It seems like a few of our sisters have been meeting up with each other lately. Earlier this year, Seabourn Legend and Seabourn Spirit had a dinner date in St. Kitts, while Seabourn Odyssey and Seabourn Quest met up last month in Safaga, Egypt. And just a few days ago, sister ships Seabourn Pride and Seabourn Legend rendezvoused in Livorno, Italy.

In true Seabourn style, the hotel directors of both ships put their heads together to organize a special “Welcome Back” experience for their guests returning from the full-day tours. They rolled out the red carpet and the bands from both ships played as one.

“Both teams gave our guests a wonderful ‘Seabourn Moment,’” said Seabourn Legend Hotel Director Nick Burger.

Together again in Livorno!

Seabourn Legend Hotel Director Nick Burger and Seabourn Pride Hotel Director Philip Reutener give their teams four thumbs up!

The talented bands from both ships welcome guests back to the ships.

Guest Bloggers Adam McCulloch and Emma Sloley are married travel writers based in New York. Originally from Australia, they moved to the U.S. in 2004. They have traveled to over 60 countries and written for a wide range of publications, including Travel + Leisure, Condé Nast Traveler, New York magazine, Gotham, Gourmet Traveller, Coastal Living, Reader’s Digest and Outside.  Adam and Emma are sending us stories and pictures daily from their 14-day voyage aboard Seabourn Odyssey between Rome and Venice. Come by and read their blogs often.

Day 6 – May 3, Syracuse, Italy: Right Place, Wrong Weather

Some destinations suit a certain kind of weather. The Greek Isles are idyllic under a dazzling cerulean blue sky, England needs a jolly good atmospheric spritz of mist and drizzle to really come into its own, while Costa Rican rainforests are at their flamboyant best during tropical downpours. Catania, one of the destinations on today’s tour of Sicily, feels like it should be experienced beneath thunderous clouds pelting black volcanic rain or shrouded beneath the jaundiced desert grit that periodically blows in from the Sahara. Somehow it just doesn’t look right under a cheery blue sky.

From the moment we disembarked it was clear this town had a forceful personality.  Blood oranges oozed murderously on a fruit seller’s cart. In a small square all the statues had been decapitated in a revolutionary rage and, further on in the shadows under the bridge, old men loitered around card games, arguing in scratchy mafioso voices.

On entering the main square we discovered a classic baroque streetscape, but the style’s usual whimsy was rendered a funereal shade of black. The volcanic stone from which the whole town appears to have been hewn comes from the flanks of Mount Etna, which looms over the city like an angry stepfather, perpetually poised to blow his top.

As if we needed a reminder that this was Sicily, the soundtrack to the Godfather seemed to follow us wherever we went — from the main square with its sooty black elephant fountain where a melancholy bearded man played a haunting tune on his accordion, to the fish market, which appeared to have been hacked out of a coal pit and was filled with the raucous yelling you might expect at a cockfight.

All this drama under the influence of today’s glorious weather was far too incongruous for moody Catania, which felt like a set piece for some wonderfully grim saga. We can’t wait to return in bad weather.

Souvenir: Mount Etna certainly photographs well but our guide assured us that the very best memento was a piece of volcanic rock. “We make more souvenirs every time Etna erupts,” she quipped. So we did just that, pocketing a tiny chunk of black lava stone from one of the calderas. It’s a gift for a dear friend of ours who collects stones from around the world. We just hope she doesn’t think it’s a lump of coal…

Day 7 – May 4: Ionian Sea: Let the Games Begin

Golf:
We thought the ship only had 10 decks so imagine our excitement — Spinal Tap style — when we discovered that this ship goes to 11. On the very top deck we found the driving range and, joy of joys, it was free. Not being golfers, it took us a while to be able to clear the railing. But soon we were watching the little white balls soar far into the Ionian Sea. What fun! We do wonder how they fetch them though — maybe one of the tender boats follows behind scooping them up?

Table Tennis:
Is it just us or have tennis courts grown smaller since we last played? Even the net seems to have shrunk — although that did make it easier to jump at the end of the game. What a lark it was belting the little balls back and forth! We realized in the end, though, that the flimsy-floaty white balls were actually for kids, so we changed over to the hard and fast golf balls, which was a lot more satisfying (even if they did hurt a bit more).

Shuffleboard:
Finally a game that looked so simple even we should be able to master it: shuffleboard. After some debate, we decided that it must be a cross between hopscotch and jousting. A contestant, holding a long pole, stands at each end. The first round involves hopping on one leg while shoving the dinner plates down the green in an attempt to stub the competitor’s toes. When all the dinner plates have been thrown (don’t worry, they’re made from plastic so they don’t break), you run at each other like jousting knights, trying to wrap the fork of the pole around your competitor’s neck. (Again, don’t worry, there are rubber safety-stoppers on the prongs). It’s a real hoot when you do it right.

