It didn’t kill the enjoyment of our cruise. I had had only one asthma attack in my life a few months ago but I was hit with racking coughs and three asthma attacks on board ship on our crossing of the Atlantic.  The trip was wonderful but the asthma was and is scary.  Been to the doctor and he loaded me down with all kinds of free samples and left me sort of wondering how to use all this stuff.  There seems to have been a whole lot of hacking and wheezing going on.

I had over five hundred messages that awaited me on my computer.  It is amazing how this stuff accumulates.  I have now deleted all of it and will start out fresh.  But I thought that you might like a list of the countries we have visited.  Our trip was divided into two parts.  One started in Italy and went into the Eastern Mediterranean skirting Sicily until our return.  We stopped at Dubrovnik, Olympia, Piraeus, the port of Athens and a visit to the Parthenon which dominates the city. We stopped off at Greek islands including Santorini and Ephesus, Turkey.  On the way back we went to Messina on Sicily and approached Mount Etna which was showing off by letting off steam. In Athens and at Etna, we saw all we could see from below.  We have limited climbing ability these days.

We returned to Citiveccia, Italy where our ship continued on to return to the US by means of Lucca and Pisa in Italy; Monte Carlo in Monaco and the high tiny city of Eze.  One of our trips was an all day motor tour of Provance, France.  Then, at Barcelona, Spain we were overwhelmed by a hundred year unfinished construction of a Church by Gaudi which shows different architects’ impressions from different sides: an  ugly, beautiful and imaginative building - work goes on.  We ended the day with a trip to the beach where we had a lunch and a demonstration of ‘Flamenco dancers with some travelers getting up to participate.

In Valencia, Spain we got the chance to visit inside a cave in continuous use for 17,000 years.  Part of our trip included sitting in poled canoes to cross on top of an underground river in that cave.  The cave paintings were all gone because of the human use of the cave since it became a tourist destination.

Almiria, Spain we felt was badly planned and a waste of our time.  We saw desert (a “natural” park) and miles of plastic covered greenhouses where they had a good thing going raising hot-house tomatoes. Ponta Delgorda, Azores was a beautiful close to European countryside before we began our five day at sea.  That last time provided me with a lot of opportunities to sketch left profiles of my fellow passengers.  I finished about forty and most were pretty good (I think.)