A Tale of Two Ships and Planes

A Tale of Two Ships and a Plane - An Adventure Across Barcelona, Marseilles, and Beyond

In this solo episode of Season 7 of Open Forum in the Villages, Florida, Mike Roth shares an in-depth recount of his recent vacation travels. The trip begins with a smooth experience on Air Canada from Orlando to Barcelona, offering high praise for the airline's business class service. In Barcelona, Mike revisits La Ramblas only to find it under reconstruction but enjoys local tapas and landmarks. The journey then takes listeners aboard the maiden voyage of the Princess Star, highlighting efficient check-ins and exceptional dining experiences, but also touching on the less favorable episode in Palermo, Sicily. The podcast continues with the transition to the Norwegian Jewel for the return trip to Miami, recounting a mix of pleasant port visits and logistical hiccups, such as a missing-person incident at sea. Mike closes by sharing his insights and extending gratitude to the podcast's supporters.

00:00 Welcome to Open Forum Season Seven
00:38 A Tale of Two Ships and a Plane
02:24 Exploring Barcelona
04:48 The Maiden Voyage of Princess Star
07:14 Adventures in Marseilles
12:58 Rural Tour in Rome
13:50 Disappointing Stop in Sicily
15:20 Touring Gibraltar
17:42 Challenges on the Norwegian Jewel
25:18 Final Thoughts and Return Home
25:48 Alzheimer's Tip from Dr. Craig Curtis
26:52 Support and Stay Connected

Villages Vitality Listeners, I've got some good news for you. In season 8 most new episodes will released as both audio & video versions. Videos on Apple Podcasts, Busssprout.com and YouTube. If you're listening via our Buzzsprout feed, you can ask questions via the Fan Mail button or leave me comments as a text or in our new feature, you can send it as a voicemail. If you'd like a response, make sure you leave your name, email address and cell phone number.

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

A Tale of Two Ships & Planes

[00:00:05] Nancy: ​Welcome to Season seven of Open Forum in The Villages of Florida. In this show, we talk to leaders of clubs and interesting folks who live in and around The Villages. We also talk to people who have information vital to seniors. You will get perspectives of what is happening in The Villages, Florida area.

We are a listener supported podcast. There will be shout outs for supporters. 

[00:00:34] Mike Roth: This is Mike Roth on Open Forum in The Villages, Florida. I haven't done one of these solo episodes in a long time, so I thought I had put together a episode that I'm calling a Tale of Two Ships in a Plane . Recently I came back from a. Wonderful vacation, and I'm going to take it apart piece by piece.

 But the first part of the trip was on Air Canada from Orlando to Montreal and then Montreal on to Barcelona. Now on Air Canada, I had booked business class the whole way to make sure I got a sleeper seat on the transocean portion of the flight. The trip from Orlando to Montreal was wonderful. Not a problem. We get to Montreal and there's a little bit of a delay, but Air Canada had three lounges for their business class customers. The first lounge was a standard airport lounge.

The second lounge offered some food and beverages. Third lounge was a first class restaurant. They had entrees. You could order off a menu. The food was first class, service was first class. There were beverages. It was really quite a wonderful experience and there was no charge, so we really enjoyed it.

And then the flight on Air Canada delivered another perfect flight. The food was great. The cabin at attendants were great. The, even the sleeper seats were comfortable. And so we got to Barcelona in really good shape, so I want to give my congratulations to Air Canada and that'd probably be my first choice for international air travel for a long time to come. So we get to Barcelona and we're gonna spend a few days to get used to the time zone and visited a few of the sites. I had visited Barcelona about 20 years ago and really enjoyed Las Ramblas so we went out, of our way to pick a hotel right on Las Ramblas because 20 years ago it was a bustling street.

It was about five lanes of traffic wide that they reduced to one lane of traffic in each direction. And in the center island that they built, they had little booths or concessions, restaurants places that sold flowers and birds and costume characters. It was a real hopping place, so we were anxious to get back there and we liked tapas, so we booked the hotel. The hotel itself that we booked was very nice. It was like English translation ​Royale. And although the rooms weren't royal, it was very nice. They had a great breakfast which we included in the price of the hotel. We booked it through something called Princess Promotions, which is something that Princess sold us on their last cruise. And they said princess promotion pays everything except for a few dollars in taxes, it turned out that the few dollars in taxes was a lot more than that almost so that I wouldn't buy another Princess Promotions again. And then we still have five days left, so we spent two days in Barcelona. Unfortunately, Las Rambles was under total reconstruction, so almost all of the vendor booths that I loved were gone.

The street itself was torn up and being repaired brick by brick. So we enjoyed Barcelona. We saw a few sites. We went to a house that Gouty completely redid, and it was wonderful experience. It was a short walk from the hotel. But the experiences that we expected to have on Las Ramblas never happened.

On the second day, we asked the concierge at the hotel what the best topas place was, and he gave us the name of a place that was around the corner on a very narrow street. It was like a. I thought a local bar, but the food in there was absolutely fantastic. So we enjoyed that.

And the reason we picked this particular Princess cruise out of Barcelona was that it was the maiden voyage of a brand new ship. About a 4,000 passenger ship called the Princess Star, which was the sister ship to the Princess Sun, which we had gone on last December and really enjoyed. And we had our hopes high.

We were a little bit worried about being on a maiden voyage because things can go wrong and maybe the ship won't even sail. But the ship did sail the check-in process. It was flawless. Princess sent us our medallions and we had the sanctuary class. And so the medallion came with a letter that said, when you get to the terminal.

That you need to go in the green lane. Okay, so we get to the terminal, there's a little bit of a line, five or 10 people. We get to the green lane. There are fewer people and we get rushed through that real fast. We hardly had a chance to stop. We stopped at a check-in desk. They checked our passports and boarding passes and.