The Observation Bar:
Exhausted after our day of athletics we repaired to our favorite bar with our favorite bartender and our favorite piano-man serenading us with our favorite songs. There’s a lot of favorite in that one sentence but our enthusiasm goes to 11, too. The Observation Bar is located at the pointy end of the ship on deck 10.

*Disclaimer: Of course, we didn’t really play any of these games in the fashion described above. Although we’re still a bit confused about how to play shuffleboard.

We are proud to present to you the hardworking crew of Seabourn Quest’s 2013 World Cruise! On board since January 6, 2013, every member of the team pampered our guests each day and made sure they enjoyed their voyage around the world. The 116-day cruise just came to an end on May 3, 2013, and the crew exchanged hugs and goodbyes with guests as they disembarked the ship in Venice. We have no doubt they will return home with many fond memories from their journey.

Next year, Seabourn Sojourn will sail a 116-day world cruise from Los Angeles to Venice. We hope to see you on board! Who is planning to sail on this voyage?

Cheers to the crew of Seabourn Quest’s 2013 World Cruise! Photo by Captain Geir-Arne Thue-Nilsen.

Guest Bloggers Adam McCulloch and Emma Sloley are married travel writers based in New York. Originally from Australia, they moved to the U.S. in 2004. They have traveled to over 60 countries and written for a wide range of publications, including Travel + Leisure, Condé Nast Traveler, New York magazine, Gotham, Gourmet Traveller, Coastal Living, Reader’s Digest and Outside.  Adam and Emma are sending us stories and pictures daily from their 14-day voyage aboard Seabourn Odyssey between Rome and Venice. Come by and read their blogs often.

Today we swapped the Odyssey (population: 452) for a slightly smaller vessel, Jake (capacity: 22) after arriving just post-dawn in Valletta, Malta, a stunning port lined with steep sandstone cliffs. Jake the power boat took us on a high-speed, slightly bumpy journey past the high-rise shores of Malta and across to a neighboring island called Gozo, a small but flamboyantly beautiful speck in the ocean full of stately sandstone houses and churches, with a classic Mediterranean backdrop of terraced hillsides dotted with prickly pear cacti, olives and fig trees.

While Gozo and Comino (another comely part of the archipelago, whose claim to fame is a channel of psychedelically blue water called The Blue Lagoon) seem dwarfed by the hulking bulk of the main island, in reality Malta only covers around 122 square miles, making it one of the world’s smallest states.

Malta might be diminutive but it’s not the smallest – in fact, it doesn’t even make it in the top ten of the world’s smallest countries. Among that illustrious, if teensy, company are the Maldives, Monaco, Nauru, Liechtenstein and everyone’s favorite country-within-a-city, Vatican City. (All roads on this blog really do seem to lead to Rome.)

We were going to bang on for another few paragraphs about the beauty of small places, but in keeping with the theme, let’s keep it short and sweet.

Overheard: “On a small island you have to be faithful to your wife. Otherwise she’ll find out by the time you get home.”

Cocktail Corner: A waiter bearing poolside refreshments is one of the world’s most perfect sights, but we were a little skeptical about the combination of kiwi sorbet and champagne ours was proffering this afternoon. Until we tried it and realized that the French and the New Zealanders should have got together earlier. Consider us converted.

What the Heck is That? Just when you thought it was safe to go back out on the pool deck, we found another oddity there: this pint-sized pelagic predator sits atop the umbrellas. Is it meant to scare off cheeky seagulls or does it serve a more prosaic function?

Guest Bloggers Adam McCulloch and Emma Sloley are married travel writers based in New York. Originally from Australia, they moved to the U.S. in 2004. They have traveled to over 60 countries and written for a wide range of publications, including Travel + Leisure, Condé Nast Traveler, New York magazine, Gotham, Gourmet Traveller, Coastal Living, Reader’s Digest and Outside.  Adam and Emma are sending us stories and pictures daily from their 14-day voyage aboard Seabourn Odyssey between Rome and Venice. Come by and read their blogs often.  

Day 3 — April 29, Sorrento to Tunisia: You Don’t Have to be Crazy to be a Conqueror, but it Helps

Today was a day at sea, so we had plenty of time to work on our sun tans, try out the spa and ponder the nature of megalomania. Here’s a remarkable fact: we’ve spent the last two days and nights sailing away from Rome in one of the fastest and most modern of cruise ships, by tomorrow morning we’ll be in Africa, and yet we still won’t have traveled beyond the reach of the Roman Empire.

