Day 1 Of Cruise - Rome, Italy

The tour was of the Vatican museum, Sistine Chapel, St. Peter's Square & St. Peter's Basilica. The entire tour was scheduled to take around 4 hours. We loaded on the bus then were driven to the line that will allow us to enter the Vatican. The surprising thing was that this line was probably around a mile long. We initially thought that we were going to spend 2 of our 4 hours standing in line waiting to get. However, it was only about 45 minutes before we were entering the Vatican. At the line we also met up with our official tour guide who gave us some wireless headsets that he could broadcast to in order to explain things to us and keep the group together. The picture on the right is the arch above the Vatican entrance, one of the figures is Michelangelo (we cannot remember who the other two are)

The Vatican museums are incredibly packed, at least the day that we went (I think there were about 10 groups from various ships there. It was almost shoulder to shoulder through the entire museum. After going through an initial portion of the we came to a courtyard that had a bunch of presentation stations set up with pictures of the Sistine Chapel in order for the guides to explain the history and the art. We then entered the main portion of the Vatican museum. The picture at the left shows the entrance to the museum and the press of people waiting to get in.

The Vatican museum is just incredible. There is an unbelievable amount of art and history crowded into such a small space. The picture at the left shows an example of one of the hallway ceilings that we passed through on the way to the Sistine Chapel. Lael took many pictures, however flash photography is not allowed in the Vatican museum so many of the pictures didn't turn out (Lael - The shutter times were too long to hold the camera by hand therefore many of the pictures were very blurry). The pictures that did turn out are in the Vatican museum section at the bottom of the page.

After making our way through the Vatican museum, we finally arrived at the Sistine Chapel. The Sistine Chapel was amazing! There is no way to explain what it means to be there. The history, religion, the art that the chapel represents is just hard to believe. The chapel is the one place in the Vatican where you cannot talk or take any pictures. If you want pictures the Vatican does have a book that you can buy. This book is the one that has pictures of the celling since it was cleaned - Lael & I picked up this book.

In case you didn't know The Sistine Chapel is where the Popes are selected. There has only been one pope that wasn't selected there and that was because the area was under occupation. We saw the chimney that displays the white or black smoke letting the rest of the world know if a new pope has been selected.

The next stop was St. Peter's Square on our way to St. Peter's Basilica (a Basilica is a large ornate church). St. Peter's Basilica was named after the first pope, St. Peter. In this Basilica is where all the previous popes are buried. Most of them are buried under the basilica but a few are buried in the common areas. After visiting the basilica we were able to visit one of the gift shops that sells hand-made mosaics and lots of religious artifacts. All the religious artifacts have been blessed by the pope. Christie couldn't leave without buying herself a cross.

Our only issue with this tour was that 2 of the other tour members decided they were done and bowed out before the ending. Therefore, at the end the tour, our guide had to track them down to make sure that they got back on the bus to get to the ship. Luckily, we did get to the ship with a couple of hours before it was scheduled to sail. Actually getting on the ship was nothing like our last cruise. I took all of about 5 minutes once we arrived at the cruise terminal for us to board the ship and make our way to our room

One wonderful thing about cruising is that once we checked in with the ship at the hotel we didn't see our bags again until we got to our room in the boat. They take care of getting your bags to the ship and to your room. After we got on board we learned that there is wireless high speed available on the boat (Christie - apparently Lael actually knew this but never bothered to mention). The only down side to the high speed was that we had to buy minutes.

We also got to have dinner on the ship as well which for the most part the dinners are quite excellent - on par with a decent restaurant in the Portland area. On a cruise, most of the dinner tables are for 6 to 8 people and ours was no exception. On this cruise Lael & I were sitting at an 8 person table with 3 other couples, however the third couple (oddly enough their names were Chris and Lou) almost never sat at our table, but had decided to sit with a different couple. The two couples we did sit with were are a set of parents, their son, and his wife. James & Dorthey (parents) and Ryan & Allison (no idea if the spellings are correct anywhere). James & Dorthey live near Kansas City. Ryan & Allison are living in Moldova.

St. Peter Square

St. Peter Basilica