La Spezia 11th October. As
things turned out it didnÕt happen as we expected. We were late docking and had
to wait quite a time for the Immigration Officers to come aboard, so we
couldnÕt go ashore until after 3:15 PM. The Second Officer had rung Duncan to
say the shipÕs agent could arrange a taxi to Pisa he would show us around and
return us to the ship (about 4 hours) for about the equivalent of NZ$300.00,
Duncan consulted the rest of us and we all agreed it was too expensive. We all
went ashore and went by bus to the railway station and after finding the trip
was about 1 1/2 hours each way we decided we would rather
spend our time around La Spezia. So after finding somewhere to buy some stamps
and postcards we had a coffee, addressed and posted them and wandered the shops
for the rest of the evening. The weather was nice and warm, 22o C at about 5 PM. Dinner was a
wonderful salad in a little bar on the way back to the ship. We had no idea of
the what price it would be, but from the look of the plate full and the
establishment, took it that it would be reasonably expensive. However we were
very pleasantly surprised! The whole lot for the 5 of us was only Û34.00 so
there were 5 happy people heading back to the ship arriving on board around
8:00 PM. We all finished the evening in the Officers Recreation Room over a
couple of cans, all in all a pleasant stay in Italy. The ship was due to sail
(as we understood) at 10 AM next morning but awoke to find we had already
sailed a 6:00 AM, so we are now underway to our next stop Damietta. Thursday 13th
October, well I suppose some people are superstitious, generally IÕm not, but
thereÕs always ŌMurphyÕs LawĶ. Anyway today I did the stupidest thing I have
done on the trip so far. I was having a clean out on the computer and was so
cleaver that I managed to dump the ŌGames FolderĶ. Clever arenÕt I. Next time maybe it would be an idea
to look at whatÕs in the trash before I empty it! Friday 14th
October, as I havenÕt got any games and I didnÕt want to read today I decided
to try and do something productive, so I set out to do an exercise with iMovie
using photos from Disney land. I did a 4 minute clip with a music background, I
was going to do a short voice over but decided there was too much background
noise that the microphone would pick up. Burnt the whole thing to CD, and
played it back on the DVD player. I am very happy with the result. We arrived
off Damietta tonight around 8:00 PM and anchored until they were ready for us to
dock. We felt the ship moving after we went to bed and understand we docked
around 1:50 AM. |