Here’s the first of our cruise posts – this one focusing on our ship, the Celebrity Reflection.  She’s 1,047 feet long, can carry 3,046 passengers with a crew of 1,500.  You can see more ship photos on our Smugmug site: https://dancooksey.smugmug.com/Mediterranean-Cruise-2018/Celebrity-Reflection/i-kctghH6

Celebrity Reflection

Our Stateroom

Stateroom Bed

Enjoying our Balcony

Outdoor Pool

Enjoying the Sunset Bar

Dinner with the Southern Illinois Girls

A Good Ship

Any time we went into or out of a port we were always accompanied by seagulls, and we would often see them in the cities.  I’m sure to the locals, they think of them as we think of birds such as crows… very commonplace.  However, once you take a closer look at them you can see the beauty in them that God created.

We’re home, doing a lot of laundry and trying to get our bodies adjusted from Italian time to New Mexico time.  I’m still working on processing our photos from our trip and I hope to have them done by this weekend.  After that I’ll do a series of posts for each of our days on our cruise and time in Rome.

In the meantime, I want to introduce you to our new friend.  This is Agung who was our stateroom attendant.  He was responsible for cleaning our room and keeping our ice bucket filled and he did both very well.  We spent some time to get to know him.  He’s from the Island of Bali in Indonesia and married with two kids.  He even taught us how to say ‘good morning’ in his native language – “Salamet paggi,” and ‘good evening’ – “Salamet mulam.”  We started to greet him this way every day and he seemed to appreciate our efforts to get to know him as a person.  When we said goodbye to him on our last day, he said, with a tear in his eye, “I think of you as my grandparents.”  That was special to  us.

Sunday morning we took a tour of the Roman Coliseum which is pretty incredible.  As with most of the popular sites, there were thousands of people, but we were able to book a tour that got us in a special entrance so we didn’t have to wait in line as many people and groups did.  We entered the Coliseum through the gladiator gate, where the gladiators entered to do their battles.  It’s also the gate where the loser goes out.  At the end of our tour we went out of the Coliseum through the winner’s gate.  Then we toured the Roman Forum which is a pretty amazing area.  It was a great tour, even if pretty hot in the sun.  We had lunch at a sidewalk cafe and we all order pizza.  We rested in the afternoon and ended our evening with a delicious gelato.  I had a cup with pistachio, hazelnut and milk chocolate flavors.  A good day.

We arrived back in Rome on Friday and had a driver who gave us a driving tour around Rome.  This is a picture of Margie and Betty with the Dome of St. Peter’s Basilica (designed by Michelangelo) in the background.