Shore Leave

I just knew Livorno was going to be a different sort of stop for us when I opened the curtains of our cabin and saw we were docked next to a ship called Moby Love that had giant cartoons of a fat, naked couple running into one another's arms.

I was right.

Livorno is a port town that's not too far away from Florence and Pisa, and most people jump on a tour bus and go to one of those places when ships dock here. We, however, had already spent lots of time in Florence a few years ago and the trip to Pisa didn't seem worth it just to see a tower that leans. So off we went to check out Livorno.

It proved interesting in a port city sort of way. There were clues galore that it is a shore leave sort of place, like the condom dispensing machines on the sidewalk every hundred yards or so. You could almost hear Susie Wong asking, "Sailor boy, want to go topside?" Or in this case it may have been The World of Sammy Wong. Because, judging by the statuary in town, Livorno has a definite bent. You can judge for yourself above and there are more pictures here, but to me these may be the gayest statues of any municipality I have ever visited. The last one in the group is a little different - looking mostly like a flying monkey that's out hunting for Dorothy and that dog of hers, too.

In continuing the port theme, Livorno also offered a tattoo parlor. Of course, it did. However, I think you would need to intravenously feed me four gallons of limoncello before I would walk willingly into a place called "Feel the Pain Tattoo Studio". Even though my friend Picture Boy would respect me more for doing it.

Oh well, not every good tour is in the travel books and this was fun, even if it was a tame Sunday morning in a town that was probably rocking just a few hours earlier.

There is one more historical fact about Livorno that I should add. The English used to call the city "Leghorn", and that led to the breed of chickens being raised here being called leghorns. And as all of us raised on cartoons as kids would know, that means Livorno is the reason we have the greatest rooster in history, Foghorn Leghorn. I will refrain from making the obvious pun and just sum up our trip to Livorno, the way Foghorn would: "I say. I say."

PS We were in Elba yesterday in the town of Portoferraio. Not much going on. I can see why Napoleon didn't even stay a full year. Anyhow, a couple of pics here.

Let Them Entertain Me

A couple of lazy days in the middle of the cruise.

Yesterday was a cold, rainy day anchored at Amalfi. We stayed on the ship because we had already been in the town the day before when our driver took us there after we finished touring Pompeii. I've uploaded some pictures of the towns of Amalfi and Positano here. Both are beautiful places, and the shots from the ship show how spectacular their setting is, built into the sides of cliffs along the coast. There are also some shots of a little roadside replica of the village that was built by a local artist. They are charming, and the fact that they just sit there without any protection says something about the locals, I think.

Today we are in Civitavecchia, the port city about 50 miles from Rome. It's a long trek into Rome - about 2 hours each way and we decided not to go since we were in the city last year. It's a cool, but sunny day, and we were getting ready to take a walk through the town here at port when we ran into Toronto Denny who had been in and told us it's a really boring industrial town whose highlight is a flea market with used clothing. Linda doesn't wear a mood ring, but I swear the one she had on started to turn dark when she heard that.

So it's up to us to make the day entertaining.

The ship tries hard to provide entertainment options for the passengers who stay aboard, but LK and I have been fairly selective so far. We were still drinking our first gallon of coffee this morning when they held the golf putting tournament so we missed that. And then we missed the ping pong tournament as we moved on from coffee to Bloody Marys in the hour before lunch.

When we scuttled our walk into Civitavecchia, we could have been a team in the non-hosted bridge play, but our style of play is to deal the cards and then talk for several minutes until someone finally gets tired of waiting and says, "Who's bid is it?" We have learned that whoever says that has good cards, and you need to be wary of them. But we also doubted our fellow cruisers would appreciate the technique.

I could end this post now and just make it to the shuffleboard tournament, but I have chosen to deliberately boycott anything that is associated with senior citizens since I am sure there will a couple of 70-year-old shuffleboard hustlers up there who play every day at their senior center. I just know they will miss their first few attempts and then innocently ask if I wouldn't want to make it a little more interesting by playing for, say, a dollar a point. And I know I will fall for it, too, because to refuse the challenge would make me a wuss. So shuffleboard is out.

Team Trivia starts at 4:30 but Linda and I have already tried that and won't go back again. We ended up on a team that had this rabid player who acted as if getting the answer right was a new ransom requirement if she wanted to free her kidnaped husband. The fact that she decided to override just about every answer Linda or I came up with did not turn out to be as annoying as it sounds, because when they read the answers out we had been right in each instance. Others in the team acknowledged we had been right; her husband probably remains captive; but we won't go back to spend half an hour with such an unpleasant person.

