Dubrovnik, Croatia

Today we are docked in dubrovnik, Croatia. It is a very nice little beach town that also has a medieval old town with city walls. This morning we walked on top of the walls for over an hour to get all the way around the city. It was a LOT of stairs. Not for the faint of heart (which I am with this baby). I would not advise for pregnant women. The views were outstanding though. I will add a lot of photos to the blog once we get back. Then we ate ouch. It was just ok but it was cheap. I don't think they have very good food here because that one came highly recommended. Since then we have just been chillin at this cafe where we got a chocolate croissant and smoothies. For the price we get free wifi and use of the bathrooms. That has been kind of difficult here in Europe. I need to go a lot and there is not that much access to restrooms and I only get a little sympathy for my condition. But it's all ok and has been so fun. We will probably leave soon and ride a cable car/gondola to the top of the highest mountain in the area. Then I think we are done for the day. I'm trying to let my sunburn heal so I can lay out during our next two days at sea. Hope it goes well :)

May 7, 2012-Venezia

We were docked overnight in Venice so we had the morning to play/explore in Venice. I really wanted to go to the Peggy Guggenheim museum/palazzo. It was cool. She bought an unfinished Palazzo/palace on the grand canal in Venice and made it her retirement home. It only has modern art since it is most just art she collected from artist she knew. I loved it. There were a few cool Picasso's and Dali. The Dali's we saw in the MOMA in NYC we pretty small and one was quite large here. After that we took the public transport boat to the famous Rialto bridge and went shopping. We just about finished all our souvenir shopping there. Then we decided to try to walk back to the ship instead of using the vaparettos so we could see more of the city. It was such a good day. I would love to come back to Venice. There is so much left to see. I think we just scratched the surface of Venice and got the most important things crossed off.

April 30, 2012-Ville Franche sur Mer

The French Riveria/Cote de Azur-

May 1, 2012-Florence

Today is Labor Day in all of Europe pretty much. All the galleries/museums are closed.

May 6, 2012-Venice

So far Venice is living up to my expectations. It is a totally unique and magical city. I love that there are no cars. I've dreamed of seeing and being in these canals. We got into port around noon and after getting lunch to go we finally got to Piazzalle Roma right about 1:00pm. We bought our 24 hour Vaparetto pass and headed out for St. Marks square/basilica. We were going to go to the Peggy Guggenheim museum but since it was no longer raining we headed to the square. We rode the public transport boat from the mouth of the grand canal all the way to the end. There was an audio tour we listened to as we rode that told us about some if the famous Palazzos that we saw along the way.

The piazza de San Marco-they told us it is the most photographed Piazza/square in the world. I was surprised since I've seen way more pics of St. Peters in Rome. Again we had an audio tour to let us know what all we were seeing. We were able to see

May 2, 2012-Roma

Today we were in Rome.

May 3, 2012-Napoli

Today was our stop on Naples. We originally had planned to go to the island of Ischia in the bay of Naples.

Star wars day-May 4, 2011

Today we are on a boat cruising around the bottom of Italy. I love at sea days that are all sunny and amazing.

Cinco de Mayo-Montenegro style

Today we are in Kotor, Montenegro. Chad got up at 5am to watch us sail in through the fjords. Seeing as how we stayed up till almost 1am watching the help I was not as enthusiastic. I did however wake back up at 6 and saw land ahoy so I hopped out of bed. We were supposed to be off the boat tendering in at 7 but it ended up being 8am before we were on land in Kotor.

We started the day walking the medieval walls surrounding to old city as far as we could. Then we toured around the streets old the old walled city. We also toured the oldest christian church in Europe supposedly. It is a few decades older than Norte Dame. Then we went in search of the water taxi company we wanted to take us around to some of the surrounding towns. We couldn't find then in their location it showed on trip advisor so the lady told us there was a public phone at the post office nearby. As per usual with our luck neither of the phone numbers we had worked. Back we went towards the old town. On the way we stopped at a supermarket to buy a soda and look for some good wine for my neighbor Marsha. Two problems here: first neither of us know a thing about wine, second Chad is wearing a BYU shirt. Awesome! After we finished our purchases we went back to the old town to look for an Internet cafe since we couldn't get hold of the water taxi folks. We found a pizzeria with gelato and Wifi. Hooray for wifi and we each got a scoop of gelato for only €3 total.

After looking at email we tried again for the water taxi. We wondered around for probably another 30 minutes with no luck. We had to go back to the square with the pizzeria so chad could save the email with all the info with the water taxi. Finally we found them over 2 hours after getting off the boat. We were supposed to have a 2 hour private tour of the area but those nuckle heads didn't know anything and didn't act like they spoke much English. They drove us out of Kotor into the bay and first to Our Lady of the Rocks church. It was really pretty small church on its own little island. Next we were supposed to be taken to the small city of