Days 18-20 New Cruise and Bourmes, France

Cruise 2 Route

For the past few days it has been difficult to either get an Internet connection or, when it became available, to find time to use it.   I used up the last of our paid minutes on our last sea day on Friday.  We arrived back in Civitavecchia on Saturday morning, but the tour we hoped to take was cancelled because not enough people signed up.   That meant we just had to get out of our room after breakfast and find a place on the ship to read for a few hours until our new room was ready at 1PM.  Between Friday night and Saturday night we had no Internet access while they closed out one account and opened the next. 

We met our new dinner companions Saturday night.  We are seated with 5 nurses from Jackson County Hospital in Florida, who seem to vacation together often.  Ray is the only guy at the table, but he doesn't mind. 

Bourmes

Sunday morning there was a mass onboard so we went and discovered that we have an excellent Catholic priest on this cruise.  He is a retired Navy chaplain from Pensacola - Father David.  The amazing thing is that he is recovering from surgery to remove cancer from his kidneys 2 weeks ago and he still managed to make it on board.  There was no priest on the first cruise, so I'm guessing he was scheduled for that and had to cancel because of the surgery.  He is an excellent homilist, vibrant and friendly, you wouldn't know he was sick if he hadn't told us why he needed to keep it short and sit down occasionally.

Bourmes Castle

We took care of Internet signup and a few other things between breakfast & our tour start time.  The ship docked at the port La Seyne-Sur-Mer, across the harbor from Toulon, France, about 11AM.  Toulon has a French Navy base with a number of moth-balled ships in the harbor.   Our tour for today was a village named Bourmes, about an hour away and on top of a high, rocky hill.    This was hopefully the low point of our tours.  It had a bad omen to start, since all the other tour buses had been called and ours was still waiting about 15 minutes after the others for this tour had left.  When we got on the bus we found it had been overbooked.  The bus was packed and there were still 4 people standing.  The 4 had to get off.  I don't know what happened to them.

Flowering Vine in Bourmes

The bus ride up was not much to talk about.  The village was mostly 10th century, with a church and a small castle, but nothing special.  Bourmes is known for it's flowers, but our guide said they mostly bloom from December to March.  We hiked along the village streets, some of which rose at about a 60 degree slope.  It was a very strenuous walk, both up the streets and back down a winding stair.   The guide pointed out a few flowers along the way and talked about the village's defense position.   Then we had an hour free.  The shops didn't have anything I couldn't get elsewhere, so we just took a few pictures , stopped in a cafe for cappuccino and were back on the bus 15 minutes early.   



View of the Med from Bourmes



We did finally make it to a show tonight.  Last cruise we were so tired at the end of each day we decided to skip the shows.  They should be mostly the same on this cruise, so we don't think we have missed much.  Tonight a group called The American Dream were on and they were great.  They are a Motown cover group, with 3 guys and one woman.   People were dancing in the aisles by the end. 



Tomorrow we will be in Barcelona.  Hopefully, it will be a better tour.