That takes us up to 5 o'clock. We will join the entertainment program for that one. It's 2-for-1 drinks during Happy Hour. And after a day of avoiding all the other ship entertainment options, we definitely want to be happy for at least an hour.

Our Last Day at Pompeii

I don't know why Pompeii intrigues me so much. Maybe it's just the freakish nature of a city stopped in its tracks 2,000 years ago and now on view as it was then. More likely, though, it is the macabre idea of all these bodies dying suddenly from the poisonous gas of Vesuvius and then preserved in their awful last moment by the ash that rained down on them and crusted their bodies. It would be nice to say the historic interest outweighs the morbid curiosity, but I suspect horror films will always do better at the box office than documentaries.

Motives aside, Pompeii lived up to its promise and was as interesting as I had hoped it would be. The special effects team cooked up a grand day for us. Vesuvius loomed over the city with clouds lingering at the top looking suspiciously like smoke. Thunder boomed not too far away, and it didn't take too much imagination to think the mountain was getting bored being dormant.

This was the Denny, Denny and Donny Daytrip I wrote about earlier, and we had driven up Vesuvius to check out the crater and get a view of the Bay of Naples below us. Being cold, rainy and misty, what we got was a view of the mist below us while those with sharp eyes insisted they could make out the outline of the Bay. Our driver took us as far as we were allowed to go by car, and then it was a 40-minute walk to the top. That was 40 minutes in dry weather by people who didn't limp and drag their legs. Also, most of us hadn't bothered to consider that it's lots colder at the top of a mountain than down in the valley so we were standing around with goosebumps about the size of the local lemons.

In other words, we got back in the car and went to Pompeii without staring down into caldera of the mountain.

Once at the ruins of Pompeii we chipped in 10 euros each and went with a tour guide who pretty much told us everything we had read in our guidebook on the way over. The big difference was that he made us walk around in the mud before he would go on to the next paragraph.

After seeing so many old buildings and ruins in other cities, it was always going to take a lot for Pompeii to really impress me. It did. Because of the preserving effect of volcanic ash, we could still see murals painted two millennia ago. It also became obvious that somewhere between 79AD and the 15th century someone taught Italian artists how to draw.

And of course the ash-coated corpses were there. They were fascinating yet grotesque. We were looking at real bodies yet somehow enough time had had passed to make it OK to gawk at them. I mean, people would think you were sick if you walked to the site of a natural disaster today and just wandered around taking pictures of the bodies there. But let 2,000 years pass and there we all were clicking away.

I must say there was one point when that emotional distance broke down and I became strongly aware that these weren't just statues of people who had died in a tragedy, but it was really their bodies trapped in the ash. That happened when a few toe bones showed through a break in the ash of one woman. And walking around to the other end of the display box, half her skull was showing and the grimace on her face was truly horrible.

It drove home what it must have been like to have suffered through this awful catastrophe. So of course, I took lots and lots of pictures of this poor woman. You can check them and other Pompeii shots here.

Donny and the Cruisers

Today we are staying on the ship as it sails from Greece to western Italy through the Strait of Messina. In other words, we're trapped and have to figure out how to entertain ourselves for a full day without passing out before the sun sets.

Oh the ship tries to offer diversions. Just in the morning there are shuffleboard and ping pong tournaments, trivia contests, cooking lessons, needlepoint lessons, and a trolley going around the pool making Bloody Marys. As I said, the challenge is not to pass out before sunset,

It's actually not that hard because we have met quite a few people who are fun and entertaining and the conversations are good value. I've put up some pictures from the ship - including one of some of our new pals - and you can see them here, but really a ship is not the most interesting place to take pictures.

Many of my new buddies have made me feel quite amateurish about this retirement thing I've been planning. Take Jaki and Robert from northern California. Jaki retired from her job and proceeded to open a small business that now takes up more of her time than her pre-retirement job. Her partner, Robert, is more traditionally retired from the business he owned, so he entertains himself by going online and learning how to do such things as put in a new bathroom and kitchen for their house - which he actually did.

