For those of you who haven’t been following us on Facebook, my wife Jane and I had a marvelous 4 days in Greece before beginning the main part of our journey.
October 2 marks our 25th wedding anniversary, and we have been planning a special trip for a long, long time. We booked Viking’s “Voyage of Marco Polo” on April 14, 2017 and have been counting the days ever since.
We took Viking’s Rhine River cruise seven years ago. We appreciated that Viking promotes these cruises as exploration, cultural, and learning journeys, rather than having its ships be floating casinos. When we started thinking about a silver anniversary cruise, we compared our bucket list of places to visit, and Viking’s itinerary looked too good to pass up.
We began our trip on August 15, 2018 when we arrived for a 4-day extension based in Athens. By the time we make it back home on September 27, we will have visited:
- Greece:
- Athens
- Mycenae
- Epidauros
- The islands of Ydra, Poros, and Egina
- Delphi
Israel:
- Haifa
- Tel Aviv
- Caesaria
- Jerusalem
- Bethlehem
Egypt:
- Cairo
- Luxor
- The Suez Canal
- Sharm el-Sheikh
- A snorkeling excursion in the Red Sea
Jordan:
- Aqaba
- Petra
Oman:
- Salalah
- Muscat
India:
- Mumbai
- Goa
Sri Lanka:
- Colombo
Malaysia:
- George Town
- Penang
- Kuala Lumpur
Singapore Thailand:
- Koh Samui
- Bangkok
Cambodia:
- Siem Reap
- Angkor Wat
Our ship is Viking’s newest ocean-going vessel, the Orion. When we booked the voyage, it was called the Spirit. Astronaut Anna Fisher is the godmother of the ship, and she christened it Orion. Jane and I had dinner with Dr. Fisher at Spacefest in July, and she told us that the ship had a planetarium! No one will believe me when I tell them that I didn’t know that the Orion is space-themed ship. There’s even a Resident Astronomer, John Maclean, on the ship’s staff.
When we boarded the ship yesterday in the port of Piraeus, Greece, of course my first stop after dropping the bags in the room was to find the Explorer’s Lounge, at the forward end of Decks 7 and 8. Our room is 8011, and it’s a shorter walk from our room to the planetarium than it is from my bedroom to the TV room at home!
The Explorer’s Lounge is fantastic, and I can tell it’s going to be where I’m going to be spending much of my time on the ship. The windows offer a panoramic view of the sea in front of us, and there is an extensive library of books on exploration, astronomy, and space travel.
I’ll post more photos of the rest of the ship as our voyage progresses. It’s a beautiful vessel. There are about 900 passengers and 480 crew on board. It’s big enough that you can find a quiet place to get away from other people if you want to, and small enough that you don’t feel like you’re in a floating city as with the mega-cruiseliners.
(As I wrote that, Cha-Cha lessons started up in the Deck 7 part of the lounge and I had to relocate to quieter surroundings!)
We’re off on a visit to Jerusalem and Bethlehem on Wednesday. On our next sea day in a few days, I’ll recap the Greece part of the journey.
In the meantime, לְהִתְרָאוֹת (bye)!