All at sea

How did Caesar and his cohorts conquer so widely? Well, just as absolute power corrupts absolutely, emperors, tzars and dictators have long demonstrated that a crazy amount of power makes you stark raving mad. The Roman Empire wrote the book on crazy. Take Caligula, for example. His name is synonymous with the kinds of depraved acts we can’t mention on this G-rated blog (there is, after all, one child on board). On his most rational of days Caligula was merely content to proclaim himself God. He even built a pontoon bridge across the Bay of Naples and pretended to walk on water. But on his irrational days? Oh boy. One day when he ran out of criminals in Rome’s Circus Maximus he ordered guards to drag the first five rows of spectators into the arena to do battle with the lions.

Caligula stands out in history because…well, we’re not entirely sure. Other emperors have been equally diabolical, and not just the ancient ones. Enver Hoxha, for instance, ruled Albania in 1944. When we say ruled, his official title (of his own invention) was Comrade-Chairman-Prime Minister-Foreign-Minister-Minister of War-Commander-in-Chief of the People’s Army Enver Hoxha. He was rather paranoid – and probably with some justification — of being assassinated, so he kidnapped a dentist who bore him some resemblance and forced the poor man to undergo plastic surgery to strengthen the likeness. Now if that’s not crazy, we don’t know what is.

Shipshape: Talking of transforming faces, the treatment we had at The Spa at Seabourn this morning was pretty sublime. (And that’s how you do a segue, folks.) While the Seabourn 24 Karat Gold Facial sounded like something Caligula might have gone for, we opted for a humbler experience in the Elemis Oxydermy Facial. The treatment involved oxygen therapy and microdermabrasion: if you’re unfamiliar with these terms, imagine the world’s tiniest vacuum cleaner being swept over your face, followed by the world’s tiniest floor polisher. Finally, a facial massage and the application of a hydrating mask and voila! We suddenly felt all the travel fatigue swept away like the wake of a ship.

As the wise Scrabble board says, we had a fabulous ayda at sea… 

Game time

Stairway to buffet.

What the heck is that? As we wander the ship, we’re occasionally struck by items that are, at least to us, inexplicable. (Hey, we never claimed to be sailors.) So it was when we saw this little blue creature stranded in the hot tub. At first it looked like a broken bottle, which didn’t seem right. On closer inspection, it seems to be a plastic dolphin in sunglasses on a popsicle stick. Seabourn staff or fellow passengers, feel free to school us in the comment section!

Day 4 – May 1, Tunisia: Souks Appeal

You can tell a lot about a society by its markets. We always like to head to a market when we visit a new place for a hit of full-sensory cultural immersion.

So wandering through the souks of Kairouan on our shore excursion in Tunisia today gave us a snapshot of life in this small north African country. There were the usual stoic donkeys tethered to makeshift carts, along with homicidal scooter drivers weaving and honking through the pedestrian traffic. There were vendors selling brightly colored ceramic tagines, freshly baked round loaves of bread, piles of saffron and henna and pastry shops galore.

Talking to Declan, a lovely English fellow from Guest Services over lunch at The Kasbah, we learned that Seabourn Odyssey’s chef often disembarks at ports like this and shops the local markets for produce to serve onboard – unusual fruits, the catch of the day, that kind of thing. We plan to grill chef before dinner as to what he’s grilling for dinner…we’ll report back.

Does This Mosaic Make Me Look Fat?

Some art forms are suited to portraiture and some are not. Today, on our day trip to El Jem we visited the mosaic museum that featured some of the finest mosaics on the planet. They depicted gods and goddesses, myths and legends, but they also depicted ordinary people…in a kind of unflattering way. While sculptors and painters can trim off the extra pounds and make you appear taller or more noble, in mosaic we suspect even the most stunning family member ended up looking like they had been dropped you on your head. To wit:

Souvenir: The beautiful and carb-tastic “makroudh” cakes stuffed with dates we picked up at one of the sweet stores in the market.

What the Heck is That? What was it that made us two hours late getting away this afternoon? Was it:

1. Yours truly and 38 other passengers trapped in a rug store?
2. Our anchor snagging an old abandoned fishing net in the harbor?
3. Both.

Answer: C (Both)

Sisters Seabourn Odyssey and Seabourn Quest met up a few weeks ago when both ships were in Safaga, Egypt. Both ships were en route to the Mediterranean to begin their Europe summer season. Seabourn Quest Captain Geir-Arne Thue-Nilsen sent us this wonderful photo of the ships in port. Don’t they look like they’re speaking to each other? If ships could talk, what do you think they’re saying to each other?

