So many ports, so little time...

Mallorca, Spain—April 20, Easter Sunday
Barcelona—April 21
Valencia—April 22
Alicante—April 23


Still on the high seas, pictures later!

OMG, I may have found my new favorite place to visit! Well, Australia is still my FAVORITE-favorite, but Mallorca is certainly a place I would go back to! It is the jet-setters go-to place, it has all the charm and beauty of the Amalfi coast in Italy and probably less expensive, I know more Spanish than I do Italian, and it’s easy to get to. At least it’s easy to get to from Europe!

We used Mallorcaprivateguides.com as they were highly rated on tripadvisor.com (any time you go anywhere, TripAdvisor is a GREAT website for advice and reviews of almost anything a tourist might want to do from finding a rental company (cars, apartments, or houseboats), a tour guide, a restaurant, or a hotel—or almost anything else! We absolutely hit it out of the park with Alex, our Mallorca tour guide. She was prompt, speaks superb English (and four other languages as well), is personsonable and friendly, knows everything worth knowing about Mallorca, and is just an all-round nice person. We were with her from 8am to 4:15pm for a cost of 34€.

We visited the Cathedral, a HUGE church in the center of town and happened to be there when there was a service and after, a processional that only happens once a year, on Easter Sunday: The priests and some parishioners carry a large statue of Jesus and a large statue of Mary from their normal locations at the side of the church to the front to “meet” as they would in heaven. The cathedral was packed! People started arriving at 8 am to get seats at the front—not for the processional, that was just a side benefit, but so they could see the King and Queen who were to arrive for the Mass at noon. We left and so only got to see the outside of their limos as they sped by us. The police presence was amazing! And we were told there were lots of plainclothes cops in addition both inside the church and out.

We then had a few adventures on the road in our van—well, a bus really, not Greyhound size but still pretty big and the roads are made for tiny cars not busses! Valdemossa is a small town in the mountains whose main claim to fame is that it is where Chopin and George Sand lived together in a monastery(!). It wasn’t actually a monastery any more when they got there but it was the only place that would rent them a room since they weren’t married. Alex took us all around and not only gave us all the history of the place and of Chopin and Sand’s romance but managed to get them to delay the Chopin concert so we could see their rooms and hear the piano recital (which was quite good).

The town is picturesque and we had a beer and wandered a bit before heading off on a meandering trip back to the ship. Including a driveway where Alex had to get out to direct JuanCarlos (the driver) because he literally had about one inch on each side of the bus between the badly parked cars! He was a wonderful driver, navigating the narrow, winding roads without scaring us too much! We all worried about getting back to the ship (that’s the biggest difference between and Holland America tour and a privately arranged tour: the ship will either wait for us or manage our transfer to the next stop if the ship’s tour is late; if a private tour is late getting back to the ship, too bad!) but Alex was true to her word, we got back in time after a wonderful day.

The following day was not so great. I had a tour planned to Monserrat, outside Barcelona but one of the couples said they couldn’t find us and left after waiting five minutes. We had to pay for that couple, 140€. I wrote to them, telling them that we had waited for 45 minutes and asking for the money but he came up to us a breakfast and told us they wouldn’t pay. A fitting end to a miserable day: it was rainy, foggy, cold. A beautiful drive (we were told) and we couldn’t see a thing beyond about 100 yards! And they closed the monastery chapel a minute before we arrived, and the chapel with the Black Madonna was closed until after we left.

A high point, however, was a tour of a very small winery that makes Cava (the Spanish sparkling wine), the Artcava Winery (www.artcava.com). We have visited probably dozens of wineries but never a sparkling wine winery so it was quite interesting to see the process and Eric, the quite young owner, went through the whole process, everything from rotating thousands of bottles at once to freezing the neck to enable removal of the yeast plug through corking and putting on the labels. Very different than the process for making still wine. We are very glad we went there although we can’t get his Cava in the US.

We then had a couple of days when we had not arranged any tours at all in Valencia and in Alicante.

Valencia is a beautiful, beautiful city that Randy and I both agree that we’d love to come back and spend more time in. It has a wonderful blend of old, old architecture and stunningly modern architecture spread around homes and businesses. We used the HOHO bus (Hop On, Hop Off), known as the Bus Turistic, to get an overview of the city. It starts in the Plaza Reina one of the beautiful places in the city; we could have stayed for hours just looking at the sculptures and buildings and parks within a few blocks of the Plaza Reina but we wanted to see the city so we hopped on and stayed for the entire one and a half hour tour.

One of the amazing things we learned on the tour is that Valencia used to have devastating floods, so they rerouted the river! Now the old riverbed is a wide, green park with public art, stunning bridges and buildings, and lots of activities going on.

Holland America really tries to get the very last penny—well, it’s more like the very last dollar—out of its “guests.” One example is that the shuttle bus to the Plaza Reina costs 10€ p/p round trip. We took the city bus for 1.5€. Another example is a recent change (that wasn’t communicated to its “guests”: we used to be able to bring a bottle of wine per person on board for consumption in your room. As of January (four months ago) they changed that to allow you to bring a bottle of wine but they were going to charge a “corkage fee” of $18 per bottle! Several people who booked BEFORE the change in policy brought wine with them and were quite surprised to be charged that $18 per bottle. Especially the guy who brought a couple of bottles of wine that didn’t cost more than about $6.

Alicante today (April 23). We hung out on our deck for a long time watching the scullers (don’t know if that’s the right word!) practice and seeing one group of four almost get run over from behind by a sailboat running under power. The scullers had no warning as they had their backs to the sailboat. Why the sailboat didn’t veer off earlier than they did, who knows?

Didn’t do much other than go into town to the Castillo de Santa Barbara, a beautiful castle from long ago (translation: I haven’t a clue how old it is but I think it’s pretty old) high on the mountain that is right in the middle of town. You can walk up to the top (about 1000 feet) or you can walk about ¼ mile into the mountain in a tunnel and take an elevator to the top. What a civilized way to get there! Not to mention the engineering marvel the tunnel and elevator are! And senior citizens (over 65) are free. The younger folk are only 1.5€ so it’s pretty inexpensive to visit.

Then the obligatory cerveza on the Esplanada de España and lunch at an outdoor café on a lovely side street. And home again.