just john

Ibiza, Spain is the port I keep forgetting to include in my email accounts of this trip. Rightly so, it was atrociously expensive and had little to offer. $47 for two mixed drinks is over the top in any club. Fortunately, sensibly priced liquor was always onboard the ship.

For those of you out of the know, Bill and I took a cruise through the Mediterranean that left from Barcelona and stopped at Valencia, Ibiza, Florence/Pisa, Rome, Mykonos, and deposited us in Athens. We allegedly ate less food(by virture of not sneaking it into our over-sized hand bags) and drank 30% more than the "usual" cruise people. Good times. Florence is not a coastal city. People keep asking this as though I am either lying about stopping there or they believe Italy is composed of dirt roads and donkey carts. We took a bus from the port, with air conditioning, on the highway. Stopped in Pisa, too.

I think this was Ibiza but it's hard to say...

It was sunny that day and this was probably the most fun to be had in the ancient walled city (the cannons were a later addition, 1980 or so). The sheer amount of sunlight covering everything was amazing. There were no giant oak trees or dense forests, just rock buildings and sunlight so bright and hot it wasn't really a reasonable proposition to not use sunglasses. No real landmarks to speak of, just the remains of a walled city to walk around and look at.

This here was Valencia:

The round, numbered stickers we're wearing are for the guided tour group. If I were olive-skinned, two feet shorter, and spoke fluent Spanish, that sticker would still be screaming "Over here, tourist." The long shorts help but nothing trumps the guided tour sticker. For those of you wondering about the difference between long shorts and capri pants, it is very simple. I do not wear capri pants.

Sorry, no more pictures tonight. Due to various battery failures, electronic constraints, and poor planning, I will not have the rest of the pictures for another week or so. Then I can further pontificate on the exploits we had in other places.

I think I'm just about over travelling this year. 11 countries counting a week from now this year is my personal record. I don't want to beat my personal record.