Cruise Ship: Carnival Liberty
Cruise Destination: Mediterranean Cruise Embarking from Rome - Part 2
Cruise Date: August 25, 2005
Guest Contributor: John and Pat Hunt
jhuntgolf@earthlink.net
Part 1 of John & Pat's Carnival Liberty Mediterranean Cruise Review
Ninth Day-Carnival Liberty Day at Sea
Once again, it was great to have a sunny and relaxing day at sea. Today was the first day I heard some complaints from members in our group. The first dealt with the Internet Café. There were far too few computer terminals for the number of passengers on the ship wanting to use the Internet to check or send e-mail. The second dealt with the fitness facility. On this day, there were quite a few pieces of equipment out of order. For a ship beginning just its fourth sailing, this appeared to be highly unusual. One member of the group was upset with this situation, especially when told that the representative of the equipment manufacturer would have to come on board to fix the equipment. The Carnival employee didn't know when this would take place. To compound this problem, it appeared that the Carnival dancers were being given priority to use the equipment over the paying Carnival passengers. Another member of our group that used the fitness facility later in the day, and he said that there were just a couple pieces of equipment out of order at that time. As the cruise worn on, I didn't hear much more in terms of complaints about the fitness facility.
I had to do another load of white clothes and colored clothes this afternoon. One of the women in our group got lucky and won $150 dollars at bingo this afternoon. Later in the cruise this same woman won nearly $400 in a poker game. She was pretty lucky!!! Another woman in our group won a raffle for a piece of art work at this afternoon's art auction. Turned out later that when she went to pick up the art work, it was a piece she already had. Somehow, I didn't picture my doing laundry this afternoon as winning anything!!!!
Tonight's show was Jac Rene, a hypnotist. The show was excellent. If fact, I was one of the participants in the show. I was told that I was the big hit of the show. I paraded about the stage doing my best imitation of a muscle builder showing off his muscles, a ballerina in a white "tutu," and a runway model. The hypnotist even had me dance with him and pinch his read end. There were lots of laughs and lots of pictures. It was a fun evening.
Tenth Day-Messina, Italy
It was a sunny day again. I had previously arranged via e-mail with Salvatore Lucibello to have a private tour of Taormina and Mt. Etna. Our guide, Gaetano, and driver, Sebastian, picked us up at 8:00am at the pier. We headed off for Taormina first. We spent some time walking through the city, taking pictures and walking into one of the churches. We ended up at the Greek Theatre (entrance was 6 euros per person). The views were just spectacular from the seats of the theatre looking at the stage and to the sea beyond. We were told that Elton John and Diana Ross had just had a concert here about a week ago. We had lunch at a small café in Taormina. We then headed for Mt. Etna. It was a long ride, and it started to rain the closer we got to Mt. Etna. When we got out of the bus, it was very cool because we were about 6,000 feet above sea level. It had started raining a little harder at that point. We just took a few photos before heading into a restaurant. I also did pick up a couple lava rocks to give to my daughter who teaches 2nd grade. I thought her students might find it interesting, when they have a lesson on volcanoes, to see and touch some real lava rocks from an active volcano in Sicily. We were all disappointed with the adverse weather and would have liked to have been able to spend more time at Mt. Etna. As it turned out, this was the only rain we had during our entire stay in Europe so there wasn't much we could complain about at all. It took about an hour to get back to the ship, and we arrived at about 4:05pm. The cost for the 16 passengers was 1,000 euros, or 62.5 euros per person. We set sail for Barcelona at 5:20pm. The Captain sailed by the island of Strombolli at about 7:45pm. Strombolli has an active volcano, and you can see steam/smoke rising from it. We took pictures, and it reminded me of the island in the original "King Kong" movie. All you needed was just a little fog and a huge ape. One of the members in our group actually saw what I would call a "volcano burp." He said there was a puff of smoke and you could see some fire balls go up in the air.
Tonight was the guest talent show. It was what I view as the typical guest talent show with the talent being so so. After the talent show, John Heald did a very good audience participation show. The audience really liked the show.
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