Split & Corfu

Here she is! Our floating resort, the Norwegian Gem. You can't tell from this angle but she had super tacky "gems" painted along the sides near the bow- so American. Our cabin was long the port side around the middle.

Our first stop was Split, Croatia. The ship uses their lifeboats as ferries to bring people back and forth from the docks, which I thought was pretty creative. Diocletian's Palace is the main attraction in Split, besides the beach. We walked into the old city and randomly found a tour guide that was about to begin, so we hopped into her walking tour to see the Palace and hear about its history. After the tour, we made our way over to a beach where we cooled off before heading back to the ship. Beaches in Croatia are supposed to be fabulous, and while the one we went to was nice, clean, and family friendly (other than an anorexic looking woman doing topless pushups...) , we would have liked to have enough time to venture to some out of the way beaches.

This is the view of Split from our cabin balcony. The main dock area of the port is off to the right, while the Palace area is behind the more modern looking buildings.

The next stop on our itinerary was Corfu. This was the one place that we chose to do an excursion through the cruise. We took a bus about 45 minutes to a farm to horseback ride through the countryside. It was great to get away from the main tourist areas and see what the more rural parts looked like. We rode through olive groves, along a rocky beach, and through more olive groves.

After sufficiently bruising our bums, we returned the horses and took the bus to a beach for some relaxing before returning to the ship. Above is Cameron swimming- the water was still pretty chilly and it was a windy afternoon so he was on his own.

Here is a jetty that formed a cove for some fishing/leisure boats, and below are the boats and the shore (the beach was on the other side of the jetty to the right).

Every single night we had a sunset better than the night before!