On the Road is a weekday feature spotlighting reader photo submissions.
From the exotic to the familiar, whether you’re traveling or in your own backyard, we would love to see the world through your eyes.
PAM Dirac
A local winery organized a group to take a cruise around the Adriatic Sea and the Greek Islands. My wife and I put our deposit down in Feb 2019 and thought how hard it was going to be to wait over a year til the scheduled date of May 2020. Of course just as we made final payments and plans, the pandemic shut everything down. After waiting another year, the trip got rescheduled to May 2022 and now the trip started in Rome and went around the Iberian Peninsula. Our more than a year wait turned into more than 3 years wait, but we were vaxxed and double boosted, masked up and ready to go. We cruised on the Oceania Marina which has a capacity of about 1200 passengers. We heard the shipped was a bit less than half booked, so it was quite comfortable and easy to get avoid getting caught in crowded spaces. The cruise line required vaccinations and negative test to board, so at least the most obvious idiots were weeded out and that made things more relaxing as well.
The cruise was officially listed to start in Rome, but the port was Civitavecchia, about an hour and a half drive north of Rome. Very utilitarian and uninteresting. Our first stop was Saint-Tropez, France which has a glamorous reputation. The coastline is certainly beautiful. This is looking across the Gulf of Saint-Tropez towards Sainte-Maxime
We opted for an excursion that went to a winery and toured the village of Gassin. Here are some of the vines at Domaine Bertaud Belieu. The area mostly makes rosé wines that are quite nice. The grape varieties have a lot of overlap with the Rhone region. It was interesting to see the differences in growing practices compared to home.
From the winery we went up to the village of Gassin, which sits on a big rocky hill. The view is nice, even though the weather wasn’t optimal. Most of the cultivation you can see are vineyards.
Gassin has the narrow “streets” and maze like feel that is typical in villages that date back to medieval times.
The next stop was Barcelona, Spain. We didn’t have an excursion planned and we ended up not getting off the ship. After five days of airports and flights and buses and lines of people, we just sat on our balcony, sipped some wine, enjoyed the view.
The next stop was Cádiz, Spain. We got on a bus to El Bosque, about an hours drive away, to go to a museum of cheese and cheese making. https://www.quesoselbosque.com/
It was very interesting. The area makes goat and sheep cheese from breeds that are unique to the area and quite endangered. The locals are trying to regrow the stocks and preserve the traditions. The cheese is excellent, but doesn’t make for pretty pictures. On the other hand the side trip to Museo Molino De Abajo was pretty. An old water run mill, it was cool to see the water courses, follow into the mill and see the stone grinding at work and all the tools that were used.
The countryside between El Bosque and Cádiz was beautiful. Here’s an example. There were also places where there were huge fields of sunflowers in bloom, but I never got a decent picture of those out the bus window.
The cathedral in Cádiz as seen from out balcony.
The next stop was Lisbon, Portugal. It was a very enjoyable stop. The ship docked right in the city and ran a shuttle up the hill. We took the shuttle and walked down the hill through shops and neighborhoods and ended up in the big Commerce Square with the Arco da Rua Augusta Triumphal and had a nice lunch with some local wine. The view of Libson from the ship fascinated me; the overall sameness, but with fairly subtle variations like plants or even laundry hung out to dry.
The next stop was Porto, although since this was another stop where the port was outside the named city, I don’t think we ever even got a glimpse of Porto itself. We got on a bus to to out to the Douro Valley and a stop along the way was Amarante, a quaint little town with houses crammed together down to the water. Which ends Part 1. Tune in again to see the conclusion to this exciting adventure.
Baud
That’s a good itinerary. Too bad you couldn’t get off at Barcelona. That’s a nice city.
eclare
Great photos! Gassin looks so charming. Can’t wait to see Part Deux!
PAM Dirac
@Baud: Yes it was a bit of a disappointment, but we realized we needed a break and were glad we took one. Next time! And there might even be a next time. Both of us realized Spain and Portugal weren’t really places that even come up for consideration when thinking about travel, but both places are pretty high on our list now.
Albatrossity
Gorgeous shots of gorgeous places! Thanks!
WaterGirl
Great shots, so charming!
zhena gogolia
Looks lovely.