Linda looked aghast when he told us this and made it quite clear that this would never be an option for me. It was an awkward moment. I had already had to tell Robert I did not ride motorcycles. Now my wife was explaining that I was not permitted to own most power tools (that is, those with sharp edges). I really did not expect that I would be trying to prove my manliness once I turned 60, but I did feel it necessary to let Robert know I was pretty cool with screw drivers, hammers and rakes. I was just forbidden to work with anything that had the ability to cut my hand off.

Some of the other retirees are also making me feel like I need to lift my game. Tomorrow Linda and I are sharing a tour with two other couples, and we met with them to plan. Both of the men are named Denny. Besides making us sound like a bad comedy skit - Denny, Denny and Donny - I need to differentiate them. At the risk of creating confusion with the restaurant chain, I will refer to them as Chicago Denny and Toronto Denny.

Toronto Denny talks like a man who has no trouble figuring out what he wants to do each day. He is organized yet casual. He seems like a suitable role model and I will ask him more about his approach tomorrow. Chicago Denny, however, is another story.

Chicago Denny talked about his retirement. He walks a lot, works out in the gym, and spends a couple of hours a day researching information for a professional newsletter and database one of his former clients runs. He also said that his daughter, who lives in another city, calls him most mornings while he is on his walk since she knows he has more than an hour when he is available.

He then added, "I decided early on that there would be no TV and no naps when I retired."

So two questions came to mind. First, if you decided to make rules about what you could not do during your retired days, why did you bother to retire? Second, how long does it take during your walk when you can take a phone call and do more than heavy breathing into the phone?

Actually, with not much to do on the ship today and writing about all these guys named Denny, a third question came to mind. I wonder if in-room dining would serve a Grand Slam Breakfast in the middle of the afternoon.

A Slight Greece Stain on Our Trip

Today we wandered around Corfu, a little island off the western part of Greece. It was OK, but only OK. Or as Linda said tonight as we sat with a drink watching the last stragglers get to the ship: "I wonder why this became a popular tourist spot."

Frankly, after Dubrovnik Corfu looked just a little rough around the edges - too touristy, not maintained as well, trying hard to get your money without doing much more than sitting prettily in the middle of a drop-dead gorgeous sea.

Mind you, part of our perception was jaded because we zigged when we should have zagged in the Old Town. (Every place in Europe seems to have an Old Town they use to suck in tourists, by the way. Sydney may be the only place I know with a Newtown.) We left the touristy part and got into a really humdrum and uninteresting section where it looked like the hottest buy would be used clothing. It's the section that put the Fu in Corfu.

But we finally found our way back to overpriced sidewalk cafes and brand names in English so we felt better. I knew neither of us was having the greatest of days because we ordered a diet Coke and a coffee - not our usual drinks when we're in a party mood.

After our drinks, we walked past the town's main church, named after its patron Agio (St) Spiridon. Which reminded me of Spiro in Sydney, the only guy named Spiridon I have actually known. Spiro would pobably like it here, if only because his namesake is the town's patron and all the girls think would think he looked like a rock star. But also because it feels like the sort of place that would love having a guy like Spiro around to fix whatever it is they have broken even if he is figuring out how to do it for the first time.

Anyhow, not every place is going to be a 10 on the meter, and there really wasn't anything bad about Corfu. Just not the sort of Wow things we've seen elsewhere. Pictures from Dubrovnik are here and pictures from Corfu are here.

Tomorrow is the first Tuesday in November - one of the most important dates on the calendar.

For every year on the first Tuesday in November, Australia stops to watch a horse race. This year, an hour after Australia watches the Melbourne Cup, the US opens its polls to decide the next president. We'll be cruising the Messina Straits while all the action is happening. Not sure if that's good or bad, but it is the way it is.

You Can't Stop the Music

We have added Croatia to the list. Having acquired Portugal and Croatia this trip, Linda now lacks only 64 regions recognized as countries by the United Nations before she completes her official Global Domination Bingo card.

Dubrovnik turned out to be a really pretty place -- wonderful harbor, picturesque Old Town. The weather was warm, the crowds were few. We had fun. I will load pictures tomorrow on Shutterfly and put the link in the next post.

In the taxi on the way back to the ship we were subjected to some music that sounded like a bad Nashville backup group trying to cope without the steel guitar while three drunk guys and one very drunk woman sing nonsense words at the top of their lungs.

"Croatian music," said the driver, turning to see if we were impressed by the native noise.

"Very nice," said Linda in her most insincere voice. "Is it new or old music?"

