Price Gouging

btw Internet access is $.5o/min so don't expect more than like 1 post a day while we're gone... Also you'll have to make due with the smaller resolution pictures until we get back :)

Getting to Europe & Barcelona

So far everything has gone well. No problems in the airports, or getting to our hotel in Barcelona. After crashing for a short nap we went to the "meet and greet" with some of the other people from the cruisecritic.com message boards. It was nice to finally be able to put faces to screen names since we'll be on excursions with a majority of the people we met.

Since we were all hungry about a dozen of us went out in search of a great tapas restaurant that we had heard of... only to find out that the restaurant would only hold about a dozen people total! So instead we went to another one along the way and tried quite a few things, though we'd be hard pressed to tell you what they actually were (one was green). As a bonus Ashley found 20e on the ground so the sangria was on her :) After barely making it back to our hotel room before we passed out we crashed for the night.

Today we took the hop-on/hop-off bus (not stair car) around the city, the high points of which are up on Picasa. Primarily we stopped at buildings by Gaudi. Katie was more impressed than I was by the residental buildings, at best I thought they were interesting, at worst hideous.

We had to cut the bus ride short so we could get onboard before dinner so we didn't get to see everything we would have liked to in the city. We got off just before the bus would have gone to the Futbol stadium (GGGGGGGGGGGGOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAALLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!).

Our timing was pretty good getting on the ship, no lines at all. Plus we got to walk right in to dinner where our waitress was actually from Slovakia! Unfortunately all the Slovak I could remember was hello, which I'm not even going to try to spell (and rozky).

After the lifejacket drill we hung out with more cruisecritic.com people until we left port. Then we came back to our room and typed this up.

That's it for now. Tomorrow is Marseilles so we'll have to be up kind early for our 9:00 tour.

Itinerary

Here's our itinerary:

4/28 - 4/29 Fly to Barcelona
4/29 - 4/30 Barcelona (cruise leaves at 10PM)
5/1 - Marseilles, France
5/2 - Florence, Italy
5/3 - Rome, Italy
5/4 - Naples, Italy
5/5 - At Sea
5/6 - Mykonos, Greece
5/7 - Istanbul, Turkey
5/8 - Ephesus, Turkey
5/9 - Athens, Greece
5/10 - At Sea
5/11 - 5/13 - Venice
5/13 - Fly Home

We'll be on the Emerald Princess. Here's a link to the ship's webcam.

Is this thing on?

To get ready for the trip (only 8 days away now) I've set this up to track where we're at each day. Pictures will be up on my picasa page though I'll try to link to them on here too so this can be the best place to see everything we've seen.