September 2007
Day 4 - Saturday, September 22, 2007
It took me well into our first cruise to "get" cruising. It's just a multi-stop tour of interesting places and the "hotel" travels with you. Unpack once and you're done for the duration. And, since the sailing is almost all at night, you wake up in the port bright and early with a full day of adventure before you.
We slept in this AM (no planned shore excursion to get ready for today) and disembarked in Marseilles about 11:00a. A quick shuttle ride into town and we walked along the quai next to the marina at Vieux Port:
     
It was about a 10-15 minute walk to the foot of La Canebiere (Marseilles main drag), and a few blocks later we turned right onto Rue Saint Ferréol, one of the best shopping avenues in all of France (we're told). As we were strolling, Gael said she wished she could find the "H & M" store. She knew they had one in Marseilles but had no idea where. A block later, there it was. Go figure. A bit of shopping (and only one shopping bag) later we continued our walk. People in Spain and (now) in France are, on balance, a lot slimmer than the average American. But they all smoke and maybe that's one of the reasons.
It's a lovely place to walk:
This is the Préfecture des Bouches-du-Rhóne:
.. which we think is the equivalent of the state/county courthouse for Provence
..was being married there.
My first two-story carousel!
And, of course, for the grandsons:
In all it was a very pleasant few hours before we made our way back to the shuttle and then to the ship.
This is on the sunbathing deck where the beautiful people go to soak up the rays. We didn't see any beautiful people...
Lunch and a nap (YES!)
At the end of yesterday's entry I mentioned that I'd inadvertently left the MacBook connected to the internet throughout dinner (114 minutes of connect time). So this afternoon I rounded up the Online Manager (yes, there is such a dude) and became a whimpering supplicant. And he wiped those minutes right off my account, no problem. Whew! Another potentially expensive mistake on my part. And the cruise is only four days old..
I don't think I mentioned that internet access is $0.65 per minute? You can buy a block of minutes (and I did) but that takes it down to still $0.38 per minute so you don't want to waste 'em!
The ship is sailing from Marseilles to Cannes which, on my map, is a bit North of East of us. That put the sunset directly off our starboard side and gave us these opportunities:
 
Dinner tonight is the first of our three black-tie dinners. Here are all eight of us; we clean up pretty well:
Left to righ: Don, Mick, Christy, Chaz, Gael, Tony (behind Gael), Norma and Pat (behind Norma)
And we look pretty good, too, I'm thinking:
Dinner was even better than last night and we got a reserve Zin because they were out of the regular -- no extra charge. I'm thinking things are turning around.
We were scheduled to see a Broadway Review in the showroom at 11:00p but they had some technical difficulty and, rather than cancelling the show, they scrambled to get last night's show, Jack Walkers, a tenor from the UK, who is definitely meant for better things than cruise-ship performing. He was outstanding!
And so to bed; tomorrow Cannes and Monte Carlo!
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