At Sea

As this cruise is starting to wind down, we are making our way from the eastern Mediterranean west to Italy.  That means we have two "at sea" days.  I am not sure about my fellow passengers but I am more than ready to have some time off from excursions and the like.  This travelling is hard work!  So, below is a screen shot from Google maps when we were somewhere in the Mediterranean heading toward Sicily.


So, without too much to blog about in terms of travel, I thought I say something about the ship.  Azamara is a cruise line based in Miami, Florida, that operates a fleet of 4 ships on worldwide itineraries.  The ships have a capacity of around 700 passengers.  The ship I am on is the Azamara Pursuit and currently there are about 550 passengers on board.  The other ships are the Azamara Journey, the Azamara Quest, and the Azamara Onward.  Quite a number of passengers on this cruise had stayed on board following the completion of the previous cruise.  The demographic is mainly Americans but with a good representation of Canadians, Brits, Aussies and some Kiwis.  

As you may know, I am not an experienced "cruiser" nor am I particularly a huge fan of cruises at all.  To date, I have only used them to visit places that would otherwise be too complicated for an independent, senior and/or solo traveller to get to.  For example, I did two cruises with the now defunct company called Voyages to Antiquity as well as one with Holland America to the Baltic between 2017 and 2019.  These took me to Athens, some of the Greek Islands, Malta, Crete, Palermo in Sicily, plus four ports in Spain  The Baltic cruise had stops in Copenhagen, Warnemunde (D), Tallin, St. Petersburg (a highlight), Helsinki, and Stockholm.  None of the places, with the exception of Spain, were places I would likely travel to on my own.  So, when the opportunity to see some of Egypt, Turkey and Israel plus Cyprus came up, I jumped at the chance

I think the Azamara Pursuit is a typical cruise ship dating from about 25 years ago. It is comfortable, the staterooms are big enough - at least for one person, the food has been good, and the service has been friendly and efficient.  I would criticize some of the onboard scheduling logistics though; for example, having specialty dinners starting at 6:15 when excursions come back later so you can't partake in them as they have a set start time makes no sense.  I have other examples as well.  Also, while I have not attended many of the shows, the two or three I went to had very mediocre entertainment.  They could up their game, so to speak, in that regard.

So, without muck more to say, the following are pictures of different areas of the ship I thought you might like to see.   For experienced cruisers, they are pretty typical and probably don't measure up to the more luxurious ships.  However, they were fine for me.




Hopefully, I will have more interesting topics when we get to Italy.





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