"Best Mediterranean Cruise ever!!"

Planning this Trip

I'm not certain when the discussions about a trip to the Greek Isles began; perhaps it was while we were on the 'Radiance of the Seas' during Thanksgiving week in 2006. If not then, it was shortly thereafter as my first 'CruiseCompare' spreadsheet was created 11/28/2006. Research on the cities, ports and countries began in earnest, and continued for 18-22 hours per week for the next three weeks. Google pointed the way to a wealth of information on just about everything.

There were discussions on and off through most of December. The notes in the spreadsheet were pointing to an obvious conclusion. The cruise was the subject of a family discussion on Christmas Eve. During the evening on Christmas Day, I went to a recently discovered website (cruisecritic.com) and started searching the archives on the two cruises under consideration. In all of my prior research on the port cities there had not been a connection established between Alexandria and Cairo. I found the connection here - Alexandria - Cairo - Pyramids. The pyramids tipped the scale and the cruise selection had been made. On December 26, 2006, I booked the cruise directly with RCCL. Thus was the beginning of six long months of planning.

Ok, we are going to Rome in June 2007. How are we going to get there? I started with expedia.com and then worked my way through several other online searches. My notes revealed one or two flights that were consistently returned as the best deal. OK, try the airlines direct and see what we get. Ah ha! Better deal yet! Let it rest for a couple of days and repeat the process to see if anything else surfaces. Essentially the same results. Just for grins I repeated this process one more time only to get the same results.

I think that it was around January 18th that I decided that the possibility of the prices dropping was somewhere between nil and none; so I booked (and paid for) non-refundable round-trip airline tickets between Miami and Rome. The cruise booking was a small deposit and outlay compared to the plane tickets. The foundation stone for this trip had been set.

To be honest, I thought that what I had accomplished to date was a lot. Actually it was very little as I was soon to learn. My DW was suggesting that maybe we should get help with the rest of the planning; but I was adamant that I was going to do it myself. I think that it is important to point out at this point in time that I was quite familiar with Italy as I had lived there for 3 years (my DW one) and had traveled extensively.

Outlining the tasks yet to be completed, I quickly became aware of the inter-dependancies between them. The hotel selected, and its location, would have direct impact on the transportation to/from the airport as well as the port in Civitavecchia; both in terms of time and cost. It was obvious to me that additional research was in order. I spent a large amount of time researching transportation and hotels, both in Rome and Florence. It was late January before I was even close to making any decisions.