Now those of us who spent most of our lives being polite and lying to clients have learned that Rule No 1 is to never embellish and never ask additional questions about the topic. So it is to Linda's credit that she didn't know this rule. It is to her discredit that she didn't know it, as well.

The taxi driver thought about Linda's question and pointed to the radio/CD player of the car. "Yah," he said. "Say day."

Having trapped herself in this extraneous conversation, Linda tried her best with a knowing "Mmmmmmm," in reply.

At which point the driver looked mildly exasperated and punched the eject button of the player. Taking out the CD (and mercifully stopping the native music) he showed it to Linda. "Say day," he said, as one might to a puppy that had peed on the carpet one too many times.

"Oh, CD!" said Linda. "Yes. New!" she said.

The driver put the CD back in the player, but did not hit play. He also did not take us to our destination, leaving us off quite short of our destination. While other passengers' taxis were whizzing past us on their way to the ship, we were walking along the pier wondering what we had done wrong so our driver wouldn't take us all the way.

"We both nodded enthusiastically and told him we loved the music," I said.

"He knew we were insincere," Linda said. "Taxi drivers can spot that a mile away. Next time it happens, we have to really look like we enjoy the music."

I don't know if this sort of moment is likely to come around a second time, and I certainly hope it doesn't. But I do agree with her general premise. Taxi drivers are pretty good at figuring out when you're just trying to take them for a ride.

I May Not Know Much About Art,,,,

The tide was high when we checked out yesterday, so we couldn't get the water taxi to take our bags to the cruise ship terminal for a few hours. Even though it was raining pretty hard at the time, I swear I could hear Linda singing her own version of that old Blondie song, "The tide is high, so I'm going to buy."

To divert our own personal economic meltdown, I suggested we use our newly acquired knowledge of the water bus system and hop aboard for rainy day cruise.

We ended up at l'Accademia, which had lots of old art works. Linda is an art buff, and I enjoy some of it. She ended up loving the museum. I ended up liking some paintings, but really after you've seen your first 50 Madonna with Child pictures, why would you want more? It started to feel to me like I was looking at all the entries for this year's Christmas Card contest. If I had to vote which collection I like the most, I would choose the hotel with all the naked women on the walls to this, but what do I know about art?

One thing that did interest me was when I noticed that St Sebastien showed up in lots of the paintings, wearing his underpants and with an arrow or two sticking out of him. He was never the center of attention, but these old Venetian masters must have really enjoyed painting him standing off to the side. I was curious that the arrows were never in the same place. In one picture, there would be one in his abdomen on the left side; in another there would be one in his shoulder and a second in his leg, and so on. I found it interesting that these painters couldn't agree on where the arrows hit him, but they were absolutely unanimous that it happened while he was wearing only his underpants.

When I pointed this out to Linda, I got the kind of sniff that she only uses once in a while and only in public. It means something like, "I don't want to hurt your feelings so I will sniff to acknowledge you've said something, but what you said was so (A. Stupid B. Unfunny or C. Both of the above) that I don't want you to think I share your sense of humor or views of the world, especially when it comes to art which is something I know a bit about."

I love her anyway.

After the museum it was time to get back to the hotel and order up the water taxi. The tour books were full of warnings that water taxis in Venice cost an arm and a leg. It didn't turn out to be as bad as the books made us think it would be. In part, I think the driver saw how bad my leg is right now and figured he would only charge an arm. Also, when I think how much we spent in the taxi driving from Milan Airport, this seemed a bargain.

We also got to see a little more of Venice that we hadn't passed before. It was very pleasant, except when" Linda nearly capsized the boat rushing to the other side when I mistakenly thought I saw the boat her heartthrob had been in when we first arrived.

We are now aboard the ship, which looks like it will be fun. They tried their best to have a Halloween Party last night as you can see by the picture at the top of this post. Most people were too jetlagged - or too sober - to get into it, but at least there was an effort.

The other cruisers seem quite friendly. We've met Andy and Sandy (LK: "Hey, that's my sister's name!") from California, Larry and Linda (LK: Hey, that's my name!) from Long Island and several others who probably told us their names but since they aren't the same as our family's names we have forgotten. Today Linda also met a guy who went to Hudson Elementary School in La Puente - the same school Linda's mom, Peg, once taught in. He was too old to have been one of her pupils, but it really does show what a small world it is. It also shows how Linda can have a conversation starting at just about any point and find out something interesting by the end of it.

We are leaving tonight for Dubrovnik in Croatia. LK promises it will be interesting.