. The Venetian winged lion is carved into the gateway - the Venetians were here before the Ottomans and their emblem can be seen all over the Adriatic and Mediterranean.

We head down the hill rather than up the staircase and arrive at a sun trap with a view of the Marella Celebration swinging gently at her anchor.

Another change of direction brings us to a museum to Marco Polo, the explorer who lived / visited here. There is a claim he was born here, though most sources favour Venice as his likely birthplace in the year 1254.

Our route brings us back to the same bit of seafront and we have a drink in a pavement cafe with plenty of fellow travellers to talk to. Then I find a bench and spend another hour scratching away with the pencil.

Then we climb the main street and the staircase to pass through the gate into the medieval city.

There are cafes, bars, restaurants, a cathedral and as many gift shops and museums as you could wish for. There's another Marco Polo house, a restaurant with a sign that he found both "food and great love" within. Good job his wife never found out...

We get back to the ship to find Tomas and Maris doing a spot on the Lido deck. Lunchtimes onboard for me are usually catered for with some melon and pineapple and very little else. Cooked breakfasts are our usual start to the day even if only one slice of toast with a few beans and the evening meal in the waiter service restaurant usually defeats us. I can't eat huge amounts any more alas.

It is Maris's birthday tomorrow. To celebrate we have booked a table for the four of us in the Kora La restaurant for our final night.

The evening comes. Tomas has been keen to hear me play something by The Shadows. I play a Fender Stratocaster guitar at home with my duo Creeping Bentgrass and am not sure how it will sound on Tomas's guitar which has a more acoustic tone and has no tremolo arm or whammy bar to bend the notes down. But I play Wonderful Land and it gets a huge round of applause so it must have sounded alright! King, the guitarist/singer from Hemingways bar on Deck 5 had come up to listen too - agh, the pressure, the pressure LOL.

I follow it with a crowd pleaser - Manfred Mann's Doo Wah Diddy Diddy. There is no way that an audience who lived through the sixties can stay quiet through that one and I am able to leave the appropriate gaps for the audience to sing (sing? roar!) out the responses and chorus lines.

King joins Tomas and Maris to sing Wonderful Tonight to Maris for her birthday.

Midnight comes and with it Maris's special day. The Horizons staff bring out a cake and two glasses of some fiery spirit!

I'm not sure what time this was, but somewhere around 12:30am. We are in Hemingways Bar to catch King's last session and are happily messing about taking photos when Fran nudges me. "Your name's being called!"

So now I find myself doing a spot with just my own backing on guitar, no backing track. I do three numbers, True Love Ways by Buddy Holly, followed by Tell Laura I Love Her by Ricky Valance and finally Eddie Cochrane's song Three Steps To Heaven. The grin afterwards is sheer relief...!

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