Seabourn Odyssey and Seabourn Quest together again!

Guest Bloggers Adam McCulloch and Emma Sloley are married travel writers based in New York. Originally from Australia, they moved to the U.S. in 2004. They have traveled to over 60 countries and written for a wide range of publications, including Travel + Leisure, Condé Nast Traveler, New York magazine, Gotham, Gourmet Traveller, Coastal Living, Reader’s Digest and Outside. Adam and Emma are sending us stories and pictures daily from their 14-day voyage aboard Seabourn Odyssey between Rome and Venice. Come by and read their blogs often.

Day 2 – April 29, 2013: Sorrento, Italy

So today we got ruined. No, not through a deleterious lack of sleep due to jet lag (although that certainly helped.) We visited the legendary ruins of Pompeii, and we walked away impressed: less by Pompeii itself than by the lack of it. Sure, we were amazed by how damn clever the Romans were. How could we not be? The seats in the music hall were made from porous volcanic stone to absorb the sound, and the nearby merchants stored food in heated terracotta pots, thereby inventing the world’s first bain-marie-style food warmer. We were impressed by how intact so much of the city was: the frescoes were still bright and the plumbing was in better order than our apartment in New York. And we were slightly appalled by how disgusting the Romans were: washing clothes in human urine? Phallic symbols engraved into the sidewalk? We almost blushed.

All of this was impressive, but nothing was more extraordinary than the fact that Pompeii managed to vanished completely and remain forgotten for 1500 years. Picture this: you grew up in Pompeii and spent your years perfecting the art of creating phallic oil lamps (which were found in abundance during the excavation). You took your craft seriously, envisaging a whole range of phallic objets d’art: lamps, boats, buildings…maybe even the red souvenirs we saw while we were waiting for the bus. You have bigger plans than Pompeii can satisfy, so one day you decide to take your skills to the known world and leave to seek your fortune. You’ve only been gone for a few weeks when you hear a big bang. Half of Mount Vesuvius just exploded.

What do you do? Do you simply assume that your family members are all okay and not check up on them? When orders for your phallic oil lamps drop precipitously do you simply assume that the style has gone out of fashion back in the big smoke? Surely, after a long dusty donkey ride back home, when you reached the smoldering ruin, you thought, “Hang on a minute…Pompeii used to be right here. Maybe this stone and ash dog isn’t a nifty sculpture after all.”

At some point history forgot each and every single person from the ruined city of Pompeii, from the slaves to the senators. Friends and family stopped talking about it. They forgot that they used to go there to drink, eat and view the wonderful pornographic mosaics which, even today, are locked away. They forgot (and perhaps this is entirely understandable) that they ever held a memberships to one of the worlds first gymnasiums – I expect that even now their descendants still receive promotional flyers.

Pompeii, the largest and most important city in the Bay of Naples, was entirely forgotten. That is the most amazing thing of all. A millennium and a half later, all it took was one guy with a shovel and an entire lost city was discovered. Maybe there’s hope for us finding Atlantis on this cruise after all…

Souvenir: The first time we tasted limoncello, we hadn’t even visited Italy. We were young and impressionable at the time and the distinctive flavor of this classic Italian lemon liqueur never left us: sweet and a little bit tart, it tastes like distilled sunshine. When in Rome, or in this case Sorrento, we figured we’d do as the Sorrentines do…pick up a bottle of limoncello to take home. You’ll find this classic all over the Sorrentine Peninsula and beyond, and it’s best served chilled or over ice.

If you didn’t manage to snag a bottle while on shore leave in Sorrento, never fear: we enlisted bartender Sasha at the Sky Bar to mix us up a mean lemondrop martini, made from shaken vodka, lemon juice and limoncello, and look how pretty it is!

Overheard: “See how big is this line? People are crazy to visit the brothel.”
Our guide Daniela at Pompeii, referring to the site of an ancient Roman house of ill repute.

Guest Bloggers Adam McCulloch and Emma Sloley are married travel writers based in New York. Originally from Australia, they moved to the US in 2004. They have traveled to over 60 countries and written for a wide range of publications, including Travel + Leisure, Condé Nast Traveler, New York magazine, Gotham, Gourmet Traveller, Coastal Living, Reader’s Digest and Outside.  Adam and Emma are sending us stories and pictures daily from their 14-day voyage aboard Seabourn Odyssey between Rome and Venice. Come by and read their blogs often. 

