The Great European Adventure, Day 9: Day at Sea #2, Italy to Greecefeatured

In preparation for our arrival in Greece, the clocks moved forward an hour in between Sea Day #1 and Sea Day #2, which meant we were losing an hour of sleep. Except all we had ahead of us was another sea day where my plans involved napping, sunbathing and snacking in between naps and sunbathing, so I don’t think it really counted as a lost hour of sleep. Can you lose an hour of sleep when you have no official wake-up time? I love vacation.

Waking up at 8:00 really meant waking up at 9:00, and we didn’t even get to breakfast until nearly 10:00, when it was still packed at the Windjammer. We had a quick breakfast so we could try to find some chairs near the pool and quickly found a few in a primo spot. But even though the sun was hidden behind the clouds, most of the chairs were already claimed by people who…weren’t in their chairs and weren’t in the pool.

Your room steward won’t leave beach towels in your room on the Vision. There’s a towel hut near the pool where you can pick up fresh towels whenever you’d like, as many as you’d like at a time, without leaving your sea pass number on hold. So since towels were free for the taking, people were taking them to save loungers they, more often than not, never actually used. One woman came by and snapped up six chairs in a row with towels, explaining that they couldn’t find loungers the day before and couldn’t leave it to chance again. Pool security removed her towels within 20 minutes. Every sunbather for themselves on this sea day – even when there wasn’t much sun to be had.

The sun finally came out around 11:30, but disappeared again an hour later when we headed inside for lunch at the Windjammer. Offerings were varied and there were plenty of options from salads to pastas to prepared sandwiches and a rudimentary burger bar, but nothing that stood out as spectacular.

After lunch, we headed inside to do some shopping along the Centrum Shops, where there was some commotion over a logo sale.

While we prebooked most of our tours, we hadn’t booked a tour for Turkey, so we headed over to the Shore Excursion desk to see if there were any tours left that visited Ephesus. While I was snapping pictures of the lobby, Stephanie was motioning me over – most tours were already sold out. We weren’t picky with the Kusadasi tours so we picked whatever was available (a tour to Ephesus and Sirince) and crossed our fingers that it was a good one.

Mom went off in search of a laundry machine and Stephanie and I headed out to the promenade to catch some fresh air and take in the…gray…skies.

As it turns out, there are no laundry facilities onboard the Vision. Not public ones, anyways. If you need laundry done during your cruise (and if you’re on a 12-night cruise, chances are you will), your options are to do it in your sink or to send it out to the laundry service (we opted for the latter). With gray skies and nowhere to do laundry, there was only one thing left to do: nap. I know. I’m thrilling you all with the details of this exhilarating day at sea. But with such a port-intensive itinerary and a voyage on an older ship without upgrades to newer features, there wasn’t much to do and there wasn’t much of a desire to do anything but rest. After these two sea days, we had two days in Greece and a day in Turkey before our next opportunity to rest. And after that? Back in Italy. From Italy back to Spain. From Spain to Paris. And from Paris? We had a flight back to the US on Monday to be back at work on Tuesday. Rest was a luxury on this trip and I took full advantage of any chance to get some.

I woke up just in time to get ready for formal night. This was the second of three on this voyage, and there was no time I was more thankful that we had a family room for our little family than I was when we were getting ready for formal night. Three ladies and one vanity doesn’t usually work out too well for us, but with a vanity, a desk, a separate bedroom and a bathroom, we had plenty of space to get our primp on.

There was no wind out on the promenade deck – a rarity on sea days and an even bigger rarity on formal nights, when my hair always seems to end up stuck to my lip gloss – so we lingered for a little longer. When we headed inside to dinner, we were greeted with some bad news: our table was taken! Since we had My Time Dining and we hadn’t been making reservations, the previous night when we dined at Izumi, another party got our table and they had made reservations for tonight. Just as we were resigning ourselves to dinner with another wait staff (who I’m sure would have been great – all of our servers on Royal Caribbean always have been – but they wouldn’t have been Lloyd and Pawan), Lloyd caught us at the reception desk and insisted we be seated at a table adjacent to his area so he could take care of us. So our little family of three got a big table for six all to ourselves.

Marc had caught us that morning at breakfast to tell us he missed us the night before (and that the new people weren’t as fun or friendly as we were!) and stopped by again at dinner to tell us all about Athens and give us some recommendations on his favorite spots while Lloyd made sure we tried all of his favorites on the dinner menu. His specs were spot on, too – dinner was fantastic.

Royal Shrimp Cocktail

English Cheddar Cheese Sticks

Baby Shrimp Salad

Garden Salad

Chilled Cherry Bisque

Roasted Chicken

Singapore Noodles

Mustard-Crusted Roast Beef

Cappuccino Layer Cake

Warm Pecan Butterscotch Tart

Traditional English Trifle

After dinner, we spent an hour out on the promenade to watch the sunset. It was a stunningly gorgeous night capped off by a magnificent sunset, and there was plenty to look around at as we sailed on closer to Greece.

We stopped back at the room to change before heading out to catch the headliner show. I don’t think we’ve ever had a turkey towel animal before! (Ed. note: My sister tells me this was not a turkey, but was, in fact, a peacock. Since there are no other distinguishing features, I guess we’ll never know)

The headliner show was a one-woman cabaret. Her repertoire kept the show interesting and she was incredibly talented. We very much enjoyed the show.

We headed up to Park Café before bed to have a hot cup of tea. They had buffalo wings out for the late night snack, which drew quite a crowd to the Solarium. We’d be docking in Athens early in the morning and though our excursion wasn’t as early as the others we’d been on in Italy, we still went through the motions of getting our outfits picked out and bags ready for the next phase of our Euro-explorations in Greece.