Today we are in Kotor, Montenegro. Kotor is a gorgeous medieval town that is located on a large fjord (not carved from a glacier!) and known as the jewel of Montenegro.

This is a part of the Mediterranean that I’ve really been looking forward to seeing! Montenegro is tucked into the Adriatic Sea between Albania, Serbia, Kosovo, Bosnia, and Croatia. We’re only here for the day and hope to come back and visit this area in early Fall. Here are some pics of the hike up to an old fort and the old city walls that we did this morning. It was almost 3 miles (up, up, up) and we rewarded ourselves with fresh homemade goat cheese and local wine at the “cheese shop” up here. This is a cozy residential home up in the mountains where they bring up wine and beer by mule and serve hikers before they traverse the switchbacks down.

This is our first port of call on a 12 night cruise out of Barcelona on Carnival Pride.

We were wary of booking a Carnival cruise because these “party ships” get a bad wrap for being cheap and receiving horrible customer service. Pride is an older ship and it’s showing that wear along with filthy windows, but the food is good, service has been outstanding, and there’s plenty of outdoor pools and loungers (and water slides).

It’s only been a few days but it’s all been great! So great that we actually booked 2 more Carnival cruises which means we will be sailing 4 European itineraries on Pride this summer.

(Current) Italy, France, Montenegro, Greece

May 29: Gibraltar, Portugal, Northern Spain

June 19: Baltic

July 10: Iceland

This is indeed a fun ship and we’ve met loads of friendly people already. There’s a pretty large percentage of people (like us!) that are doing various kinds of back to back sailings. Though we consider our plans to be more like a hop on/hop off bus since we plan to disembark in Dover twice and rejoin twice.

For our first 9 day “layover “ in England, we will take the train to Scarborough and stay with my friend, Dan Spink. We have offered our services of working at his neat bookstore, Mrs Lofthouse’s Emporium, in exchange for room and board.

We are undecided how to spend our next 9 days in England, so if you have ideas please share them in a comment, text, or email!

Tomorrow we will visit Corfu, Greece and then we are off to sail the west coast of Italy. We will only have data on port days, so our communication will be spotty until we get to Scarborough in a few weeks.

Until then we will stuff our faces with as much delicious local food as possible.

Ciao for now!