Starting Out

In May of last year, we took our fifth cruise. It was a seven day out of Fort Lauderdale on the Royal Caribbean INDEPENDENCE OF THE SEAS. This was our third cruise with the Lo Carb group. We enjoyed ourselves as we always have on these cruises. Almost immediately upon our return  we decided it was time to plan our next excursion. Up until this point, we had experienced cruises on Cunard, Royal Caribbean and Carnival cruise lines. These were all on relatively large ships with thousands of passengers. We wanted to try some smaller ships and other cruise lines.

Doing a little on-line searching, we came across an interesting transatlantic deal on the Seabourn Cruise Line ship Odyssey. We contacted our old travel agent we had used on two of our previous cruises and she helped set everything up for us. The trip itinerary has evolved over the past year. The initial leg from Fort Lauderdale to Barcelona is 14 days in duration with only one stop in Funchal (Madeira), Portugal. The original plan was to sail to Barcelona, spend a few days and fly home. The final plan, which begins on this coming Saturday, is to sail from Fort Lauderdale to Barcelona and then, the day after disembarking from the Odyssey, starting a second cruise from Barcelona to Athens, Greece on the Oceania Cruise Line ship Riviera. This second cruise is 10 days in duration and makes stops at nine ports, including:

• Provence (Marseille), France
• Monte Carlo, Monaco 
• Florence/Pisa/Tuscany (Livorno), Italy
• Rome (Civitavecchia), Italy
• Sorrento/Capri, Italy 
• Taormina (Sicily), Italy 
• Zakynthos, Greece 
• Santorini, Greece 
• Athens, Greece

We will then stay three nights in Athens before flying home.

These two back-to-back cruises will be our seventh and eighth cruises. Our sixth cruise was in December 2015 with our son and his wife. We cruised seven days across the Caribbean from Saint Maarten to Colón, Panama on the Windstar Seabreeze, stopping in Aruba and Cartagena, Colombia. We enjoyed the trip. The ship was a very small one (perhaps too small), capable of accommodating 212 passengers (there were only 170 on the cruise).

The Seabourn Odyssey has twice the passenger capacity (450) of the Winstar Seabreeze. The Oceania Riviera has a capacity of 1,250. Compared to the Royal Caribbean Independence of the Seas, with a passenger capacity of 4,370, these are all small ships. Hopefully, by the end of this adventure, we will know what size of ship,and perhaps which cruise line(s), will be our choice going forward.

This blog will chronicle our journey.