Legend of the Seas - Rome to Venice 8/31 Review

After our previous experiences with room service breakfast (too cold) and the MDR (too slow), we found the perfect breakfast fit at the Windjammer. We were sold after our morning in Malta and ate breakfast here every day for the rest of our trip.

 

I LOVE your "goldilocks" comparison!

 

For my main dish, I ordered the Vegetable Paella. It was fine, but not my favorite of the main meals.

 

 

 

It may not have tasted that great to you, but it LOOKS beautiful! :D

jrmint, I am eating up your review! Your writing style is wonderful, and you are an excellent guide. I am cruising and touring right along with you!

(Sorry that I am late to reading your review; I was on the Freedom of the Seas when you started! ;))

Google Artemis statue breasts and you'll find that many articles on this state that what the guide said is believed to be the truth.

I had always been taught that they are breasts. (it's my field)

In reading many sources, as you suggested, the references either say:

1. Definitely bull testicles

2. Definitely breasts

3. Both are possible interpretations

:D

I had always been taught that they are breasts. (it's my field)

 

In reading many sources, as you suggested, the references either say:

 

1. Definitely bull testicles

 

2. Definitely breasts

 

3. Both are possible interpretations

 

:D

Our guide did mention that there were various thoughts on what the "eggs" were - but according to her, the bull testicles are now thought to be most likely. I didn't mean to create such a debate on these body parts lol!

jrmint, I am eating up your review! Your writing style is wonderful, and you are an excellent guide. I am cruising and touring right along with you!

 

(Sorry that I am late to reading your review; I was on the Freedom of the Seas when you started! ;))

Thank you so much!

We ate at the Windjammer before meeting up with our tour group for Corfu. We were doing a private tour with a total of 14 people. We met our group just outside the ship and walked together to the port building, a few minute walk.

We met our driver, Spiros, on the other side. We had planned to start with Pelekas, spend an hour in Paleokastritsa, make a photo stop at Lakones, take an hour to climb the Angelokastro Castle, and arrive in Corfu (old town) around 12:45pm. Our day ended up feeling very relaxed, and I quickly realized it was going to be difficult to stick to such a strict schedule with so many people. I was proud of myself for just going with the flow on this excursion!

We began by skipping Pelekas because of time concerns, and our driver said we could come back to it if we had time later. We never made it back. I was okay skipping this town compared to the others on our itinerary.

We started at the monastery in Paleokastritsa.

One of my favorite sights at the monastery was these stray dogs. I know I probably should not have pet them, but they were rubbing against my legs and seemed so loving. They were definitely looking for food and I was sad I didn’t have anything to give them other than some attention.

It was actually pretty crowded because there was a ship tour going through at the same time. We had to weave in and out of the large tour group.

I ducked inside the church quickly, and right back out to avoid the crowds. The courtyard outside was beautiful, with a fountain and grapes.

And especially, this little kitten. So tiny and adorable!

We made our way back to the bus to head down the hill to Paleokastritsa.

I was on Corfu 40 years and I can remember how beautiful the flowers were on the island.

The beach at Paleokastritsa was beautiful. There were many boats waiting to take tourists out to the small caves nearby. We thought we found a boat that would take our entire group, but it held everyone except for one couple. They ended up on a boat that offered shade, and I believe they were charged the same price as we were for their private boat!

The boat ride lasted about 30-45 minutes. We went inside a few different caves, just far enough inside to see the openings, and then we would back out to go to the next one.

I loved the purple coral (I think that’s what it was?) inside many of the caves.

One of my favorites was the “blue eye” – the light reflected nicely here and you could see a ton of fish. These fish were especially happy when our group tossed Fruit Loops into the water.

I also loved the Lion’s Head rock. I never heard if they carved the rock to look like a lion’s head on purpose.

It was a beautiful and relaxing boat ride. I’ll post a few more pictures of the views from our boat next.

More pictures from our boat ride:

After our boat ride, we still had close to 30 minutes of free time in Paleokastritsa. Several people went for a quick swim, and my husband and I went in search of caffeine. There was a cute open-air café next to the beach. It was a beautiful setting.

I had my cappuccino of the day. I noticed the cappuccino was much darker in Greece than it had been in Italy.

I really wished I had brought a bathing suit for this beach. It was so hot out and the water felt perfect.

I settled for a short walk along the water, just getting my feet wet.

I would love to go back to Paleokastritsa.

We took a short bus ride to our next stop, Lakones. It was a quick and beautiful photo stop.

We took a group photo and hopped back on the bus for our next stop.

Our next stop was Angelokastro Castle. It is a castle on top of a hill, and for 2 euro you can climb up and enjoy the views. About half of our group wanted to make the climb, and the other half waited at the bottom.

I loved the olive trees all over Corfu. These were at the bottom of the castle.

The view the entire way up was beautiful.

