Apologies to anyone who has been bothering to stop by on this site over the last week or so, my blogging seems to have drifted off rather in the second half of the holiday. To pick up where we left off, Rome was hot, again, and Nicky and I both lobbed a coin in the fountain so we should be back there sometime soon. We went on the open top bus tour after lunch and having been told by our tour guide that there are 13 obelisks in Rome we managed to bag photos of 6 of them. Jake, Nanny and Grandad enjoyed their tour of the Coliseum, although again struggled a little with the heat - understandable given that we saw a time and temperature display just after lunch recording 42 degrees Celsius. We bought a clock from a shop in one of the lanes inbetween the Pantheon and the Trevi Fountain. Appropriately enough it has Roman numerals around the face, although surprisingly it has IV rather than IIII - maybe it's a British Roman numeral thing to use IIII and not a Roman Roman numeral thing?
After Rome came Sardinia. John managed to walk into town and have a little explore, but the rest of us didn't get very far and enjoyed lazing around on board after three full days of touring (Monte Carlo followed by Pisa/Florence followed by Rome). The day after was another sea day, so more sunbathing, sporting challenges (mostly table tennis with a little bit of shuffleboard thrown in) and reading - during this holiday I polished off Numberland and Dave Gorman's Unchained America, both taken with me, along with three books from the ship's library - a John Humphreys moan about the English language, and the two most recent books from Kathy Reichs - move over Scarpetta, Tempe Brennan is the new grave-digger in town!
On Tuesday we arrived in Cadiz. Jake stayed on board, but the rest of us enjoyed a pleasant stroll around the historic town, and on Wednesday we were back to Lisbon. John, Nicky and I took a (scary) taxi up to the top of town to the main shopping centre and then walked back down from there to the old town. Last time we went to Lisbon we were really impressed, but this time not so much. Difficult to pinpoint exactly why, but just didn't come across as well as last time.
Thursday was Vigo. Not much to say about the town - I don't think there is any particularly good reason for stopping there other than providing a staging point before the return leg across the Bay of Biscay (which was a bit friskier than on the way out but still not too bad). Our last day at sea was taken up with a final trip to Johnny Rocket's, chilling out, packing, our last dinner and farewell to our waiters Fidel and Marco, and a final trip to the casino, which was the liveliest we'd seen it. I tried really hard to hand over my final $50 but the croupiers kept giving my chips back to me, so after an hour or so, I cashed in with exactly the same amount as when I'd started.
As for the ship itself, Independence of the Seas is huge. This gives rise to two very noticeable points. Firstly, there are loads of facilities and all of a pretty high standard. Secondly, there are many thousands of people on board, and at times the numbers can be a little overwhelming, especially when it came to organising excursions, dining in the self service restaurant, or participating in a number of other activities. Also our overall impression was that Royal Caribbean seem to have decided with their ships that they want to cater to a new type of customer, who perhaps wouldn't previously have thought of cruising as the right holiday for them. A few years ago, I would probably have described us like that, but now I think that we are more suited to a more "traditional" approach to cruising, and whilst we will certainly be going on more cruise holidays, we may look at some different cruise lines next time around (as well, obviously, as looking forward to a Disney cruise - hopefully in the not too distant future!).
As always, one of the tasks for the last day of our cruise was selecting which photos to purchase from the many taken by the cruise photographers during the fortnight. Eventually we managed to get the selected set down to seven, and I've just been scanning them in to the Mac. Here we are enjoying the last formal night on board.
