Cruise The World With Us

After sleeping in a bit our day began with a great breakfast buffet at the hotel. One unique item was a full honeycomb from which you could scoop honey. We then walked toward the commercial fishing area West of our hotel. On the way Kelsey spotted a car that caught her eye but we don’t have room left in our luggage so that won’t be coming home with us. Upon arrival at the docks we saw a fish market that included fresh eel. Didn’t get a photo of that. We waited for then boarded bus 60 for a ride to Notre Dame de la Garde basilica which is on a peak West of the docks. From the basilica grounds we had great views of the Marseille area (like the one above including Islet de It of Count of Monte Cristo fame). We viewed the interior of the basilica built in 1853. One of the exterior walls showed damage from shelling during 1944 as Allied forces fought to take back Marseille. After returning to the docks on the bus we walked to the hotel and prepared for dinner. We were planning to eat at the same restaurant we visited last night but after walking to it we found it was closed. The lady at the front desk explained that many restaurants are closed on Sunday in the “off season”. She suggested an Italian restaurant named Splendid, called and made a reservation for us at 6:45 which gave us 45 minutes to get there. She also suggested we take the tram that has a stop outside the hotel. We bought our tickets, boarded the tram and missed our stop. We rode the tram to the end of the line then waited for it to travel the route in reverse. At the stop where we were to have exited (Sadi Carnot) we did exit this time. We arrived at Splendid a few minutes late and fortunately it is their policy to hold reservations for 15 minutes – so we were shown to a table upon arrival. We were expecting menu choices like you might find at Olive Garden – wrong! Here is a link to show you what we had to choose from. From the time we placed our order to the delivery of the food seemed to be under 10 minutes. Jan and I ordered a Mammargherita pizza not knowing what size to expect. You can see from the photos they were fairly large – but also fairly thin. They tasted great and Kelsey finished what we did not. Kelsey had linguine with cheese and pepper. She liked her dish as well. After our plates were emptied we headed for the hotel on foot. Tomorrow we check out by noon and the cruise officially begins! If you’d like to see today’s photos, click here. We haven’t figured out how to put text on our photos yet so you’ll see titles for each of the 24 photos at the top of the listing.