Celebrity Silhouette: Oh the Places You Will Go!

If Celebrity Cruise lines ever needed a new slogan, they could turn to the Cat in the Hat’s, “Oh the Places You Will Go!” and pretty much nail it.

We have started phase two of our Italian Adventure aboard the Silhouette, a ship still in its inaugural season. It capacity is 2,886 guests, its cruising speed 24 knots, for those of you into statistics.


We boarded the ship in Rome’s cruise port,Civitavecchia, on Thursday – a beautiful, sunny  morning as evidenced by the photo above.  We sat on this deck enjoying a leisurely lunch and sipping a glass of welcome champagne while awaiting the announcement that our rooms were ready to occupy.


And at 1 p.m. we were settling into our floating home for the next 12 days.  Thanks to a recommendation from the agency we use for booking our cruises we ended up with a balcony large enough for eight people and a room of almost the same size! 


Everything is large and spacious on this ship – even the lawn art.  Being part of the Solstice Class ships, we do have a 15th floor lawn – that many have remarked is much greener than what they left back home.

Our route will loop us around Italy’s boot:  yesterday we were in Napoli, today Sicily and tomorrow Malta (which was one of the reasons this routing called out to us). Then we have a day to rest our senses before visiting Greece, Montenegro, Croatia and four more ports in Italy before ending up in Venice.

Now that the computer is up and running again (we took a break from computers for a few days) I will tell you more about the wonderful ports we’re visiting aboard this luxurious supersized yacht on which we are sailing.

Three phone calls later: Singapore is Rome

Regular readers and those who know us well won’t be surprised to learn that we’ve changed travel directions again.

The winter’s “Big” cruise from Singapore is now the autumn cruise  from Rome.

All it took was a couple of phone calls.  Really, it was that simple. Proving, once again, that planning travel really isn’t that difficult.


The original plan: Frequent flier airline seats to and from Asia. A Celebrity cruise from Singapore to Sydney, a few days there (using Marriott points), then off to Bali, returning home a week later . Yikes – that put us traveling two days before Christmas! (Read that: the dreaded holiday travel.)

We were looking forward to the Asian Adventure, but. . .

While in Mexico we had plenty of daydreaming time and started discussing other destinations that we want to visit in the next couple years. . .

Then, back in Kirkland this week Joel happened upon the ‘perfect’ Celebrity cruise – beginning in Rome, ending in Venice, with stops in Montenegro, Croatia, Greece, Malta and Slovenia along the way. If only we weren’t headed to Singapore. . .
 

After a 24-hour ‘ponder-the-idea-period', Joel checked on availability of frequent flier seats, which was key to any changes, with airline prices being what they are this year. Two calls to Alaska Airlines in as many days and we had seats and a good routing to Europe.  He nabbed them after cancelling the Cathay Pacific business class seats to Singapore. We’ll  fly business class on KLM to Rome and back.

The third phone call was to CruCon Cruise Outlet (the travel agency we use for booking cruises because they’ve had the best prices and on-board goodies). They moved our $200 deposit from one cruise to the other, we’ve now got a balcony room on the Silhouette; incurring no penalties and getting the same on-board credits and other goodies as we had on the other cruise.

Then he cancelled our Marriott ‘loyalty points’ reservation in Sydney and used them to book a five night stay in a Marriott “Autograph” Hotel in Venice. (Use of those hotel points in Venice saved us approximately $1,700!)

We were excited about the Sydney experience; but we are plain crazy about this new adventure. Joel’s dug out the Lonely Planet guidebook to Slovenia to get the research started. . .I ordered a new Baggallini roller tote from a discount on-line shop.  Let the fun begin. . .