European vacations are, generally speaking, about history. Europe has nice beaches and good cappuccino and yodeling, but you can find all that a lot closer to home if you're coming from the states (except maybe the yodeling). So, if you're an American, you've probably gone to Europe to feel the weight of centuries, even millennia, crushing you like a bug under the heel of stiletto pumps (instead of boots, because history is much classier). Fortunately, Europe is full of history. In Italy, there's a children's game where they have to traverse the entire length of the country while only stepping on things that belong in a museum, kind of like playing hopscotch on marble busts. Almost every tour guide we had... and we had a quite a few until we started ditching them in the middle of the vacation... would start with "I'm going to tell you about the history of this place, things you'll remember for maybe five minutes and probably don't care about, but I have to do it to justify all the money you're paying me." Really. And it's pretty much true, they would go on and on about this Emperor and that Monk and such-and-such natural disaster, and I wish I had recorded it, because after five minutes it was gone and I'm pretty sure they were making most of it up as they went along.
But I'll try to summarize what I can remember.
So, we flew first class to London, which meant we had seats that folded into beds so we could sleep through the flight, which kind of makes it like a very expensive coffin sized hotel room. Very worth it. On the London side, there was the "Revival Lounge" with showers and breakfast and a fast Manicure for Kate. Then we took a connecting flight to Rome where we had a couple of days before the cruise started.
When you think about Rome, your thoughts almost immediately jump to the Roman Empire, which was the first advanced civilization on the globe. Some people argue that it's the Egyptians, or the Greeks, or the Spartans. But, frankly, I think we can rule out the Egyptians quite easily... sucking dead people's brains out their nostrils, wrapping them in gauze and building a mountain of stone over them in preparation for the afterlife hardly qualifies as advanced civilization. And the Greeks? Really, one word... Togas. The Spartans would, based on historical research (watching "The 300" a few times), wear nothing but loincloths and bright red satin cloaks into battle, but at home they wore togas as well, making them Greeks with slightly better fashion sense. Others might bring up the Assyrians, Alexander the Great, the Ottoman Empire, the Aztecs, and the lost thirteenth colony from "Battlestar Galactica." But I think it's safe to say these can be ignored if you show a complete and utter disrespect for history and facts.
So it was a little disappointing during the drive in from the Airport to be passing a McDonald's, a Toyota place, and a Marriott Hotel. But, before long, we were in the center of Rome, and that was where we realized what it really means to live in a city that has been in existence for more than two millennia, namely, that the streets are designed to allow two objects roughly the width of a horse's ass to pass by each other. So it's quite exciting when you're careening down the street in a Mercedes sedan driven at high but legal speed (there are no speed limits in Rome) by a driver cursing in Italian, aiming at what looks like a head-on collision with a bus that almost touches the buildings on both sides, and the street is packed with pedestrians that seem completely unaware of the fact they are directly in the path of TWO speeding vehicles hell-bent on not losing a game of chicken. Not that we squeezed our eyes shut in terror. Much. However, it turns out that part of getting a driver's license in Rome includes a test where you have to scrape paint off oncoming vehicle's doors to pass, and somehow, we made it to the hotel. The narrow roads were a recurring theme everywhere we rode during the vacation except Capri (which was the same but, instead of a narrow road between buildings, you had a narrow road with hairpin turns between a rock wall on one side and a 2000 vertical foot cliff with a knee-high safety railing made out of paper mache on the other side).
We had a nice dinner when we arrived and a very pleasant surprise; they had nothing but Italian wines, which Kate and I knew nothing about, so I told the waiter to just bring something good. And he brought something local, cheap, and very good, earning himself a big tip. The next day, we walked the streets of Rome, with the Coliseum as the ultimate target.
