Yellow Fish cruises: Finding Albania

I'll admit that, when it comes to some of the smaller countries we'll be visiting, I could not have pointed to them on a map. In my defense, many of them have come into modern existence since the breakup of the USSR, long after my elementary school Geography days. It's the same with those '-stan' countries. I know the general area but could not differentiate between Tajiikistan and Kyrgyzstan on an unlabeled map (I'm not particularly proud of that!).

G was all excited, thinking Slovenia was near Slovakia; my relatives emigrated from the latter to move to the US in the early 20th century. Well, close, but not close enough. Slovakia is squeezed between Hungary and Poland. That might be as close to Slovenia as Chicago and Cleveland, but, for us on a cruise, it means no family lunches this trip.

We'll be visiting many of the countries bordering the northern Mediterranean Sea

Source: WorldAtlasBook.com/Europe

Our cruise calendar

We've been using this same format for years now, preparing a calendar that is focused more on days of each cruise, instead of days of the week. I've set it up based on the first five cruises we'll be doing, which are all 12-nights long. (It would have been hard to print a calendar that was 17 days wide to accommodate the transatlantic cruise). Especially this season, when we have turnaround days in several different cities, we find this very useful. Sorry, I can't make this any clearer. I tried uploading at several resolutions and this was the best:

We'll use magnets to post this calendar on our cabin wall. It's a great quick reference, and each morning before we disembark the ship, we'll check to see what other dates we'll be visiting later in the season in case we choose to set up plans for a subsequent visit.

Ships in Port with the Pacific Princess

This is another spreadsheet I've been doing for years, though I did skip it on our French Polynesia cruises (for obvious reasons). While we will have a crowd of ships in a few ports early on (the worst is Barcelona), after November 1 the Mediterranean season winds down and we will often be alone in port. We will happily tolerate some closed attractions and shorter hours for cooler days and fewer ships! Plus, the very best part will be connecting with friends Suzan and Greg as they disembark the Royal Princess in Fort Lauderdale on December 20!