A one horse town ... without the horse

4 November 2008 - Zakinthos, Greece

QE2 anchored in the bay and we were all transferred by tender (lifeboat) out to Zakinthos Town. She looked beautiful and resplendent in the bay. A proper ocean liner.

I had been in Zakinthos about 18 years ago with two friends from University. I thought it would be a great holiday. They could lie on the beach, and I could go and look at Greek Temples as I was (and still am) into Greek history and archaeology. The island disappointed me. Their main resort, Laganas was like Blackpool with sun. We stayed in Argassi which was still quite nice, but getting commercialised. As for the temples... the whole place was flattened by an earthquake in 1953, so there was nothing. We went for a tour of the island... nothing. The only mildly interesting place was Zakinthos Town because it still retained a little Greek charm. Yeuch!

After getting the tender at 11.30am I wandered aimlessly around some shops and then back onto the tender at 12.30am for lunch. Nothing to see, nothing to do, lots to buy if you like tourist tat.

The afternoon was spent as usual sleeping, taking Evie swimming and getting ready for dinner. We had dinner in the Mauretania restaurant. The food on QE2 is the second best I've tasted (the first being Saga Rose). We had duck and sirloin steak, with amazingly beautiful sweets.

We knew we had a tour in the morning, so it was off early to bed.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

MEET VENTURA

Image
I was a bundle of nerves approaching Dock Gate 4. So much so, I went in the wrong entrance! Luckily some of the natives pointed me in the right direction.   Cruise Passenger Services were wonderful with the car handling. I waved Helga the Merc off on her holidays for a week, with Squeak the Mouse and the Pink Panther keeping her company, and quickly transferred through the terminal. It was such a difference to when I was transiting through the terminals in the 1980s. Nowadays it is such a HUGE and sophisticated operation.   Rather than explain what Ventura looks like, I'm attaching some photos:  And our cabin:   When we were leaving, we saw Queen Mary 2, Queen Victoria and 'the other ship' (as she was commonly referred to...) Celebrity Edge. We checked Evie into H2O, the teens centre, and she disappeared off there after dinner. I felt quite lost to begin with! What do I do with all this time? Off to the pub, off to the Tamarind Lounge to list
Read more

Lecturing on the Elizabeth

Friday 7 November - Gibraltar/At Sea Well, I finally managed to get into the Boardroom this morning for a few hours. I missed getting off the ship at Gibraltar because I had a lecture in the afternoon. As I haven't been lecturing much on ships this year, I needed the practice. It also didn't help that I hadn't performed the Queen Elizabeth lecture for a couple of years. We all met in the Mauretania Restaurant for lunch. Nana, Agnes and Evie went shopping, Campbell went booze shopping. Half the crew ended up in Morrisons supermarket. At 2pm QE2 slipped her moorings in Gibraltar and headed for the sea.  At 3pm I started my lecture about the original Queen Elizabeth liner (1938-1968(out of service)/1972(destroyed by fire). Parts of the original Queen Elizabeth are on board QE2, such as a 20ft high painting of the Queen Mother, a painting of our present Queen and Duke of Edinburgh when they were young, and bas-reliefs which were (I think) in the Cabin smoking room. The original
Read more

The old and the new

Sunday 2 November 2008 - Messina Messina on a Sunday is not the greatest place in the world. Sunday in a Catholic country means everything is closed and not much is happening. Our resident explorer, Campbell, was not about to sit down and watch the world go by. So as I was posting the last blog to you, he, Agnes and Evie, dragged a rather hesitant Nana off to visit the mainland of Italy by rail ferry.  Nana is the sort of person (a bit like myself) who is not in the least bit adventurous, but once you have shown her the way, she knows it all. Well, it was Nana who tried to communicate with Italians who couldn't speak English with a series of hand-gestures, and Nana who got them on the right ferry home! So much for not wanting to go! After I had written the blog, I wandered off to look at the ship berthed in front of us... Royal Caribbean's Navigator of the Seas. I reckon she is about 100,000 gross registered tonnes. I think she has flume rides and an ice rink. She will certainl
Read more