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

The journey back down the steps was not nearly as bad as the climb up. We took our time again, as we were having fun taking so many pictures of the views.

We worked up quite an appetite from our hike! As soon as we were back down we went in search of lunch.

We decided to try a restaurant recommended by Rick Steves called La Pasteria. It was easy to find and an excellent choice. We sat outdoors. My only complaint was that people nearby were smoking. When we asked to change seats to avoid the smokers, I was impressed that the server actually asked the other people to stop smoking.

We ordered pizza, pasta and wine. We agreed the pizza was the best we had on our entire trip! We never expected to find the best pizza in Montenegro. We mentioned that we were going to split the pasta and pizza, but I did not expect them to serve us this way - we each were given a plate with half of the large pizza and our own pasta bowls. The portions were huge, and I was once again impressed with the service!

The pasta dish was good, but we could have done without it. The pizza was much larger than we expected, and better than the pasta.

After lunch we set out to find our daily cappuccino. We found a place with free wi-fi and outdoor seating, so we took advantage of a short break to catch up on news from back home before walking back to our ship.

Once we were back on the ship we met up with a few friends for drinks at the Viking Crown Lounge. We relaxed and watched the beautiful scenery as the sun went down in Montenegro.

The Viking Crown Lounge quickly became our favorite spot for happy hour. It was never crowded and the views were nice.

We ate dinner with a fun group of friends. Our menu:

Many of the appetizers sounded good, so we ordered a few to share. The onion focaccia:

Vegetable samosa:

Cream of cauliflower soup:

For the main course I had the zucchini piccata.

The dessert menu:

At this point I was watching dessert calories a lot more closely, so we split the chocolate sensation.

This ended up being an earlier night for us, but here was the cruise compass with entertainment options:

We came back to our room to find another towel animal. I loved coming back to these!

Our day in Split did not go according to plan. Although Croatia is a beautiful country and we ended up making the most of our day and having a good time anyway, this was probably our least favorite day of our trip. However, since we did not get to see all that we wanted to, we have an excellent excuse to return to Split – and hopefully add a stop to Dubrovnik next time! I don’t want to sound too negative – even being our least favorite touring day, it was still a fun day – it’s hard not to have fun when touring in Europe!

We signed up for a group tour with friends from CC to visit the waterfalls at Krka National Park. This was going to be one of our largest tour groups (I think it was 14 people), and in my opinion, for future trips, I would not go above 8-10 people for a private tour. Also, if you want to see the waterfalls in Krka, this is one stop where I would recommend going with the ship’s tour. We had friends who did the tour with the ship, and they had a great experience.

Our group was about an hour late to meet our tour guide, due in part to confusion in getting everyone through the tender process and into the port. Our tour guide did not let us know that being an hour late would be a problem for our plans at Krka National Park – in hindsight, he should have warned us that we were not going to have time to see the waterfalls. Instead, he let us drive an hour each way, most likely knowing we were not going to get to see the one sight we wanted to see.

It took about an hour to drive to Krka National Park. We did not realize in advance that our tour guide could not drop us off directly at the waterfalls. Instead, he dropped us at a point where we would have to take a ferry to reach the waterfalls. Due to the ferry’s schedule (I believe it ran about once every half hour), if we took the ferry, we would only have about 15 minutes at the waterfalls before we would need to take a ferry back. We would have to pay a fee for both the ferry and entrance to the park to spend less than 15 minutes there.

After a quick discussion with the group, none of us felt it was worth the time and money to spend just 10-15 minutes at the waterfalls. We tracked down our driver (which also took awhile), and asked if we could extend our tour by at least an hour to allow us more time at the waterfalls. They had plans for our tour bus later that afternoon and told us we could not extend our time, even if we paid extra.

Disappointed, but trying to stay positive, our group agreed we would spend an hour in a town called Trogir instead, which was on the way back to Split.

We did get a few pictures at Krka before loading back on the bus.

A few people in our group fed the swans :)

We had about an hour to spend in Trogir. The views by the water were beautiful.

We took a leisurely walk through what appeared to be a main street.

At the end of the street we sat outdoors at a café and ordered our daily cappuccino.

We then made the drive back to Split where we would spend the rest of our afternoon.

We spent the rest of our afternoon walking around Diocletian’s Palace. It was once the retirement home of the emperor Diocletian, but today it is inhabited by the residents of Split. There are many shops, restaurants and souvenir stands.

We bought scarves and earrings from some of the stands for souvenirs. I tried to negotiate on prices but did not have luck.

