Cruisin' I- Savona, Italy

*This is a series of posts about our Christmas Cruise to the Mediterranean Sea. If you want to read them all, click on the "Cruise" tag on the right. If you don't care to watch AND read a slide show of "My Family Vacation" feel free to skip these posts. :)*

Last summer I got the idea in my head that I wanted to skip Christmas this year. I wanted to go on a fabulous vacation to Greece and soak up the sunshine and history. The local travel agency website has cruises listed all the time and I found one that was affordable, over Christmas, and had a perfect itinerary. Tunisia, Malta, three Greek cities and Rome. And what was best is as we were talking about it and planning, three other families we are close to over here coincidentally booked the exact same cruise! So it was a no-brainer.

The next step was figuring out how we would get to the port city of Savona, Italy which is a 12 hour drive from Kaiserslautern. Through the Alps. My very first instinct was to drive ourselves, and in hindsight that's what I would have done. My second instinct was to fly but that turned out to be incredibly expensive and a huge hassle, since it would involve hotel stays. The last choice was to take a bus sponsored by the cruise company. It was relatively cheap, we knew we'd get there on time and if we didn't the ship would wait for us or pay for transfer, and it didn't involve us driving through the Alps in December. Great choice, right?

Ahem.

We boarded the bus at 7pm the night before our cruise departed. We had the car seat to install since we paid for a seat for Maggie and I was armed with Vitamin B for Maggie. Also known as liquid Benadryl. DON'T JUDGE ME, SHE HAD A COLD, OKAY????!!! I was worried about her behavior on the bus since she is not used to being strapped in her seat for very long and does not like to sit still. But after our disaster flight back from the US this summer I knew she would definitely need the car seat.

We were seated in front of a family of six, one of whom had the plague or something and spent the first SIX hours of the ride sucking snot back up his/her nose and coughing plague particles on to my seat back. Maggie's carseat smelled faintly of vomit still, and that lovely aroma was mixed with dryer sheets I had shoved in it to help curb the smell. Lovely when mixed with Plague.

Maggie did great. She slept 10 of the 14 hours and the rest of the time watched Shrek on my iPad (this would become instrumental later in the trip) and had snacks. Matt dozed in and out and read and listened to music. The bus was like a flight- we had a bus attendant who came around every once in a while selling drinks and taking breakfast orders. We stopped every few hours, but only for quick stretching and pottying.

This picture may be a bit deceiving because I did not sleep on the bus. Thanks, anxiety!

I was a hot mess on the bus ride. I have been panicking a bit over this trip since we booked it mainly because of the bus ride. You hear about bus crashes all the time, and this bus ride was over night, through the Swiss, Austrian, and Italian Alps, and is a two story bus pulling a luggage trailer which makes it too top-heavy in my mind. We made a lot of stops at the beginning, picking up passengers in two other locations and stopping for potty breaks. This got us to the border of Germany and Austria, and I was pretty okay at this point. I even dozed a little. But when I woke up at midnight or so and looked outside to a foot of snow on the ground and noted how slow the bus was going, there was no more sleep to be had.

I was in a minor panic. I could not sleep because I needed to stay awake, in my mind, to help the driver. I don't know what I was "helping" him with. I guess I felt like if I was awake and something happened I'd be better equipped to act. What would happen? 

Falling off the edge of a mountain.

Spinning out.

Bus tipping over.

Brakes giving out.

Crashing in to something else.

Guess what actually happened? We arrived safely and two hours early to the port and I got no sleep.

Breakfast was served at 6am on the bus and included champagne. Yep, that's champagne at 6am.

Maggie woke up a little bit before we got to the port and as soon as we parked we got her out of the car seat, changed her, and gave her a snack. We had to wait a bit to get off the bus. 

I love these PJs! I got them on sale at Gymboree for $5 last summer

My little Uncle Fester

Getting to the port was effortless. We rolled in around 9am and the ship crew took our luggage directly from the bus on to the ship so we didn't even have to touch it. We couldn't board the ship for another 3 or 4 hours so we took advantage of the warm, sunny day and let Maggie run around on this deck.

 There was a small cafe and a baby play room in the terminal so we played there for a long time and tried to keep cranky, sleepy Maggie awake until we found our stateroom.

The Costa Serena

Getting on the ship was a bit of a hassle, and as we were waiting Costa (the cruise line) representatives were swarming the lobby hawking expensive drink packages and excursions. It was my first clue that the whole trip would be an up-sell to make the cruise line money. We knew this and had budgeted exactly for what we wanted on board, but it was very annoying anyway.

Here are a few notes about the Costa Serena in general:

::It is an Italian line owned by Carnvial.

::Most of the passengers are Italian, followed by French and Spanish, followed by American and German.

::Almost all the crew spoke English at least a little.

::It is a big (3800 passenger), clean ship but the decor is tacky and dated (Styrofoam Greek gods hanging in the atrium)

::Every crew member we encountered was helpful, polite, and seemed to enjoy their job, particularly the room stewards and the maitre'd in the restaurant.

::The rooms were not huge, but no smaller than a typical European hotel room. We found we had plenty of room for a Pack N' Play set up and a play area in the floor for Maggie. And we had a cheap room.

::Nothing is free and expect to pay out the nose for anything you purchase on the ship. This is true for any cruise line, though.

::There is no such thing as a "line" or "queue" for Europeans. Ever. Anywhere. There were constantly crowds pushing and shoving and elbowing, particularly in the buffet restaurant and for the elevators. Seriously, the elevator would be slam full of people and when we'd stop on a floor, people would see the crowd and STILL elbow their way in to the elevator. Not a fun ride.

::Fortunately the ship is pretty large and the only time there are really bad crowds are at the elevators before and after dinner and disembarking the ship in ports, and at peak times at the buffet, such as breakfast and lunch.