Friday was basically just a travel day. We had an early wake up call in order to catch the 5:10 Heathrow Express from Paddington. The train journey, transfer to terminal 4, check-in, security, boarding, etc. all went smoothly. We were a little delayed as we deplaned at least one passenger for reasons that are entirely unclear and then had to conduct a security sweep of the cabin and off board their checked luggage. The flight was otherwise smooth and mostly empty on Qatar’s giant A380, which is a plane that I have always enjoyed flying on. It was also the first time on Qatar Airways, which worked well despite our lack of status and flying economy — nothing special really, but totally competent.

Arrival in Qatar was equally smooth. We were actually only a few of the handful of passengers to actually enter the country from our flight — most were simply transiting here to another flight. Thus, no real waiting at immigration, baggage claim, or for a taxi to our hotel. Nice!

Speaking of our hotel, I booked us into the Marriott Marquis City Center. Due to my status and lack of guests, we were upgraded to a very large, top-floor, 2 bedroom suite (good), but we lost access to the washer/dryer combo (bad) that I’d planned on using in the 1 bedroom residence unit that I did book. The hotel was attached to a large though not luxurious mall, which was actually practical for us throughout our time in Qatar and gave more of a sense of local life (which for the vast majority of residents probably doesn’t involve double parking their Rolls in the valet line to dash in to pick up their new Patek Philippe).

We ate dinner at a place called the Twisted Olive on the ground floor of a nearby office tower. It had excellent reviews, served breakfast all day, but seemed dubious when almost nobody else was there in the evening. nonetheless, we trusted the reviews and were very pleased with our respective meals that were quite wide ranging (I, for example, had an Asian-inspired version of hot chicken and waffles with the waffles substituted for French toast — delish!).

On Saturday, we grabbed breakfast in the Marriott’s Executive Lounge and then took an Uber to the majestic—truly swoon-worthy—I.M. Pei designed Museum of Islamic Art. It was an interesting look at various forms and expressions of art across the Islamic world over the centuries. From their, we taxied to the Place Vendome Mall, which was a fairly typical mix of (mostly) high-end international retail brands and a variety of global dining concepts that seem to make up Middle Eastern malls. To that end, we ate at Eataly (a sort of mid-to-late afternoon “linner”) and bought some Birkenstocks. After sundown (when it was cooler — relatively speaking), we took an Uber to Souk Waqif to soak up the ambience of what was one of the nicest, cleanest, and most interesting souks we have ever visited.

Sunday was our final day in Qatar. We made it a fairly leisurely day with a later than usual start and allowing time to prepare for our evening flight to Hanoi, Vietnam. We thought about going to the modern art museum, but we ultimately settled on visiting the National Museum of Qatar. The NMoQ traces the natural, cultural, and political history of Qatar from pre-modern to contemporary events. Impressions: it’s unsurprisingly a difficult physical environment to live in that’s been heavily influenced by its proximity to the sea, external forces (including the British, Saudis, and Bahrainis) often attempted to control Qatar and its people, and some of those tensions remain to the present (most notably the very big deal—in Qatar, I only vaguely recall the event in US media coverage—of the blockade of Qatar imposed by a Saudi-led coalition starting in 2017).

Departing from Qatar was an easy journey through the airport despite my lack of status / premium seats and equally uneventful aboard a fairly full Qatar Airways B787 (first time for L&E on that aircraft type. The flight departed around 8pm and being both fairly short relative to our later than usual bedtime and filled with small, screaming children wasn’t especially restful.

All in all, glad to have visited Qatar and added this country to our list.

Today,’s box score: +1 country (Qatar)

Days 1 & 2 were really all about the journey, having left home around 7:00am on Tuesday morning and arriving at our hotel around 8:30pm on Wednesday night. Given a good deal for miles on DeltaOne, we flew to Shanghai up front, which was a real treat for the gals (despite it being in one of Delta’s old 777 cabins before adding the suites).

I also booked us a 1 bedroom suite at the Marriott City Centre. Very nice room. This also proved to be a wise decision as some of us could sleep while others used the living room.

The transfer from airport (usual dystopian environment after spending half a day on a plane) to the hotel was very smooth. After dropping off our luggage, we went to Starbucks for a coffee and headed out to the neon lights of Nanjing Road to find some dinner (ate some really good, spicy Sichuan dishes).

