Wow! What a trip this has been! We saw so many amazing things that it’s a little bit hard to process it all. Recording our experiences and reviewing our photos as I wrote the 2023 BT blog posts was like re-visiting everything again, but with more time to consider it and to cherish the memories. We don’t have a lot of photos of ourselves, but here are some that show us in places we’ve never been before.
This is the restaurant we went to with two other couples on our second night in Jerusalem. We added another couple to our group within a day or two and the eight of us sat together for dinner every evening during our time in Jerusalem and Egypt. We all have each other’s email addresses and are keeping in touch with each other. We also became acquainted with and knew the names of at least ten other couples during this time, so it’s fun to look at our photos and to recognize so many of the people in them as we toured together in a group.
We asked the waitress to take a picture of our group of six in the restaurant. Her pictures didn’t turn out very well, but here’s the setting, and it should be easy to imagine six new friends enjoying a delicious dinner together in an open-air dining room on a warm summer night in Jerusalem.
The Great Sphinx! It was so exciting to be up close and personal with the Great Pyramids and the Great Sphinx in Giza, Egypt.
Edfu, Egypt
Sometimes, it was fun to simply relax on our ship as we sailed by the Nile River scenery.
Ok, the fake Trojan horse is pretty corny, but we had just toured the ruins of Troy, Türkiye, and it seemed appropriate to have a corny vacation picture.
When we had a free morning, it was relaxing to have coffee and hot chocolate in the Winter Garden on board our ocean ship before our afternoon excursion.
Kotor—home of the serpentine road. What a ride! The views at the 25th curve were magnificent, and after lunch at a local restaurant, there was time for a few minutes of exercise on a swing.
We toured Taormina and heard some local legends about how to treat a man who cheats on you and how to drink wine like a Greek, then had time for a break to relax and admire the Ionian Sea.
Pompeii, the site of a 79 AD tragedy, was a fascinating place to tour in the shadow of Mt. Vesuvius. Some of the things the Romans included in the infrastructure and the buildings were amazingly advanced, especially the pizza oven!
Pisa is sinking and the tower is leaning. Every day, Ted and I learned something new. At Pisa, I learned that the Leaning Tower is a bell tower and only one structure of a religious unit including the tower, the adjacent cathedral, and the baptistry. It was hard to take pictures because the sun shone directly at the camera. We had to guess what we were aiming at and hope for the best.
Gaudi’s name is so familiar to me after seeing La Sagrada Familia and the Park Güell in Barcelona that I’m not sure if I ever heard of Gaudi before this or not. I’ll never forget him now! How could a single person design such magnificent structures and include so much meaning in every part of those structures?!
Every time we come home from visiting new places, Ted remarks that we probably just had the best trip ever. The same thing was true after the 2023 BT, but this one will be hard to top with the next new places we see.