Tuesday 3rd October 2017 Corfu, Greece Excursion: "The Best of Corfu" Forecast: Clear skies, Max 23° We arrived in port early, 7:30am (having turned our clocks forward one hour before retiring in line with Greece DLS). Our guide was Anastasia, a beautiful Greek woman in her early 30's. She welcomed us as we settled in our seats on the coach, Phil and I endeavoured to get as close to the front of the coach as possible. This time we did have on our wrist-ban...

Monday 2 October 2017 Dubrovnik, Croatia Excursion: "Charming Cavtat & Dubrovnik" Forecast: Perfect, cloudless skies Max: 24° This morning we were awake around 7am, and from our balcony we watched QV sail into the new port of Dubrovnik. We were to leave at 9:45am for our day tour the "Charming Cavtat and Dubrovnik". That meant we had time for a leisurely breakfast. We were asked to gather in Queen Ball Room 9:45am and it seems all those goi...

Saturday 30 Sept 2017 The water taxi booked to take us to the Cunard terminal couldn't dock at our hotel door due to the high tide. The cabin of the taxi wouldn't clear the bridge so our helpful porter took charge of the luggage and manoeuvred us through 11:30am tourist traffic over the offending bridge to a large public dock. All ended well! The trip across the Grand Canal to the large terminus took about 35 minutes, through exhilarating water chop, I was very...

Wed 27 September 2017 We arrived in Venice by VFT (very fast train), speeds up to 250kph at about 2.30pm. Lovely trip. The country side looked so much like Umbria or Tuscany, lovely green fields, occasional vineyards, old stately homes, old, not so stately, farm homes. The train only stopped at four-five stations, Florence being one where two young Kiwi's joined our compartment of four. On arrival we caught water taxi which delivered us right to the small dock...

Cathay Pacific, Business Class, proved an excellent choice. If we were to compare Emirates v Cathay Pacific, I would say, the in-flight bathroom did not provide quite the level of facilities of Emirates. eg no face washers were provided. The lounges pre-flight were both good. Cathay shared Qantas lounge out of Sydney, whilst Emirates have their own. The conversion of seat to bed I found easier on CP but overall, our choice was really based on me not wanting to st...