I haven’t been to Barcelona. I do hear it’s lovely, but also very touristy. And a lot of the tourists are Russian, or at least used to be before the war.
Hoodie
@zhena gogolia: there are some tourist sites you’ll want to see, but try to minimize time around las ramblas and other tourist locales. Like a lot of places, Barcelona is a city of neighborhoods. My son and I found a tour with a local guy in el clot (a couple of subway stops from the tourist hub) that was fun, went to a local charcuterie shop, a family run bodega and a cantabrian restaurant. Incredible food, all locals, very few tourists other than our small group of five.
JanieM
Lovely, enticing shots of places that have (previously) not featured in my travel thoughts . Sounds like a great trip.
Sure Lurkalot
Lovely trip. I went to Portugal once but have visited Spain many times. Both worthy of exploration meeting a variety of interests! Looking forward to tomorrow’s pictures.
Anyway
Nice pictures!
PAM Dirac
@zhena gogolia:
One takeaway from this trip for me is that “touristy” isn’t necessarily a bad thing, especially on a cruise where you have very limited time at each place. Obviously I AM a tourist and even with all the info you can get online, I really don’t know what the place is like and how to fit in with local ways of doing things. I thought the visit to Lisbon was a perfect introduction, easy on and off from the ship, a walk through some neighborhoods and shops, lunch at a restaurant that expects to deal with clueless tourists and easy walk back to the ship. Part of the reason we didn’t get off in Barcelona is that it looked like it was going to be a pain to get through the industrial area where the ship was docked and into the part of Barcelona where we would want to walk. It was a little surprising to me how wide the range of accessibility to the town was in the various ports.
susanna
Enjoyed these pictures, and have loved Spain ever since visiting in 1968. Your photos of Portugal are drawing me to visit, as well. Lovely shots, even of the ocean. Thanks for sharing.
J R in WV
We visited Spain and France some 12 or 15 years ago on a trip organized by the America Institute for Archaeology, to visit caves where neolithic art had been discovered. So much of the actual visiting was in quite rural or remote places, where the caves were.
Even in quite small and rural villages there were great museums full of great and ancient stuff, and active dig sites with graduate students busy moving tiny bits of soil to find really old material.
Basque country was where we started, Toulouse was where the tour ended, and we took a very nice train to Paris rather than flying out of Toulouse.
In Paris we were able to visit Notre Dame and see some of the archaeological sites discovered around that amazing church, and eat more great European food. Most all the food and wine was great from rural Basque country near Bilbao through southern France. We loved all of the trip, tho it was tiring. There were several On the Road posts featuring that trip, we I hope those pages are among the history being recovered.
Thanks for sharing this trip and your most excellent pictures with your fellow jackals!!
Motivated Seller
Love the picture of Gassin’s narrow streets. Trying to download the picture, but it won’t let me save as a jpg. Even though the URL says jpg. It only allow’s downloading as a webp (Google’s proprietary format).
https://install.local/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/CruiseP1_04.jpg
Weirdly all the other pictures can be downloaded as jpg. Is there something going on with WordPress? Maybe a question for WaterGirl…
BigJimSlade
@Motivated Seller: Servers often try to serve webp images (depending upon the requester, ie, the browser making the request) because they are smaller files, so the site is faster. Are you on a mac? Try in Safari: https://install.local/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/CruiseP1_04.jpg
Wag
Great shots. Looks like a fantastic trip.
As far as Barcelona is concerned, it is one of my favorite cities. The food is fantastic, and the sights (even the touristy sites) are amazing. I was especially impressed by Sagrada Familia, as well as La Boqueria, the main market. Fantastic opportunities for photography. I think several years ago I did an on the road post about Barcelona. Lost in the soniferous ether.
PAM Dirac
@Motivated Seller: If you can’t get it to download, ask Watergirl for my email address and I’ll send you a jpg in higher resolution if you want.
Jill
@PAM Dirac:
PaulB
Lovely pictures and stories. That’s wonderful that you were able to take the trip, even if it was delayed. I can’t wait for part 2. Thank you for sharing.
Motivated Seller
@PAM Dirac: Will do thanks. I might like the higher res.
For what its worth, I eventually got the image by copy-paste into MS Paint, then saving as jpg.
WaterGirl
@Motivated Seller: I just dragged the image to my desktop and it came as a .jpg file. What method were you using to download?