Trip Report: Athens and a Mediterranean Cruise
Lounge Reviews: The Club CLT and Centurion Lounge Charlotte Airport
Flight Review: Lufthansa A340-600 Charlotte-Munich
Lodging Review: Academias Hotel, Autograph Collection, Athens
Our Time in Athens, Part I (Acropolis and Museum)
Our Time in Athens, Part II (Roman Agora, Hadrian’s Library, Ancient Agora)
Our Time in Athens, Part III (Kerameikos, Temple of Zeus, Panathenaic Stadium)
Our Time in Athens, Part IV (Restaurants and Observations)
Ship Review: Viking Neptune
Our Time in Ancient Olympia (Katakalon, Greece)
Our Time in Corfu, Greece
Our Time in Kotor, Montenegro
Our Time in Dubrovnik, Croatia
Our Time in Zadar, Croatia
Our Time in Venice, Italy
Flight Review: Iberia A330-300 Madrid-Chicago
As is usual on Viking cruises, they try to sell you on another cruise while you’re on the current one, offering special incentives to do so. My friends and I have a system for selecting our international vacations: whoever has a birthday ending in a 5 or 0 gets to pick the destination. That covers six out of every 10 years, so it works for us. 2025 is my choice and I’d had my eye on Viking’s Passage to Eastern Europe river cruise which runs between Budapest, Hungary and Bucharest, Romania. When we checked with the on-board travel consultant we learned that we could book this cruise for just $25 down and it didn’t have to be paid off until six months before the sailing. That was huge for me as normally the cruises have to be paid off in 2-3 months. So we went ahead and booked this cruise for $25 and that gave us 18 months to pay. When we added in our past-traveler discounts and our on-board booking discounts, that took another $600 off the price. Plus we got shipboard credit for our current cruise and additional shipboard credit for the one we’d just booked. Want to join us? Click on the link at the top of the page for more info.
Since we’d had an overnight port of call in Venice on our previous Mediterranean cruise back in 2008, our original plan was to skip the included tour and just wander around ourselves. That was something we’d really enjoyed doing the first time around. But now we had shipboard credit to spend. We could have stuck to the plan and used the credits to cover crew tips and some small purchases but where’s the fun in that? Instead we used it to book The Island and the Abbey tour, which took us to the island of Murano and then to the Church of San Giorgio Maggiore as we’d not visited either of time in our previous time in the area. Continue reading
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