HERE AND THERE

After our grey day in Valletta, our day in Kefalonia has been bright blue! Yamas! We are so excited to be back on a Greek island, and a new one (to us) at that. When we visited the Greek islands in September 2023, we were in the Aegean Sea east of the Greek mainland. Now we are in the Ionian Sea, on the west coast of Greece, closer to Italy than Turkiye. Kefalonia is one of the seven (or nine, no one seems sure) Ionian islands. Corfu is one of them. Gerald Durrell's books abo

We had to skip the port of La Goulette, Tunisia, because of the heavy fog that settled over the water ALL DAY. All we saw was blue and white. The Tunisian port officials require 2 km visibility for ships entering the channel: the fog allowed less than 1 km. So no Tunisia. Boo. We sailed east and docked in Valletta, Malta. We're on the main island Malta; the other main islands are Gozo and Comino, which we didn't see. Malta is a very small country, just over 300 square km. Alm

We're still in Italy, on the island of Sicily. We've disembarked in the port of Trapani, pronounced Trah-puh-ni, not Truh-pah-ni, as I'd been saying until now. Trapani sits on the western tip of Sicily, about 100 km west of Palermo and about 1000 km south of Rome. Legend says that Trapani was formed when Demeter dropped her sickle while looking for her kidnapped daughter Persephone. The sickle fell into the sea, creating a city in its crescent. Why, you ask, was the Greek god

We depart from Rome on our cruise and our first stop is the Amalfi coast. Here we are at anchor, on the ship, having breakfast with the town of Amalfi in front of us. (You can hear the clink and clank of breakfast utensils.) The Amalfi coast is south of Rome and south of Naples, the regional capital of Campania. The Sorrentine peninsula juts out into the sea for about 10 km, and small towns and villages lie along the very picturesque, very very steep coastline. Technically (a