We also stopped by a tie store called Croata where my husband bought a tie

We ate lunch at a restaurant called Pizzeria Fortuna. We did not have anything in mind for lunch and stumbled across this place, so we thought we would give it a try. It was down an alley and advertised free wi-fi, although we had a difficult time getting wi-fi to work here.

The pizza was good, but it was nothing special, I would do more research on restaurants if we go back to Split.

We also ordered a salad.

After a late lunch we made our way back to the port and took a tender boat back to the ship. We were early getting back, but this gave us plenty of time to get ready for our last Formal night of the cruise.

We met up with friends in the Viking Crown Lounge for drinks before dinner. We ate with our usual group of friends and had fun with our favorite servers, Ingrid and Valentino.

The menu:

I started with the chilled banana and rum soup.

My main dish was the artichoke-filled crepes au gratin.

The dessert menu:

We ordered the lemon meringue pie.

This was our cruise compass for the day:

We walked around with a few friends, taking pictures of us all dressed up on our last formal night. We also played a few games of foosball, which was a lot of fun.

I was not sure what to expect from Slovenia, but it ended up being one of our favorite ports! I would love to live in Slovenia someday. It is a beautiful country and the people were incredibly nice.

We took a tour through Roundabout with our tour guide Jerry (a woman). She was one of our favorite tour guides of our trip. She was very knowledgeable and passionate about her job. She provided a nice balance of leaving us on our own to explore in certain areas and sharing information on the places we visited. We highly recommend Jerry if you are going to take a tour in Slovenia!

Our plan for the day was to hike through Vintgar Gorge, visit the island in the middle of Lake Bled and take a walking tour through Ljubljana. Our tour group included 8 people, which seemed to be the perfect number. We were with three couples we had become close friends with, so we had a fun group.

We enjoyed some beautiful views of Slovenia on our drive to Vingar Gorge.

This is one of the most beautiful places I have visited. The entry was inexpensive and there was a clear path through the gorge, winding around and taking us over wooden bridges. We only had about an hour, so we walked 30 minutes out and then turned around. If we had walked just a little further we would have seen a waterfall at the end of the path. Two people in our group raced off to make sure they had time to see the waterfall (and we got to see it from their pictures!), but the rest of us took our time, stopping frequently for pictures along the path. I could have spent hours here! If we were to do it again, I would have liked at least 1.5 hours to explore the area.

The pictures don’t do justice to this beautiful place, but just to give you an idea, here are a few.

We drove to our next stop, Lake Bled. Our tour guide rode with us on a pletna (wooden boat) to visit the island in the center of the lake. It was a short ride, but a fun experience.

To reach the top of the island you have to climb 99 steps. The church at the top is a popular place for weddings and we were told it is good luck for the groom to carry his bride up the steps – but the bride has to remain quiet! We joked about how often that likely happens. Unfortunately, I couldn’t talk my husband into carrying me up the steps – he reminded me that we were already married.

We had some beautiful views from outside the church.

There was also a café at the top. We ordered a piece of cake and our daily cappuccino and sat outside, enjoying the views.

It wasn’t long before we had to make the trip back down the stairs. On the pletna ride back to our van we saw a wedding party heading toward the island.

Our next stop was Ljubljana!

Our final stop for the day was the capital city of Ljubljana. We took a walking tour of the beautiful city and were struck by how clean it was. This is a city I would love to visit again to spend more time.

We ate a relaxing, family-style meal at a restaurant called Rio Momo.

It was a fixed price with a lot of food and drinks included. They mostly served meat (I did promise meat pictures, right?).

But they were able to accommodate me as a vegetarian. I’m not sure what this was, but it was delicious!

Lunch was finished with a round of schnapps!

I’m pretty sure our tour guide ate free for bringing us to this restaurant, but the food was good and reasonably priced, so we were happy with her choice to bring us there!

Our last night on the ship was bittersweet. We had such a fun time on this trip and made some great friends, who we are still in touch with today (more than a year later)!

The servers and kitchen staff sang to us in the MDR. I’ve included a picture below but you can also

The menu for our last night:

I had the eggplant and Kalamata olive tartare:

I tried the vegetarian sweet and sour “chicken” but I was not crazy about this dish.

So I ordered pasta as well. I hate to waste food, but this is a big plus in dining on a cruise ship. If you don’t like something, you don’t have to eat it.

Our dessert menu:

We had the key lime pie.

After our final dinner we met up with friends for the big aerial show we had been anticipating since earlier in the week.

The aerial show had a “four seasons” theme. It was cheesy, but fun to watch.

