Planning, Planning, Planning…

It was the beginning of May when we booked the cruise and air for this trip. Which left us a mere 5 months to figure everything else out. I can’t even begin to count the hours spent on the phone and the number of emails that transpired in planning for this trip. There was so much to do, and I was totally in my element. It is funny how Shannon and both think – Shannon focused on what she wanted to see in each of the cities while I thought about where we were going to stay, how we were going to get from point A to point B, what mass transit systems are available… basically the logistics. It worked out great.

The first thing I did was set up a timeline of what I wanted to get done when. Thing on that list included vaccinations, visa, renewing my passport, figuring out all the currency exchanges, learning Italian.. I could go on and on. Thankfully since I had been on two cruises in the past year the list of items I needed to buy was pretty small, but those were put into the timeline as well. The biggest need I had was a new camera; my old one was literally falling apart. I spent quite a bit of researching camera’s until I found the one I wanted and my family agreed to give it to me as an early Christmas present. I put together budgets, lists, timelines, you name it. Every aspect of this trip was thought and planned out.

Our original plan had us flying into London on Friday, spend the day and night there, take the train mid morning to Paris, spend Saturday day in the city of Paris. Travel out to Disneyland Paris Saturday evening and stay there Saturday night. Spend Sunday at Disney and then take the overnight train to Venice Sunday night to Monday. Spend Monday in Venice, spend the night there and then take the train to Rome Tuesday morning to get on the ship. (Are you tired yet?) As we were doing all this planning we figured out two things. One was that while taking the train around Europe is the traditional method, flying is significantly cheaper. There is a multitude of regional low budget airlines that fly all over Europe. The other thing we realized was that our plan was way too ambitious. We would spend more time traveling from place to place then actually being in the place. We also realized that there was so much that we wanted to do in Rome that we needed more time there. I really had no desire to go to Paris, but knowing Shannon did, I agreed to go. So I let her make the call to drop Paris from our schedule. Once we cut that out, we revised our pre cruise plan to the following:
Oct 8 – Leave GRR
Oct 9 – Arrive London 11:00 am, stay overnight in London
Oct 10 – Leave London 8:00 pm, fly to Venice
Oct 11 – Spend day in Venice take train to Rome mid afternoon
Oct 12 – Rome all day
Oct 13- Rome in AM, go to cruise ship early afternoon.

Even though it was cheaper and faster to fly from Rome to Venice we deiced to take the train. We wanted to experience traveling through the Italian countryside and I knew we would need the 4-5 hours of down time. Every time we talked about our itinerary these pre cruise days I would end with “and then we die” I knew we would just be exhausted with this ambitious of an itinerary.

We also decided to split up the cities when it came to planning. I took London and Shannon took Rome – we wanted to lighten the load. Venice we did not have a ton on our list of things to do so, we figured we could wing it. We also had all the port cities on the cruise to plan for.

Like the previous cruises I went on Cruise Critic to “meet” others from our trip online. It ended up one of the persons was a travel agent and was planning private excursions for every port. The benefit of the private excursions are that they are significantly cheaper then the ones from the ship. Donna, the travel agent, was also putting together an overnight in Cairo. The cruise ship actually docks at Port Said, in the Suez Canal and offer trips to Cairo which is about 3 – 3 ½ hours away. The next day it docks in Alexandria, which is also about 3 hours from Cairo (if you map out Port Said to Cairo to Alexandria it would make a V shape.) Due to the distances, many people choose to overnight in Cairo. The ship offers the overnight as one of its excursions, but it is really expensive. Donna put together a trip that was the same as the ones the ship offered, for about ¼ of the ship’s price. Which made it actually affordable for Shannon and I. Affordability was not the only consideration for us when it came to Egypt. We both had come to the decision separately that since safety was a concern that we both wanted to stick with the ship’s excursions and not spend the night in Cairo. Once we made that decision we picked the excursions in both Cairo and Alexandria that covered what we wanted to do. In the end we ended up booking excursions with Donna for our stop in Naples which we went on a tour of Pompeii and the Amalfi Coast and Kusadasi where we toured Ephesus.

Istanbul is a funny story. One day Shannon called me and asked me about what to do in Istanbul – at that point I has not given it much thought – so she went on to say she found an excursion through the ship that visited Hagia Sophia, the bazaar, and then we went to this hill that overlooked the city, I was like okay. She went on to say it was really reasonably priced and I was like okay – at this point I was thinking why do we have to decide this right now. Then she added that the hill was in Asia (for those of you who do not know Istanbul is split between Europe and Asia.) At that I was sold – and said sign me up – anything to go to Asia. Of course we later realized that Ephesus was also in Asia – but we decided to stick with the tour.

This left Athens and Mykonos to figure out. We decided not to take tours at either place and that we could do them both on our own. Poor Athens was the one place that we just never really got around to plan.

In all our planning we only really hit one snafu. A few weeks before we left we found out there was going to be a national train strike on the day we were to take the train from Venice to Rome. Initially reports were that there was a possibility that it could be rescheduled or cancelled, but we did not know when this might happen (don’t even get me going on the whole announcing strikes a head of time – doesn’t that defeat the whole purpose.) So we held off making alternate plans until we absolutely had to, since we both were so excited about taking that train ride. We ended up booking a flight from Venice to Rome. Thankfully that was the only real planning issue we had.