Day 1 – April 28, 2013: Arrivederci, Roma
Ahoy, sailors! (We’ve always wanted to say that.)  We are Adam McCulloch and Emma Sloley, married travel writers based in New York who will be guest blogging on this voyage. We’ve had a lot of experience traveling but not a lot with cruising, so we’re super excited to embark on this cruise around the boot — which is how we like to think of our coming circumnavigation of Italy.

Much like Odysseus, after whom this ship is conveniently named, we’re about to embark on an epic and adventure-filled journey across the seas. (Although we kind of hope it doesn’t take us ten years to return home.) We’re going to be passing through some amazing places before we disembark for the last time in Venice – places crammed with history, skullduggery, romance and obscenely good pizza – and we’ll be sharing our thoughts, impressions and loosely researched fact-finding on each of the ports, as well as our time on board.

Our blog is called “If It’s Tuesday, This Must be Seabourn,” a riff on the famous aphorism about whirlwind travel that also happens to be a campy 1960s movie. (Just in case it comes up on trivia night: the film featured cameo appearances from John Cassavetes, Joan Collins, Anita Ekberg and the lady who happened to be Miss Belgium at the time.) If we overhear anything scintillating or scandalous, we’ll share it. If we pick up any amazing souvenirs, we’ll photograph them. If we discover anyone — alive, dead or otherwise — we feel deserves a shout-out, we’ll shout out. If anything on board strikes us as particularly praiseworthy, we’ll draw your attention to it.

So after boarding Seabourn Odyssey in Rome, the famed seat of the Holy Roman Empire, we got to thinking about Baroque. As you do. How did that whole craziness come about anyway? Well, way back in Medieval times, Catholicism was starting to look dreary: the swill had lost its taste, the Black Death had cast a pall over even the most spirited of orgies, and the pizzazz had all but vanished from the public executions. Then in 1545, the church leaders banded together in the Council of Trent and decided that if Catholicism was to survive it had to get seriously fabulous. Churches would resemble a slice of heaven right here on earth, complete with stucco cherubs and gilded everything. The completely OTT architectural style caught on, and its expressive spirit was embraced by writers, musicians, and artists of all kinds, whose opulent works survive to this day in many of the cities we’ll be visiting. You could even say they were Going for Baroque, which is the headline of every second travel story ever published on Europe (FACT).

“How do you know all this?” we hear you ask. The short answer: we make it up, or at least seriously freestyle. Please feel free to disagree, rant, rave or just share your own impressions of the voyage via the comment section of this blog: we’d love to hear from you. If you feel passionately enough about the Baroque or any other topic we tackle, feel free to corner us somewhere on the ship (as long as you’re buying drinks). As for spelling and grammar, we’ll leave the last word to Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund, who said, “I am the King of Rome, and above grammar.”

Welcome aboard.

Writer Emma Sloley

Please meet Adam McCulloch and Emma Sloley, married travel writers based in New York and who are about to embark on Seabourn Odyssey’s April 28, 2013 voyage. During the 14-day cruise, they will write about their experience as they sail between Rome and Venice on the Mediterranean and Adriatic Seas. They will send us stories and pictures daily from their cruise. Come by and read their stories often.

Originally from Australia, Adam and Emma moved to the U.S. in 2004. They have traveled to more than 60 countries and written about their experiences for a wide range of publications, including Travel + Leisure, Condé Nast Traveler, New York magazine, Gotham, Gourmet Traveller, Coastal Living, Reader’s Digest and Outside. They have been chased by a grizzly bear and scared the living daylights out of a polar bear, swum with sharks in Tahiti and eaten rotten shark in Iceland, hiked across the world’s driest desert in Chile, and quenched their thirst with numerous umbrella drinks on numerous beaches around the world.

Adam and Emma are also currently at work on several other writing projects, including a novel, a globetrotting fantasy-adventure series and a guide to the world’s most romantic hotels.

You can also follow them on Twitter at: @adam_at_large and @sloleywandering.

Seabourn Odyssey in Venice

Seabourn Quest Hotel Director Vitor Alves sent along some ravishing pictures of their “Celebration of India” deck party during the World Cruise.

Welcome: Candice Kimmon De Villiers Swart and Kinga Fazekas were transformed into lovely Apsarases, enchanting Hindu temptresses inviting guests to enter a garden of earthly delights.

Currying favor: A sumptuous array of spicy sub-continental treats awaited guests in the Colonnade buffet.

The Far Pavilions: Meanwhile the Pool Patio became a Mughal encampment fit for a Maharajah.

A splendid show of Indian music and dance added a stirring climax to the evening’s festivities.