We are looking forward to sailing again and thrilled that you have decided to join us. We celebrated many family grandchildren birthdays this summer. The twins, Olivia and Eden turned two, Benjamin (Benji) is now 5 years old, Oliver is 14 and his sister Ella is 18. We thank our children for spacing out our grandchildren to keep us forever young! Our daughters Hannah and Erin also celebrated birthdays but you never tell a woman’s age! We were out in Denver to celebrate with the twins and spent time in New York City visiting The Fashion Institute with our grandaugher, Ella.

Originally, we were scheduled to fly to Amsterdam on October 2nd and take a 15 day River Cruise called “The Splendors of Europe” sailing through the Netherlands, Germany, Austria and Hungary disembarking in Budapest. We were informed one week before departure that the cruise had been cancelled. The Rhine and Danube Rivers were so shallow that they could not be navigated. If you have been to that part of the world, the Rhine and Danube are large waterways so this is another impact of global climate conditions. We scheduled to spend a week in beautiful Budapest explore Slovakia and fly to Venice for a 31 day transatlantic cruise back to Florida. With that said, we now fly to Italy tomorrow arrive in Venice at 9:00 a.m. Friday just in time for an expresso and a cornetto, which resembles a French croissant but is generally softer with a citrus zest.

We choose this itenerary because it is port intensive with visits to 23 ports in Croatia, Montenegro, Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Canary Islands, Puerto Rico and Bahamas arriving home to celebrate Thanksgiving at our daughter Erin’s.

So as not to be repetitive, we will blog from those ports we have not visited before. If we discover something interesting along the way we will be sure to inform you. We hope to tour the completed Sagrada Família, Gaudi’s masterpiece basilica that has been under contruction for 144 years. That should be magnificant!

While we were in New York City, we visited Broadway. Chongae created this funny animation of what we would have looked like had we met in the 1940’s. By the way, I don’t smoke, but I guess everyone smoked in the 1940’s. And if you ask me, I would have been as blessed in the 1940’s just as I am now.

And as always,

Thanks for traveling with us.