We are Joost, Jolanda, Kim (13) and Rhodé (9), a Dutch
family cruising the Mediterranean. Last year we blogged about our cruise on Holland America’s Nieuw Amsterdam. This year we travel on the Noordam. You will
read about our trip (and the days before and after the cruise) on this blog in
the next weeks. We hope you will enjoy it.
This is our itinerary:
We start in Barcelona, Spain. We decided to spend four
nights before our cruise there to get to know the city. We end in
Civitavecchia, the port for Rome, Italy. After disembarkation we spend three
nights in the eternal city.
This is our third cruise. Why do we love cruise
vacations? Actually because of all the advantages that everyone always talks
about: We pack/unpack only once, our hotel travels with us, we like to see
different cities and enjoy the great food and entertainment.
We love to experience the sights in the different
ports. Holland America offers excellent tours, but we seldom book them. We are
more the Do-It-Yourself types. To be honest, the tours may be nice for us
adults, but for the kids they are usually a bit boring. When the guides
explain, the kids sit in the shade waiting to get back on the bus to the
ship. We usually venture out on our own, but we prepare for our visit extensively.
Sometimes even months in advance. Isn’t the internet great with sites like Tripadvisor?
This year we discovered Shorebee. Great
tips on their site for DIY-trips. So besides writing about our trips, we hope
to provide other DIY-cruisers with some tips for their own shore-adventures.
Tomorrow we leave for Barcelona. Today we had our
first disappointment. We are flying with Brussels Airlines. On the e-ticket we
saw something we didn’t count on: carry-on luggage allowance at Brussels
Airlines is only 6 kg (13 lbs). On KLM it is usually 12 kg (26 lbs) and that is
what we were packing: 4 days of clothes in our carry-on for Barcelona. Not
going to happen…
So we packed an extra carry-on and stuffed the rest of
the excess luggage in our “ladies bags” that are free to carry-on according to
the airlines website. I wonder if that was what they intended to achieve, even
more bags on the plane.
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