The ship staff came out on stage for a final farewell.

After the show we met up with friends for a final drink in the Viking Crown Lounge. It was so fun to recap stories from our trip, but sad to know this would be our last gathering as a group. We went to play a few last games of foosball on the deck before heading to bed.

It was very difficult to say goodbye to our cruise family! It was sad to think our cruise was coming to an end, but we had one more day of our trip to tour Venice.

We disembarked the Legend of the Seas for the final time in Venice. We took an Alilaguna boat to our hotel, Hotel Le Isole. We had a full day of touring planned since we were flying back home the next day.

The Alilaguna boat was easy to find and navigate, and we had a nice scenic ride to our stop.

I got excited when we saw this!

Although finding our stop was easy, finding our hotel was not. We were so turned around, and to add to the frustration, we had all our luggage with us. What was supposed to be less than a 5 minute walk took 15-20 minutes, but somehow we stumbled across our hotel. Our room was ready so we were able to drop off our luggage before setting out again.

Our first stop, of course, was for one last cappuccino. I needed the caffeine!

Our first goal was to find Piazza San Marco. We felt completely lost in Venice, but we enjoyed exploring the city until we found the main square.

We eventually found our way to Piazza San Marco. My first impressions of Venice were not at all what I expected. I thought it would be my favorite city that we visited and had the classic romantic picture in my head. Instead, I found it to be very crowded and was frustrated that it was so difficult to navigate, even with a map. However, by the end of the day, I did fall in love with Venice. I decided I liked it better at night, when most of the cruise crowds had disappeared, and by that point I could find my way around by landmarks. It was too bad we only had one day here.

It was very crowded and there were pidgeons everywhere. We waited in a short line to take an elevator up the bell tower. The tower was also very crowded, but we managed to squeeze between people to take a few pictures.

I heard that the lines for the bell tower were even worse later in the day, so I was glad we went early.

Our next stop was the Rialto Bridge. We got lost several times on our way to the bridge. Signs like this one did not help much:

Really?? Apparently there were multiple ways to get to the bridge, but we still managed to get lost. Luckily, we ran into cruise ship friends on our way to the bridge! It was the same couple who we ran into at the Colosseum in Rome before we were set to meet up the next day to drive to the port in Rome together. We decided that running into each other, like our friendship, was just meant to be, so we planned to spend the rest of the day touring Venice together.

They had already been to the bridge, but since we were close, they were able to lead us there.

The view from the bridge:

After we got our pictures, our friends also took us to a Disney store they had found. We are both big fans of Disney, so they knew I would love the painting on the brick walls of this store.

After the Disney store we decided to look for somewhere to eat lunch. We all agreed we wanted pizza. We had picked out a restaurant we wanted to eat at for dinner, but did not have anywhere in mind for lunch. After a lot of walking around and looking at menus we settled on a place called Da Mamo for lunch and decided we would come back to this restaurant in the evening for dinner:

Each couple ordered a pizza and we shared.

We were all exhausted after lunch. This was a long vacation filled with full day tours and staying up late on the ship. On our nine night cruise we only had one day at sea. We decided we could all use a nap, so we went back to our hotels, agreeing to meet up at Saint Mark’s Basilica in a couple of hours.

Well-rested after our naps, we met back up with our friends in line at the Basilica. The line was long but the wait was not too bad. We took a quick tour of the basilica. Since pictures were not allowed inside, here are a few pictures from outside the basilica.

It was very pretty, but we weren’t really sure what we were looking at. I would have preferred a guided tour, but it was nice to see.

After our tour we searched for a gelato shop we had heard about called Gelato Fantasy. It was some of the best gelato of our trip!

We debated whether or not to take a gondola ride. Looking back, I’m really glad we did. Riding a gondola in Venice is something that is likely on many bucket lists. Since we ran into our friends, we were able to split the cost, which made the decision even easier for us.

We saw a few gondolas with musicians and singers on board. We asked about their prices but they were incredibly expensive. We were attempting to negotiate with a gondolier for just the price of a ride with the four of us when we saw a gondola coming up with a singer. We asked him if we paid his full price, could he follow that gondola so we could be serenaded as well? He agreed if we hurried, so we quickly paid him and jumped in the gondola.

It was so worth it to travel by gondola through the canals, and even more so since we had music to enjoy along the way!

We switched seats mid-ride with our friends so that both couples could have the classic picture with the gondolier in the background. Riding with friends also meant built-in photographers to actually have pictures of ourselves on the gondola!