Cruising!!

We are just back from our cruise. We had a fantastic time! We have been cruising with MSC for quite sometime now and this time we were rewarded with an unexpected cabin upgrade!

We started by flying from Gatwick to Venice, Marco Polo Airport with British Airways. I always smile at British Airways form of 'preferred customer' arrangement. They simply work out how many 'preferred customers' they have on board and then put a curtain across the cabin at that point!! Without that curtain it would simply be an Easy jet plane!!!

This time we were travelling on the beautiful MSC Magnifica. Its really hard to explain just how big these ships are. Its fair to say they are like floating blocks of flats from the outside !

We had originally booked an inside cabin, but a couple of weeks before were due to leave they sent out the tickets and I discovered that they had changed our cabin from an inside to a balcony cabin! I could hardly believe our luck, in fact I was expecting them to realise their mistake and tell us to return to our original cabin, but no we were in a balcony cabin!!

We were on the tenth deck - Riccione Deck, this was looking down onto the lifeboats below, 

When we left the port we seemed to sail through the centre of Venice, we could see lots of little bridges, boats, Gondolas and churches, it was an impressive scene!

On the first night we went down to the restaurant for dinner and found ourselves sat on a table with 8 other people. We were in the minority as all our dinner party were Australians!!! They were all good fun and by the end of the week we had made some good friends. We got on particularly well with one couple, Roseanne and Ken. They had come away on a holiday of a lifetime with another couple, they started with a week in Malta to visit family, followed by two weeks of cruises. The first week they sailed the Western Med and had been at sea a couple of days when one of their friends was taken ill and was airlifted to Hospital in Palma Majorca. They finished the first cruise on their own and their friend remained in hospital until the end of our cruise. They finally were able to meet up with them again on the Sunday morning. So Roseanne and Ken had to get on with it on their own while not being able to contact their friends while the ship was at sea. We were lucky to have found them and we met up several times to have drinks ! Perhaps one day we will get to see them again.

In preparation for my holiday I had my nails 'done' I have only had them done once before lots of years ago, so I had mixed feelings about trying them again. To start with I had to decide what colour I wanted, which was difficult. Once they were in place, I really had mixed feelings about them. I like the look of them, but they are really difficult to  get used to!! I feel that they are preventing me from doing things!! I can't do up my necklace, open cans of drink, scratch labels off of things, I keep coming across more and more things that I can't do. So now the holiday is over think that they will have to come off!!

Our first port of call was the Italian port of Brindisi. I'll tell you about that later in the week!

I hope that you all have a good week.