Above is a picture of Montserrat, Spain, which we are planning to visit while stopping in Barcelona.
We have just two weeks to go until we leave on this journey. We have been putting the final details on the plans for Rome, and on the port stops in Livorno, Italy and Barcelona, Spain.
In addition we have been in contact with our hotel in Rome, the Aenea Superior Inn, and have provided them with an estimated time of arrival on October 5. We normally send an email to our hotels to confirm our reservation about two weeks prior to the trip to make sure they received the information from Booking.com, where we made our reservation. I was nice to get an inquiry from the hotel before we even sent anything to them to verify our room. They were wanting an estimated arrival time so that they could make sure someone was at the property, which consists of several rooms on a couple of floors of a multi-use building, so the street access doors are normally locked. We also found out that they do have an area to store our luggage when we arrive, since it will be earlier than the check in time at 2:00 PM.
We have put together the detailed plan for Livorno, Italy and Barcelona Spain, and are still finalizing the detailed plans for Toulon, France and Ponta Delgada, Azores.
Livorno. Italy
We have put together two plans for Livorno, and will decide on the final choice depending on the weather when we get into port. We will either take the train to Lucca, a small medieval walled town we visited briefly in 2008, or just go into Pisa and walk through town to the Leaning Tower. If the weather is nice and we can get up and get going early, we will try and go to Lucca. However, if we just can’t get out early, or, the weather is marginal, we will train into Pisa and walk to the Piazza dei Miracoli, where the Leaning Tower and Cathedral are located. We have been there three previous times, so it is not critical that we get there early or stay long. Since we will be there on Sunday, we intend to go to Mass at either location.
Barcelona, Spain
We have finalized the plan to visit Montserrat just outside of Barcelona. It is not the quickest place to get to, we have to take a shuttle bus from the ship to outside of the port, then walk to a Metro station a few blocks away, take the Metro to the Plaça d’Espanya train station, and then train to Montserrat. There is both a cable car and cog rail option to go to the top of the mountain where the monastery is located. We are glad that we are there on a weekday, the crowds should be less, and the train schedule is better, there are more trains than on a weekend, where they only run hourly. It will probably take close to two hours or better to get there from the ship, and maybe slightly less to get back later in the afternoon, so we have to be pretty structured on our timetable, and get an early start.
We will be completing our detailed plan for Toulon, where we still plan on renting a car and visit several coastal towns near Toulon. We have done a detailed plan map route on ViaMichelin, which is a really good mapping and travel tool for driving around Europe. We will then need to put the plan into our Garmin GPS, and we should be set to go. We may try to get a road map for that area of France, just as a backup to the GPS in case we want to modify our route.
We may look into a ship’s tour for Ponta Delgada, Azores, or try to hire a taxi to take us up into the mountains to see the volcanic caldera lakes that are famous there, one is blue and the other is green, and they are located next to each other. Unfortunately, it can be foggy most mornings there, and we don’t want to go on a tour until the fog clears, usually in the afternoon. This will be our first visit to Ponta Delgada where we will be in port for more than a few hours, so we will be there later in the afternoon than has been usual on our visits there.