Back to Italy!

After crossing the Herodtus Abyssal Plain and the Ionian Abyssal Plain, which Linda insists in calling the "abyssmal plains", and once again going through the straits of Messina between Sicily and the toe of Italy, we arrived in Salerno early on April 14. And this time we had all day ashore so we walked to the city center, then took a city bus to the archeological digs, but couldn't figure out where to get off! So we stayed on the bus and got a great round trip tour way out into the country side, all for about $1.60 each!

When we got back to the waterfront, we had lunch in a pizzeria, and walked back to the ship stopping to buy chocolate and cookies for our snack times. The ship left Salerno in the evening and headed for our last Italian stop, Savona, which is on the Italian Riveria near Genoa. But first we had to pass the French island of Corsica, and the italian island of Elba, where Napolean Bonaparte was imprisoned. To our surprise the center of the Island of Corsica is mostly snow covered mountains, which makes sense since some of them are over 9,000 feet high, but stuck in the middle of the Mediterranian sea it does look a litte odd. And when we approached the coast of northern Italy we saw more snow, this time in the Italian Alps that surround the northern coast.

Savona is a very nice port and a very picturesque city, the downtown is full of narrow twisting streets and very small shops and is right near the port entrance, handy for those walking from the ships. A large cruise ship came in this morning but almost all of its passengers got immediately on buses and headed off for their tours of other places, we suppose.

We are sending this post from a seamen's center a block away from the port entrance. They have an internet cafe and phones for visiting seamen. But we found only one computer available for tourist use in the rest of the town, and that was for 15 minutes at the tourist information enter. We got back to the ship at the appointed time only to be told that we have been delayed and are not sailing till 5:00 pm, so we came back ashore to add this post to our blog. We can send e-mails from the ship when they have time to set it up for us, but we cannot use the internet otherwise. One thing we have found is that unlike Central American where we have done most of our travelling over the past ten years, everyone in Europe seems to have their own computer and they expect tourists to bring theirs along. So there is a lot of wireless web access around the towns, but not very many computers to use.

Our next task is to try to change our tickets so that we can fly from Lisbon Portugal to the states, but when we checked on the Continental website there didn't seem to be any frequent flier seats available on the day we were supposed to leave from England, the 21st. So we will be checking other return dates and might even try to call the Continental office in Lisbon. Complicated, but necessary, since our ship is so far behind schedule due to the gales we experienced in the North Atlantic. Weather is one thing that we cannot change!

More from Portugal,
Lynn & Linda