Trips, Pics, and Tales

Today we were sharing our tour with a mom and her daughter who we met on cruise critic. We used Barcelona Day Tours for their Barcelona and Montserrat full day private tour. The ship docked at 5 am since it was a disembarking port for passengers leaving the ship as their port of call, but our tour wasn’t until 9 am.  We met our group and left the ship, finding our guide Marta very easily among the incredibly busy and super crowded port! Marta whisked us away and onto a large van, actually more like a small bus and off we went. Our first stop would be Montserrat. We drove for about an hour. Marta talked the whole time – mostly to my dad who must have asked her a million questions!  As we got closer to Montserrat the views became just amazing. We started to climb the mountain and the higher we went the more beautiful. It seems that each day we go to somewhere even more breathtaking!  We traveled up the winding road – up and up and up! There were people hiking it, ...

Today we will be visiting Palma de Mallorca! I had never even heard of this island until I saw the itinerary for the Epic. We don’t dock until 1:00 pm and we are in port until 8:00 pm. Sure we’re in port for a long time, but I found the times to be pretty unusual. I didn’t want to do a ship tour and trying to find something “unique” here was difficult with this strange time frame.  Finding a day out on a boat was a challenge, since we really wouldn’t be out and about until at least 2:00 – by the time we could get to a dock somewhere. It seemed sort of late in the day for a beach day too. I knew the family didn’t want to see cathedrals – so what would we do here in this Palma de Mallorca? Well, here it is, I’m up at 8:00 am! I actually slept in a bit! Everyone else is still asleep. I went out on the balcony and saw some lovely islands! I checked the Daily to see what was going in this morning – it ’s pretty much a half a sea day! I went to get breakfast in the Garden Café ...