The big challenge with this journey is getting onto the right sleep schedule. Emerson suffered the worst, as she got the best night’s sleep on the way over. Libby and I managed to fall asleep by 2 or and were up again by 6 or 7 (after a pretty restless night). Emerson didn’t sleep at all.

Day #3, which was Thursday, started with complimentary breakfast at the executive lounge (a great perk of my Marriott lifetime status). We then returned to the room and let Emerson sleep for about 3 hours before waking her up (really unwelcome!) and heading out for the day.

We didn’t do too much on Thursday — explored the area around The Bund & People’s Square and visited the Shanghai Museum. Honestly, our main mission was fighting exhaustion and staying awake during the day. Dinner was less successful this night–not that the food was bad. It’s just difficult to enjoy a meal on the verge of collapse. Indeed, even walking back to the hotel a few short blocks felt like a struggle.

We did have one of the funnier moments of the trip at the restaurant. The wait staff didn’t speak English. But, our waitress really wanted to ask us a question. When we didn’t understand the Chinese (despite speaking it too us more loudly), she got a piece of paper and then proceeded to write the question down in Chinese for us (as if that was likely to help). LOL

Thankfully, the Internet came through with real-time translation. Thus, we established that Emerson did not want ice in her water. And, as it turned out, she didn’t want the water either since it was “with bubbles.”

We were all fast asleep by 8:00pm or so.

Day #4 started early… I was up at one o’clock in the morning, and the girls weren’t too far behind me a couple of hours later. Today was our visit to Shanghai Disneyland. I booked our tickets online (quite cheap compared to US prices) and paid a bit more for early access to the park. This paid off as we were able to do many rides (some twice) first thing in the morning and then spent the rest of the day at a more leisurely pace moving around the park.

We had a late lunch at a Wolfgang Puck’s in their version of Disney Springs, called Disneytown. We also did some shopping there and had salted custard egg bao from Crystal Jade.

We left the park around 5:30 and made it back to the hotel by around 7:00 (traffic was heavy). Emerson fell asleep in the car, despite our best efforts to keep her up. We then fell asleep in the car, despite our best efforts to keep each other awake. Dinner consisted of snacks from the nearby convenience store, as we mostly just wanted to go to bed.

Day #5 saw us awake fairly early, which enabled us to grab coffees and a light breakfast at 6am. We then relaxed for a bit before heading out on a dumpling tour and class, which started at 10:30am. This was a blast. The food tasted excellent (the pan-fried soup dumplings were especially revelatory), and the dumpling-making class was a lot of fun too. We also had a nice, small group with us including a New Zealand / South African expat couple living and teaching in Shanghai.

After the tour, we wandered back to our hotel through the French Concession, which felt far more “Upper East Side” than “Midtown” to us. We didn’t see a lot of hotels (at least not big, international chains) in this area, but it looked like a nice spot for eating and drinking (not to mention a short walk to the exquisite dumpling and bao spots). We came upon a market that was oddly celebrating Thanksgiving, as well as a number of historically important sights related to the founding of the PRC (which admittedly were largely meaningless to us).

Dinner was a light meal from room service, as we still had many dumplings in our belly.

Overall, Shanghai was a joy despite our being in a bit of a jet lag induced fog. It’s probably not a fair comparison because I go to Beijing for business, not pleasure, but I personally liked it Shanghai a lot more. We could have probably used one more day to really see the city, but this worked out well. We’d happily come back here.

Today’s just a travel day: Tampa to Atlanta, Atlanta to Shanghai.

Due to the length of the flight and departure time from Atlanta, we left Tampa around 9:45 in the morning, which meant driving to the airport in rush hour. Thankfully, that was the only real “lowlight” of he day.

We boarded our plane in Tampa on time, and Emerson was very pleased to see that we’d secured first class seats. She also quickly tumbled to the fact that that might mean we had first class seats to Asia too. And, she was right! I’d booked us in Delta One on the route over, which was a real treat for the gals.

In Atlanta, we visited the Sky Club before boarding our flight aboard a Delta 777 (sadly one of the planes not yet retrofitted with the Delta One Suites). It’s probably Delta’s worst business class hard product in my opinion, as I prefer even the 767-300s. But, the ladies were happy, which made me happy.

We departed the ship in Civitavecchia at 8:15. We found disembarking to be very easy — it’s one of the benefits of passengers rolling on and off the manifest at most of the ports-of-call. You simply don’t have the mad crush of an entire ship disgorging itself all at once.