The climb wasn’t too bad. I was wearing my Merrell sandals and did just fine. These shoes were actually amazing the entire trip. Despite all the walking and climbing, my feet and legs never hurt. I wasn’t in love with the style when I bought them, and thought I would only wear them a few days because they did not match most of my outfits. They were so comfortable I ended up wearing them every day except for Kotor, where I wore my running shoes to do a similar climb.

Back to Corfu and Angelokastro Castle… the view at the top was awesome! I was so glad to have made this climb.

There were some rocks that made a nice backdrop for pictures.

I was a little nervous about taking pictures up here though… there was a very steep cliff right behind us.

There was a cute little church at the top too.

We took a lot of pictures at the top and then headed back down to meet the rest of our group. This was the last stop we had time for, so we headed back to old town Corfu where our driver was going to drop us off.

Along the way, a few people requested to stop and pick figs from trees along the road, so Spiros found a perfect place to stop. He also had some dried figs for us to taste on the drive back.

When we got back into town, our group debated what to do. Despite the fact that we had only paid him for a half day tour, Spiros offered to stay in town for an hour or two so we could get a ride back to port with him. I thought this was a very nice offer and would have loved to take him up on this. But, there were a few people in our group who wanted to head back to the ship without visiting old town Corfu. So those of us staying in town agreed we would make our own way back to the ship, so Spiros could take the others back with him. The ride would have been nice, but I guess this was fair since we had only signed up for a half day tour.

Really enjoying your review, thanks for doing it! This is definitely on my bucket list.

We were dropped off right next to the Old Fortress. The original plan for our afternoon was to eat lunch nearby, visit the Old Fortress, and walk back to the ship. We were running almost an hour behind, and I knew we probably would not have time for lunch and the Old Fortress. Since I had just climbed the Angelokastro Castle and knew we would be climbing a fortress in Kotor the next day, we chose to eat a relaxing lunch instead.

I had printed directions to a restaurant I had read about on Trip Advisor, Porta Remounda. One thing I had not thought about was the fact that Greek uses a different alphabet, and street signs and shop signs did not look exactly like they did in the English directions I printed off. The Google directions worked well enough to take us to an intersection where I thought our restaurant should be, but I did not see any clear signs. I asked a server at a nearby restaurant with outdoor seating if he knew where Porta Remounda was. After staring at my directions page for a few moments, he said, “Oh, that’s here!”

We took a seat at a beautiful outdoor table.

I was surprised there were not more vegetarian options on the menu, and thought about ordering a few appetizers to make a meal. I asked the woman who came to take our order about a few items. She recommended I order the aubergine (eggplant). It was not on the menu, and I am not usually a fan of eggplant, so I said I would order something else. She seemed offended and told me I could order what I wanted, but she really thought I should get the aubergine. So I decided to take her word, and ordered the aubergine.

It turned out to be an excellent suggestion. I loved this dish!

We also ordered the baked feta to share, and it was amazing.

The rest of my tablemates ordered fish. I was a little disappointed there was not more food I could eat, but the food I had was great. It turned out to be a very expensive meal, more than 100 euro for the four of us. A very expensive meal for me, with just two appetizers and one glass of wine!

After a long and relaxing lunch, we wandered in search of baklava for dessert. I did not find my baklava, but we found gelato and this made me happy. It was a place called Muka Muka. I had the Rubirock, which was a chocolate/hazelnut mix.

It was very good gelato!

We took our gelato and wandered around Corfu just a bit. I wished we had more time to explore Corfu old town.

We stopped by the outside of the Old Fortress. We had just a little over an hour until we had to be back on the ship. We were told it was only a 20-30 minute walk from the Old Fortress, and we debated going up, but we decided we did not want to pay to enter for just 30 minutes, and figured we should leave ourselves just a little extra time to find our way back to the ship. This was one of the best decisions of our trip, because it took us more than 45 minutes to walk back to the ship!

It was incredibly hot this day. I had put sunblock on in the morning and we stopped to reapply during our walk. We were not happy when we realized how long of a walk we really had, but at least we had beautiful views of the water along the way.

We could see our ship in the distance. It did not look that far away, but we had to wind around to get to it.

We were so excited when we finally spotted the pink port building! We could have walked from the port building to the ship, but I could tell I was already sunburned, and we decided to take the bus from the port building to our ship.

I have been enjoying this review but am new to Cruise Critic, where do I find the rest of this review?

:confused:

I apologize for the LONG delay in finishing this trip review. It's been more than a year since I took this trip now but I would like to finish! Thank you to all those who have been reading along this far.

Our dinner menu in Corfu:

I started with the English Cheddar Cheese Sticks, served with a side of lingonberry relish. I love a good cheese stick!

I also had the Chilled Cherry Bisque. Another delicious smoothie-like soup.

My main meal was a potato pie, which was wonderful. I wish they had some of these dishes more than just one night.

