Our next adventure is beginning. We are embarking on Viking Ocean’s 13-day, 6-country Mediterranean Odyssey cruise from Barcelona to Venice.

We will fly in a day early and spend the night at a hotel near the Barcelona airport. On embarkation day, we’ve booked a private half-day tour to Montserrat with pickup at our hotel and drop-off at the ship, the Viking Vela.

Here’s a look at the official cruise map from Viking’s website.

Our specific cruise, however, has a couple of port modifications – La Spezia for Livorno (Florence/Pisa) and Trieste for Chioggia (Venice). Since we have never been to Italy (and hope for additional trips there), we were fine with the changes. Trieste is east of Venice almost on the border with Croatia (about where I added the red arrow above). In fact, the change to Trieste provides us a chance for an excursion to Slovenia’s capital, Llubljana, giving us an unexpected country to check off our travel list and giving us 7 countries visited this trip. These ports will all provide new places for us to visit.

Our itinerary is as follows:

Travel Day	Port / City
1	Fly Houston – Istanbul
2	Fly Istanbul – Barcelona, Spain
3	Barcelona, Spain (Embark)
4	Barcelona, Spain
5	Marseille, France
6	Monte Carlo, Monaco
7	La Spezia, Italy
8	Rome (Civitavecchia), Italy
9	Naples, Italy
10	Sail The Ionian Sea
11	Corfu (Kerkyra), Greece
12	Dubrovnik, Croatia
13	Split, Croatia
14	Trieste, Italy (excursion to Slovenia)
15	Trieste, Italy (Disembark) Fly Venice – Istanbul
16	Fly Istanbul -Houston

Turkish Airlines has non-stop flights between Houston and Istanbul, then there are usually non-stop flights between Istanbul and most major European cities. We found business class tickets for about half the price of business class on any other airline/route combination. This allows us the opportunity to get a good night’s rest on the flight to Istanbul and hopefully be better rested even with criss-crossing time zones to start our trip in Barcelona. The return flight from Venice has a 14-hour layover in Istanbul (arriving near midnight), so we’ll stay at the air-side hotel (i.e. not leave the airport) before our return flight to Houston.

I’ll try to keep up with posting every day of the trip but expect I’ll fall behind! Stay tuned!