We met our driver at 8:25 for the trip to the airport (€150), which took about an hour.

Check-in had a little bit of a queue at British Airways, but it wasn’t too annoying despite my lack of status with the airline. All told, we had to waste about two hours before our scheduled boarding time.

Unfortunately, once we’d boarded the plane, we sat on the tarmac for nearly an hour while they struggled to load and unload the luggage. It seemed they were mysteriously short-handed in the baggage handling department?

The flight was otherwise uneventful, and I managed (finally — they’ve been out on other BA flights) to enjoy one of BrewDog’s Speedbird 100 Transatlantic IPAs (brewed to commemorate the centennial of BA and named, of course, for Concorde).

We were about 45 minutes late into London as a result of the baggage snafu, which further delayed our arrival at our hotel due to increased traffic during rush hour. Nonetheless, we made it to our (very small, otherwise fine) rooms at the Hotel Xenia by around 5:45.

After dropping off our baggage, we left for dinner at The Bolton, a nearby pub with excellent food and beer.

Mom and Emerson had burgers (British beef/cheddar and wild boar/chorizo, respectively). Libby enjoyed the bangers and mash, and I went for a traditional steak and cheese pie:

All in all, this made for a nice “welcome to London” end to our day.

We left the ship around 8:30, took a shuttle bus out of the port, and then a taxi (€15 euro, maybe a rip off?) from the cruise terminal to the train station, which saved us a 30 minute, uphill walk.

Once at the train station, I bought us Cinque Terre Train Cards, which included unlimited train transport, bathrooms, WiFi, and use of the trails within the Cinque Terre National Park. This was €58 euro for the four of us (including a book) — which was about the cost of a single “on your own” excursion organized by the ship. Of course, it put the burden on us to “figure things out,” but that was no problemo to me. The trains just run in two directions and the villages are only a few minutes apart.

We opted to take start at the most distant village and work our way back, which minimized our return travel time (in case… whatever happened).

The train journey isn’t very scenic. Most of your time is spent in tunnels. Indeed, you only get brief views of the villages and seaside at the stations themselves… assuming you didn’t stop in a tunnel there too!

Our first stop was at Monterosso al Mare, which is the flattest of the villages and seemed to have the most beach / coastline too.

Next we moved on to Vernazza with its attractive natural harbor:

We then skipped Cornilgia in the interest of time, as the trains run every 30 min or so. Thus, one wants to be judicious about hops on and off lest you waste a lot of time in the stations.

Instead, we moved on to Manarola, where we enjoyed a lovely fried calamari and potato lunch while walking around the village and along the cliff side walkway:

Or, final stop was in Riomaggiore for a look around (and some dessert — always good to have a traveling feast):

We then boarded one of the trains for our quick trip back to La Spezia. Since we had enough time remaining before our ship was scheduled to depart, we ambled down through the town and along the water front to the cruise terminal. Like Genoa, this feels like a real, “lived in” place too. It doesn’t get a lot of attention from the guidebooks, but we thought it was a perfectly nice town and could have happily spent more time exploring it.

I really like days like today when we see lots of new things and I get to put my travel skills to good use. That’s always especially fun… savoring both the place and my small victories as a traveler of the world.

We grabbed a quick dinner at the buffet and otherwise spent the rest of the evening getting ready to depart the ship in the morning.

Work continued to be a source of interruption and frustration for me, as it’s been for most days of this trip. I’m planning to avoid that in the future, if at all possible, as I’m gone a lot for work anyway so would rather be fully present when I am with Libby and Emerson.

Genoa has a storied history as a major port city — arriving via ship seemed very apropos. It feels “lived in,” which I mean in a nice way. I like the contrast between its narrow medieval lanes and grand piazzas.

Unfortunately, being a Monday the city’s museums were closed. Alas, this is one of the challenges of cruising: arriving in port for a one day visit that doesn’t align with local happenings.

We did, however, make limoncello out of our lemons by enjoying a gourmet pizza lunch at Savo — top quality ingredients, made with care. Just my kind of place:

We spent a bit more time wandering around the old port area (which had been revitalized) before returning to the ship.