They also had Singapore Noodles this evening. Apparently these were a favorite of one of our tablemates. When he ordered, he skipped the appetizers and said he would just have three dishes of the Singapore Noodles. Our server thought he was joking at first, but sure enough, he ate three dishes!

I don’t think they quite compared to the Singapore Noodles he had on a previous ship, but they must have been good.

The dessert menu:

I decided to try the Warm Pecan Butterscotch Tart. I think I just nibbled at this one too. By this point on the trip I was getting pickier about my calories, so if dessert wasn’t fantastic, I didn’t finish it off.

The Cruise Compass for the day:

The entertainment for the evening was Neil Austin. It was advertised as a “comedy magic show” and I was so excited to finally see a magician on the ship. It was a very good show, just not what I had expected from the description. It was much more comedy than magic. The magician would do magic tricks, but more to make the audience laugh, and frequently let us in on how he did the tricks, which is why I would call it less magic and more comedy. It was a great show for kids, and one of our favorites of the trip.

After the show, we found some friends in the Centrum and realized they were getting ready to do an aerial show. It was not listed on the Cruise Compass and we were warned it would only last three minutes. It was a teaser for the aerial show we would see on the last night. We enjoyed the short show!

Many people had suggested that we wake up early for sailing into Kotor. The cruise ship passed through 17 miles of mountains. We were expected to arrive in Kotor at 8:00am, so I set my alarm for 6:30am. I quickly got dressed and headed up to the top deck to take pictures. There was a nice little crowd at the front of the ship. I walked around the top track a couple of times, taking pictures along the way. There were very few people on back of the ship, except for a couple of people walking and running along the track, and it was nice to have some quiet time alone with these views.

After I had my pictures, I headed back down to our room to finish getting ready for the day.

Kotor was my first experience with tendering. The cruise director described the process the night before after the evening entertainment in the main theater. He told us that we would need to pick up tender tickets in the centrum in the morning. These tickets would have numbers, and you should wait upstairs in a central area until your number is called. Then you could go down to the dock to get on the boat. He warned that you should not get a number until after you had eaten breakfast and were actually ready to get off the ship. He made it sound like there would not be a long wait.

Once again, I insisted we follow the rules. I wished we had not in this situation. We went to get breakfast in the Windjammer and ran into a few friends who told us to go as soon as possible to get our tender tickets. My husband ran down to pick them up. It’s a good thing he did – we ended up with number 9!

We were planning to climb the fortress in Kotor with a few of our roll call friends, and they had number 7 tickets. We were hanging out near the line for the dock, despite the ship’s request that we go upstairs, and after a few minutes, they started calling out to those of us who had later tickets, telling us we could get on the tender that was there. Although they were strict on numbers, they also attempted to fill each tender boat, so we were able to get on early.

The tender boats pulled right up to the boat. I was a little nervous getting on and off, but they had crew members on each side offering hands to help.

I was nervous about the boat rocking too much and causing me to feel sea sick. It was not terrible, but I was glad it was only about a 5 minute ride to the port in Kotor. We had some beautiful views from our tender boat.

Based on our experience, we planned to get tender tickets much earlier the next day for our tender in Split!

We took some pictures by the port before making our way through the small town of Kotor. This ended up being one of my favorite pictures from our trip:

We did not have a good map, but had a general sense of the direction we were headed. Our first, and really only, goal for the day was to climb the 1,350 steps up to Saint John’s Fortress. Well, that was my goal. My husband thought he might go up the first 100 steps or so and then hang out and wait for me to come back down.

We passed some beautiful scenery.

The town was very cute, with narrow alleys and many restaurants with outdoor seating.

It did not take us very long to reach the very first stairs of our climb!

It was a warm day already and we were glad we brought water with us. The rest of our party wanted to race to the top and just take pictures on the way down, so we decided to let them go ahead without us. We took our time with the climb, stopping frequently to take pictures or rest in the rare shaded areas we could find.

The houses look close here but soon they looked much smaller!

Some of the steps were not bad but we had to be very careful in watching where we walked. Some parts of the climb were steeper than others.

People would offer encouragement as we passed along the way. It was so fun to watch as the houses below us became smaller and our ship looked further away.

As we got closer to the top we saw several signs warning of increased risks.

We also had to cross a thin bridge with a long drop beneath it. I almost refused to cross it! But we were so close at that point and I wanted my victory picture.

We made it to the top!

After a grueling climb in the heat we were exhausted, but we were very proud of our accomplishment. The views from the top made the climb worth the effort. We spent some time celebrating, enjoying the views and taking pictures.

A young guy from Germany offered to stay at the very top with our camera to take pictures of us standing by the flag one level below. I hesitated a bit – should I hand our DSLR camera to a stranger and leave him on his own? If he tried to run off with it, would we be able to catch him? Against my better judgment, I handed over our camera and we made our way down.

Thankfully, he took several pictures of us that we otherwise would not have been able to have gotten, and then met up with us to hand the camera back. He was such a nice guy!