Excursions

All our excursions are planned.  We have some fabulous adventures awaiting us.  We are most excited about the ones in the Middle East since this is an area we have never been to before.  In Civitavecchia we’ll go on our own to a nearby town and explore, along with seeing a few things near the port.  Next stop is Sicily and we will go with a ship tour to a nearby town and hope to see Mt. Etna with a view from an ancient Greek theater.  On to the Suez Canal, then our 2 day stay in Jordan where well will visit Petra, Wadi Rum, and much more one of the days and on the second day we will travel to the Jordan side of the Dead Sea.  Eilat, Israel is our next stop and we only hope it stays in our itinerary with world issues as they are.  We have a 4x4 desert trek there to see some equally amazing things.  After that we can relax for five days at sea arriving in Muscat, Oman. There we will have a nice tour into the countryside (or is it desert-side) to see a variety of ancient things and have local cuisine for lunch.  When we arrive in Abu Dhabi, UAE a couple days later we have a ship excursion that will take us to the Grand Mosque, the largest in the entire world.  I am sure that will be an amazing site. That will conclude our trip as the next day we arrive in Dubai and schlep our bags off and to our hotel for three nights.  While in Dubai our plan is to have a 2 day pass on the Big Bus, a hop-on, hop-off system with many extras including the tallest building in the world and the Dhow boats, plus much more.  On our last full day there we have an afternoon 4x4 excursion booked into the desert where we will have the opportunity to ride a camel, dune board, and much more culminating with dinner and belly dancing… it sounds interesting!  That is a brief description of what we will do on this cruise.  Now, to plan our nice days in Barcelona!!!     

Barcelona Flat

I managed to get a photo…

WooHoo!

We’ve booked a place in Barcelona! It is not as inexpensive as we hoped but still a great value for a private flat compared to even the least expensive hotels. We hoped to be over looking the Rambles, which didn’t work out but this looks like a lovely place.  We found this place through Airbnb, which seems to have a much better search program, more information, and better safeguards in place than iStopover. We also looked on HomeAway and Wimdu and got several responses from each.  Unfortunately, the dates we wanted were booked or some other reason it would not work.  Anyway, we are happy about this. We will have a kitchen, washer/dryer, Wi-Fi, great location, and the list goes on and on!  It looks very nice and certainly more than we hoped for in a flat.  We will have eight nights for US$797. including the cleaning fee, etc.  Ours hosts/landlords are shown below.  I can’t seem to copy over photos of the flat but here’s a link if you want to see it.  FLAT IN THE HEART OF GOTHIC . 

Sigh…

I sent off a few more inquires and we hope to hear something tomorrow.  Looking and searching more sites now.  The prices are going up for availability BUT still much less than a simple hotel room where we would have no kitchen to linger over our morning coffee, etc.   

Darn…

The booking didn’t work out so it’s back to the search again.  I know we have a lot of time relatively speaking but several places we have tried are already booked. 

Bold New Move (for us)

The bold new move is deciding to go through iStopOver to book our 8-day stay in Barcelona.  I read about this organization from an Arthur Frommer’s article. iStopOver offers short term rentals of rooms or apartments in various cities throughout the world, usually for less than you can rent a simple hotel room. Various amenities are offered from maid service and meals, to no service at all.  Another organization that does this same thing is Airbnb. Anyway I joined both when I first read about them and after we got home from Alaska I searched and searched narrowing down the choice and corresponded with a few of the landlords, some didn’t even bother to reply though.  By today we decided to take the plunge and book a place along La Ramblas, a studio flat, 30 meters from green Metro line.  Per Rick Steves Snapshot Barcelona book most everything we will want to see is along the green line.  Here’s hoping it works out.  The landlord has 48 hours to respond.  If they don’t the charge is dropped and we are back to the drawing board!  Before deciding this, we had finally decided on a simple hotel and figured the cost was worth it since they provided “buffet breakfast” and snacks all day but they had no vacancies.  Do you think it will really look like this?  I hope so!!!

Bookings!

Okay, we’re getting serious now!  Somehow I am going backwards in booking things but today we just booked our post cruise stay in Dubai!  We will stay at the Holiday Inn Express Safa Park Dubai City from Nov. 21-24, with a late check out to catch our flight home on Nov. 25, 01:35.  Yes, you read that right, we begin our flight home at 1:35 am! 

We also sent a few inquires off to find out more about this fun sounding Desert Safari with Orient Tours that we want to do one of the days.  It is highly recommended on Cruise Critic and looks very interesting.  The other days in Dubai we will plan on a 2-day pass on the Big Bus Tours that looks pretty comprehensive. So that completes she basic plans for Dubai, UAE. 

Dubai Skyline

Sicily

Today I went to the library and got a book or two about Sicily.  What shall we do on our stop there?  I also plan to look on the Rick Steves Daily Itinerary in Sicily to see if perhaps we can just “borrow” a day he describes as something we would like to do.  Since I am officially back to work I need to do that first and then play.  I am not sure about a couple of the other stops either, so there is still a lot of research to do.  I have requested a couple of books on Dubai as well.