Sailing away

Thanks for waiting for the past 8 weeks or so while I took another cruise and then wrote about it for 6 weeks on Cruisecritic.com

Let's get back to the Emerald Princess cruise that we took a year ago.....

It's 4 p.m on a sunny Saturday  in late September and we are about to leave the port of Civitavecchia, 65 miles North of Rome. Normally we are sad to leave Rome but we aren't flying home to Chicago today yet instead setting out on a voyage that will keep us in Italy and it's waters for the next 5 days before we turn away to the West and sail towards our final destination of Barcelona, Spain.

We've been on the ship for 4 hours and have settled in to our new home.

Now we are ready to sail and that is always an exciting part of cruising.

We are the second ship to set sail. first we have to wait while the Sea Dream II, a luxury cruise ship that holds just a couple of hundred guests, reverses from the back of the harbor and makes a turn in the basin to get her facing the right way to leave port....

Then it's our turn to slowly move away from our berth and head towards the breakwater to enter the Mediterranean sea

The other ships will follow soon

We reach the mouth of the harbor

And the pilot leaves in his waiting boat to go to another ship

The other ships still sit in port

Out at sea and a magnificent sunset is enjoyed

 Passengers gather on deck to enjoy a drink and the fading light before dinner

Dinner for us is in the Ship's steakhouse, called the Crown Grill. This is a pay to dine restaurant known as a Specialty Restaurant. Most of the passengers are in the 3 main dining rooms (M.D.R) or the all-you-can-eat Horizon Court buffet where the food is included in the price of your cruise. We like to start our cruises in the Specialty Restaurants. As we stayed in a suite our meal tonight was complimentary. Hooray!! Free is good...

Some Tiger Prawns

and a salad

My filet mignon cooked medium temperature served with herbed French fries

A glass of Malbec red wine is a perfect accompaniment to a nice tender steak

A wonderful dessert by the Master American Chocolatier, Norman Love, is the perfect ending to our meal

It's a peanut butter and chocolate flavor bomb and those are therefore peanuts on top. Amazing food!

Crown Grill video.....

After such a fine dinner and some smooth wine it only remained for us to walk on deck in the warm night air as we sailed at 18 knots to our first port of call-the City of Palermo on the island of Sicily, a city we had visited one year before.

Falling asleep was easy as we had been up all day, in my case since 5 a.m and the motion of the ship and sound from the wake worked their magic on us.

We slept with smiles on our faces.

We were cruising again!

While we are sleeping here is a video of our leaving Civitavecchia.