Cruise from Barcelona to Rome

Cruise from Barcelona, Spain to Rome, Italy
Friday, June 20 - Saturday, June 21

Our cruise from Barcelona to Rome turned out to be an experience whose price rapidly escalated from the initial 40 Euros per person. It also served as a good lens, and an opportunity to brace ourselves for unstable, ready to explode concoction that is the post-menopausal Italian woman. On the shuttle ride over, Alicia and Nikki, our two new friends from Chicago and Scotland, respectively, along with the two of us were loudly and forcefully herded to the back so as to preserve four Italian middle aged women’ incredibly inefficient arrangement of luggage. I had never seen anyone so concerned with, yet at the same so inept at managing their bags.

The pleasant surprise that was the relatively low cost of our tickets for an 18 hour cruise faded as we saw that we had seats on the ship. Imagine a partial cross section of a Boeing 747, and you’ll have the room in which we were assigned seats that were not next to each other. We gladly upgraded to a cabin with beds, air conditioning, and a private bathroom for 15 Euros. The ship was decently large with a number of cafes, bars, restaurants, a casino, an arcade, a club, and a computer lab. The pool which got us excited at the time of booking, however, turned out to be a square with each side measuring about 5 meters long.

After dinner in the overpriced, on-board restaurant, we watched the end of the football match, and then went to the club. The awkwardness of seeing a swarm of 13 year olds dancing in a sea of sexual frustration/ignorance was heightened by their fathers drinking at the bar. With our books in hand we quickly marched out, and proceeded to walk on the deck for about an hour before calling it a day.

Greeted by an industrial landscape of cranes, barges, and scaffolding instead of grand, old Roman ruins, we soon found out that our destination port, Civitavecchia, was a city located few hours from Rome, not a Roman port (these turned out to be a figment of our geographically handicapped imagination).