Multiple pictures of the Coliseum merged together into a panoramic shot
The Roman Empire, as the first really advanced civilization, has left it's mark on our culture today, with the top three contributions being Gladiator movies, the phrase "Et Tu, Brutus?", and Pizza (some people argue that Lasagna should rank before Pizza, but Lasagna was actually created by an Italian immigrant to the United States, although the name is derived from the Italian "Las," or "stupid," and "Agna," or "Americans"). So the Coliseum is one of the must-see attractions in Rome, along with the Pizza places. It's actually pretty impressive, and there were a number of stories the Guide (who we paid in order to skip the long line waiting to get in) told us, all of which we forgot within the prerequisite five minutes. They did talk about why major sections of the Coliseum collapsed, which I thought was a pretty funny story and did stick with me. Apparently, the Romans didn't use mortar in those days because there were frequent earthquakes, and the Coliseum was designed with blocks separated by brass pins as a base. The pins allowed the blocks to shift around and absorb the shaking from any tremors. But somewhere along the line, people forgot about why the pins where there, and it seemed stupid to have all that brass sitting round doing nothing when you could make it into weapons, so they pulled them all out and melted them down, and the walls collapsed a few years later in the next earthquake. Giving us the fourth lasting contribution to modern civilization, idiots who think they know more than Engineers.
In any case, we walked from our hotel to the Coliseum, which was a couple of miles, and saw a lot of excavations of Roman ruins, along with more recent but far from mundane fountains, buildings (like Mussolini's "Tomb of the Unknown Soldier"), and statues.
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 Doesn't look that impressive from the outside... |
 But that's Kate standing in the corner |
 And the organ, which was playing bone-rattling music when we walked in, is 30 feet tall |
 Basilica of St. Peter |
 Michelangelo's Pietà |
St. Peter's Square
The port of Messina, Sicily
The central activity here was our first off-boat excursion, a trip to Lovely Taormina, a small, ancient town embedded in the mountains along the coast of Sicily. This was our first opportunity to learn the major differences between cruise ship tours and cattle cars, mostly that the cattle don't have to pay large sums of money to participate. We had a note on the door to our cabin that told us to join the other members of the tour in the forward theater at 8:45 for the tour, which we did. I went up and provided our tickets, receiving two round stickers with the number "21" on them.
"What's the 21 for?" I asked.
"That's the number of your bus."
"The bus has a number?"
"Your bus has a number... the number 21... like in 1, 2, 3, etc."
"There are twenty one buses going to Taormina?" I gasped.
"No."
I breathed a sigh of relief.
"There are 30. Your bus is middle-of-the-pack-ish."
"That's... that's like 1000 people" I sputtered.
"Give or take a few hundred, ya, from this ship."
"From... this ship?"
"Didn't you notice the other four floating-city-sized cruise ships in dock?"
 One of the other four floating-city-sized cruise ships... if you look in the lower left hand corner, you can see a little compartement that juts off our ship's bridge, so they see the sides of the ship clearly. This view is from our balcony. |
 Kate heads for bus 21 (she's wearing the backpack) |
The ride was actually kind of interesting; this section of Sicily, at least, has very rugged terrain along the coast, with most towns nestled in valleys. A lot of the road was tunnel-bridge-tunnel-bridge-tunnel-bridge for miles.
Taormina was, as a result of 5000 tourists pouring into town at the same time, just packed with people, and it was next to impossible to hear the tour guide or even keep up with her, despite the radio-and-earpiece setup they had for everyone. Which was OK. It was a pretty town, very vertical, making for spectacular side-alleys, with rugged mountains in the background and beautiful seacoast vistas far below. And it's history didn't seem that interesting, anyway. We ditched the tour guide about half way through the tour.
 One of the very-vertical side alleys off the main road. |
 The fantastic seaside vista from Lovely Taormina |
 Kate tries to keep up with the tour guide despite the crowds... the thing in her hands is the radio receiver to hear what the tour guide is saying |
 This church in the center of town is famous for some reason I forget. But the mountains in the background are pretty cool regardless |
And that brings us to the end of part one of European Vacation; we returned to the Equinox and pulled out around 7 pm as the sun was setting, with another cruise ship following us out, a very picturesque ending to a reasonably nice day. In two days, we would be in Athens, and the adventure would continue.
You can move on to part two here.