We docked early in Kusadasi which is one of the western most cities/ports in Turkey. We were rather surprised to learn that Turkey has a population of 72 million (I don't know why we were surprised - it just doesn't seem that big or maybe we were just ignorant). The attraction for us here was the site of Ephesus which is an ancient Greco-Roman town which was abandoned in the 6th century AD and which has only been rediscovered relatively recently (about 100 years ...

After an early morning pickup by Mr young Greek taxi driver we were off to the port of Piraeus which is about 25 minutes from the centre of Athens. We boarded efficiently with the compulsory welcome photo, and settled in. The ship didn't seem to be crowded and we learnt that there were only 700 odd passengers on a ship which could host 1460. This would make for a very pleasant cruise. As this was going to be our final relax before heading home we were determined ...

A seamless trip on the train to Rome's Fumiciano airport and we were off on our 2 hr flight to Athens for one night prior to our Greek Island cruise. We even had pre-arranged transport to our hotel as part of our cruise package and Mr young Greek taxi driver was a little speedy guy who had difficulty staying in the correct lane. Nevertheless he got us to our hotel safely. The airport was updated/built for the 2004 Olympics and it was shiny and new and the road i...

Ciao Senores et Senoras! We now consider ourselves multilingual (tongue in cheek here) as we now know how to say 1-2-3, hello, goodbye, please, thank you, ticket, exit, excuse me, mr, mrs and miss in 4 languages - soon to be 5. We've had to check ourselves on occasions when we're saying 'Bonjour' when in fact we should be saying 'Biongiorno'. However we haven't embarrassed ourselves too often. Well, beautiful Roma - what can you say? We said arrivederci to our Ku...

We set off this morning and travelled along the French and Italian Rivieras from Nice to Pisa, going through over 150 tunnels in the process. In places the scenery, both inland to the mountains and along the coast, is spectacular. Not long after leaving Nice we visited the Fragonard Perfumery where scents are manufactured for companies across the world. We were both quite interested in how they extract fragrances from natural products, from all around the world i...