The Saturday Morning Post: How to describe the adventure?

 It is a challenge to describe one day short of five weeks of relaxing, and exploring. Let me try a few short paragraphs. 

It all started with a couple of days in Miami. We stayed in a hotel very near the cruise Port.  There was a shopping, entertainment and food complex across the street.  It was pleasant, if crowded and expensive.  Probably the highlight was riding the people mover around the downtown area.  

Boarding the Cruise was a breeze.  I had done all of the pre-registration, we showed our passports, walked on, our room keys were waiting on the door to the cabin.  We had a nice lunch and the ship set sail around dinner time.  

The first week was a 4,000 mile steady cruise across the middle Atlantic.  To avoid storms, the ship took a southerly course, probably a little longer, but the weather was nearly perfect.  We settled into a comfortable routine.  I am an early riser and would go have breakfast and leave the sweet bear to sleep in.  I attended a series of "enrichment lectures" at 10:00 AM each day - the speaker was really good. We would meet for lunch. Then go explore, and settle in for an afternoon nap.  Dinner seating was a 5:30 we would meet in the room about 5:00.  Most evenings we went to the main dining room, a few times we skipped that for the buffet.  We were seated with three other couples, one couple only showed up once.  The other two were there pretty much every night.  An older couple from the midwest, who have a home in Florida, and a young couple from southwest Georgia.  Dinner conversation was pleasant.  

We had two port calls in the Canary Islands. The first sighting of land after more than a week at sea was kind of exciting.  We had nice walking visits to the two islands. Then it was onto Spain.  The ship passed through the Strait of Gibraltar very early in the morning, with about a 50 mile per hour headwind. We slept through it.  

Mitchell was not feeling well, and Sweetie Bear had trouble sleeping, so I explored Malaga and had lunch on my own.  It was a short port call, limiting options.  Having spent a week there 18 months ago, it was easy for me revisiting places I had been.  

Alicante was pleasant.  The ship arrived in Barcelona early in the day, and there was a push to get the passengers off of the ship as early as possible to the cabins could be prepared for boarding that afternoon.  We were in a taxi to the hotel by 9:30. 

Barcelona was enchanting.  Dinner the last evening made the sweet bear violently ill.  

Then it was a train to Carcassonne France. A walled city.  We were there a couple of nights, then onto Nimes by train, were we picked up a rental car. From here it becomes a progression of walled cities, hilltop villages, and a couple of visits to the Mediterranean coast. The end of this was three nights in a nice hotel in Nimes, and a very relaxing visit to a hidden gem in Provence.  We took the train from there to Charles De Gaulle airport in Paris, spent the night. The navigated one of the world most hated airports, flew to London Heathrow (another contender for the most reviled airports on earth) and flew onto Washington Dulles.  

A few bucket list items for me.  

The transAtlantic cruise. 

Riding an Airbus A380 (a great ride.) 

Spending time in the South of France. 

Biggest Surprise? Aigues-Mortes an amazing walled city.