Summer Snapshots - Mediterranean Cruise: Boat and Sicily

Sorry for the lack of blogging, but internet access was too expensive on the cruise and the service in Rome and Venice was too slow. So we will try and catch you up as much as we can. Continuing on our Summer adventure we drove down to Civitavecchia, Rome's port, which lies about 65 km outside of Rome.  It was quite a transition going from our villa in Tuscany to a plush, air-conditioned, ocean-view room on the cruise ship, but we managed fairly easily (insert laugh here).  We'd never been on a cruise or to anywhere in the Mediterranean, so this was a trip of many firsts. First, we did not know what to expect and we have to give our travel agent (another first for us) mad props for hooking us up with an awesome upgrade. We thought all the upgrade included was an oceanview room, but we also got to eat in a special restaurant every night.

The mighty Celebrity Equinox docked in Messina, Sicily - not her maiden voyage, but it was our maiden voyage

......featuring a real grass lawn on the top deck and a hot glass blowing show by Corning!

Three pools for the enjoyment of all - we preferred laying out and partaking in the chocolate chip cookies and fruit punch!

Our stateroom - much nicer than any other place we stayed on our trip.

complete with ocean view balcony!

they decided to add this "floating tree" in the space between the four main elevators......just because they could!

For those in the middle of the Harry Potter series or into the "Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" stuff, there was a library to borrow books for the trip (I got the BYOB memo)

Our first stop was the island of Sicily, which was way different from the region of Tuscany.

While we found most of Messina, Sicily to be kind of dirty, other parts of the island were refreshing...

... such as the mountain village of Taormina - glad we found this place, otherwise Sicily would've been a bust!

view of the Sicilian coast from Taormina

--Justin