For dinner, we ate at the ship’s teppanyaki restaurant, which was one of the best teppanyaki meals I’ve ever had in terms of both flavor and the show (which was participatory). Here’s Emerson trying to flip an egg on a spatula:

The waterfront of the historic city center is very attractive:

The Fesch Museum was mercifully uncrowded and contained a number of high quality works by artists both familiar and unfamiliar to me.

Maison Bonaparte was a bit less exciting in part because the explanations were entirely in French and also the smaller space was a bit more crowded with tourists. Nonetheless, it was interesting to see (though not Angelina Jolie’s handprints in concrete in Cannes interesting).

The other major sight, the town’s Cathedral, was closed. So, we returned to the waterfront and enjoyed some ice cream and drinks at one of the restaurants that were open on the quay:

Today’s Box Score: +1 Country (Corsica)

We started by taking a taxi to Parq Guell. Unfortunately, no tickets were available for the day (despite arriving at 9am!). Oh well. From there we walked to Sagrada Familia. Guess what? No tickets available there either. Oh well. We’ve visited that before too.

We then walked to the Eixample where we viewed a number of the Modernista masterpieces.

We then spent the remainder of the morning and early afternoon exploring this area and the Gothic Quarter, which is quite evocative with its narrow alleys and warren-like feel.

We then crossed Las Ramblas to have lunch at Guell Tapas in El Raval. Here’s Libby enjoying a delicious cava (sparkling wine) sangria:

Lunch was equally good.

I think we could eat tapas every day for a month and remain happy perfectly happy.

We returned to the ship by 3:00 and had dinner in the ship’s Pan-Asian restaurant by Roy Yamaguchi. I had sushi, which was great. Emerson and Mom also seemed to enjoy their dinner, but Libby didn’t love her dishes (having tried them, I tended to agree they were kind of “meh” at best).

We returned to the cabin to find that they has delivered two chocolate ships models to us (another–slightly bizarre–perk of our status).

We docked in Mallorca and departed the ship around 1:30pm. It’s a bit of a walk along the waterfront from the cruise terminal to the historical city center, but it was a pleasant enough stroll. I especially enjoyed looking at the various boats and yachts, which always puts in the mood to buy one (not that that’s a good or wise thing).

Mallorca is surprisingly lovely. I say that for no particular reason. I mostly just thought of it as a holiday spot for Brits. Thus, we came with no real preconceived notions or expectations, which is usually a good setup to like a spot.

We visited Palma’s cathedral, the Royal Palace della Almundaina, the Palau March (which was something of an eclectic art museum with an especially alluring and elaborate nativity scene on display), and the Museu Fundación Juan March (which housed modern and contemporary paintings).

We then enjoyed a lovely dinner of Spanish tapas at one of the local restaurants, called Tast, in town. The food was excellent!

After dinner, we walked around Palma a little more to soak up the atmosphere and then took a taxi back to the ship (which cost only 6€ one way for all of us vs. 12€ per person round trip with the ship’s shuttle bus!).

Today’s box score: +1 country — Mallorca (Spain)

Having been to this part of the world a few times, we didn’t feel especially rushed to take the first tender ashore (though we had priority tickets) nor did we feel the need to rush out of town to places like Nice or Monaco (been there, done that).

Nope, we decided to spend a leisurely day in Cannes itself, exploring the seaside town and enjoying a nice lunch.

The waterfront is swoon-worthy in terms of its beauty and its yachts.

Like this Azimut:

The location of its famous film festival is a bit less visually attractive:

The road along the beachfront is lined with luxury hotels and shops, as well as chic and expensive bars and restaurants overlooking the bay. I guess if you’re going to spend $35-40 to eat a hamburger this isn’t a bad spot in which to do it.

For our part, however, we found a nice wine bar that was a few blocks inland that was quite enjoyable for eating a a cheese and charcuterie plate washed down by a nice glass of a dry Provençal rose.

In the mid-afternoon, we walked up to the oldest part of town for sweeping views of the city and bay:

Back aboard ship, we enjoyed dinner at the Butcher’s Cut, which is Seaview’s speciality steak restaurant. Libby and I ate for free as one of our Voyager’s Club Black level membership benefits. The dining experience was otherwise $39/pp. for a three course meal with additional charges for various “upgrades” and/or the option to pay even more to order entirely a la carte.

Truthfully, speciality dining aboard ships had become increasingly expensive. While it’s often far superior to the included fare, I find it increasingly to be less good value for money. But, we can afford it and enjoy it… so c’est la vie, I suppose.