Lo and behold, we were walking on the ship. I think the whole thing was less than 20 minutes, so it was really a fast boarding process and very trouble free. The ship was, is almost a mirror copy of the ship we had been on in December, but. It was better in several respects. And the state room that we had was very nice.

We had a balcony in the sanctuary class so that on the ship naturally we could eat in any of the restaurants or the specialty restaurants, but there was a special restaurant just for sanctuary guests that probably held 50 tables and. It was a very nice restaurant. I don't think we had a dinner in the main dining room.

We did have a couple of breakfasts there because the sanctuary wasn't open that early.

We were very happy with the service and the food in the sanctuary restaurant and the specialty restaurants that we ate in

 The overall dining experience even in the food court, I forget the name that they use on it was excellent. We went to. Many ports. I'll talk about a few of them. The first port we went to was Marseille . We had never been to Marseille and we get to Marseille and they tell us the ship is so big, we have to dock it the freight terminal container port, and we get off the ship and they put us on a bus to go for about four miles to get to the end of the dock. Ah, so we take the bus ride. We're driving along the bus ride about halfway and we're looking out at the scene in the port and there's a Norwegian ship in dry dock.

We didn't realize it was dry dock at first. There's just a lot of cranes all over it. And then we look up at it and we say, gee, it's the Norwegian Jewel. That's the ship we're supposed to take in about two weeks to come back to America. And we didn't think anything of it. We figured it was just really in the port, letting walk passengers on a, another cruise. And we come back after we had visited a few places in Marsaeille we didn't get far out of the port. I'm, I'll go over that experience in a minute. But on the way back, we took a closer look at the ship, this Norwegian Jewel that we were gonna be on, and there were no lifeboats on the ship.

All the lifeboats were on the ground. Apparently they have to be replaced every 20 years. So when we get back to the ship, I grab my phone and. Sent a text message over to my travel agent who booked us on the Norwegian Jewel, and I said, Hey, is this ship gonna actually be ready on the 15th of October when we're ready to come back to the states?

And he said, oh, yeah, no problem. Luckily, he was right. The ship was ready. The part about no problem was, a little bit of an overstatement. Anyway, so we're in Marseille and the bus drops us off at the port and there's a little I'm gonna call it a tourist area, but there's an old church.

So the first thing we do is we walk up about 50 steps to go through this old Catholic Basilica . It was beautiful. It was under construction. It was free. I couldn't complain about that. We got through that in 15 minutes, maybe 20 minutes. And then we walked down to this tourist area and they had a Museum of Illusions, which would've been interesting because I had gone through one about a year ago in Orlando on International Drive.

And I like optical illusions and stuff. Anyway, it was closed, so we go further down and there's another very strange shaped museum with a little manmade lake in front of it. Waterway with a strange boat. And we go over there and we say to the lady at the ticket counter, what kind of exhibit is this?

And she says, oh, it's newly discovered cave drawings from prehistoric times. And I go, what? I never heard of it. And we go in and we pay for it. And they put you in a little four person. I'm gonna call it a boat or a cart, and it was like a Disney ride because they put you into this cart and they take you down into the caves that were discovered in the nine and explored in the 1990s.

And they produced the caves on the interior walls, and you could see reproductions of these cave drawings that were. 10 or 15,000 years old. And it was animals and horses and all kinds of things. It was terribly interesting. And so after you get out of the little boat, they show you the typical tourist film, and then you're in a museum.

Okay? And the museum is. Displaying animals that I had never seen before. 'cause these are the way the animals would've looked based on the skeletons that they found. And we found that museum to be terribly interesting. We probably spent an hour and a half there. Worth the time and money. The little boat that we saw was a reproduction of the diving boat. That the the guy who found the cave drawings used and he accidentally found these cave drawings. So he was a scuba diver using scuba equipment. 'cause it was an underwater cave. He had to go into the cave, it was filled with water. And then you came up, you were in the middle of a, I'm gonna call it a lake inside the cave.

Because of the tides, 'cause it was a tidal cave and he started seeing these drawings and some of 'em were really quite amazing. They had a whole series, an area where these prehistoric men had put their hands on the the wall or the ceiling of the cave and, blown smoke. At their hand. And so when they remove their hand, you see an outline of their hand.

It was really quite interesting to see what these prehistoric men had done in the, in these cave drawings. I never thought I'd see. I'm gonna call it real or as close to real cave drawings as you could ever see. 'cause I'm never going down in the real caves. But this little ride, it wasn't exactly little, it was probably a 20 minute ride depicted was quite unusual.

So that was our time in Marseille.

I don't know think it was the next stop, but the next stop I'll talk about was Rome. Now, we had been to Rome a few years ago and we loved Rome, little crowded, but the bus ride from the pier to Rome was between an hour and a half and two and a half hours, depending on traffic.

And so we decided we wouldn't go on a tour of Rome or any of the things that we've already seen. Instead, we decided to take a rural tour and we went to an olive farm where they grew olives and we watched them harvesting so olives, and then we had some wonderful olive based snacks tasted their olive oil.

We actually came home with a couple of bottles of olive oil. Very good stuff. We learned how it's made. I actually tasted an olive right off the tree that there were harvesting, and I'm telling you, it was so bitter. I spit the thing out. It was a terrible taste, but the real olive oil didn't taste anything like the olives off the tree.

We visited Naples. We did not go to Pompeii again because we had been to Pompeii . We stopped in Sicily at Palermo which was the low point of the cruise. I didn't know very much about Palermo, so we decided to take one of the ship provided tours. Most of the tour was a waste of time.

 So we walked around the Port of Palermo. To say it was crowded and dirty is an understatement. But it was both of those there were two ships in the port Costa line ship, and the Princess Sun. And so we de, we walked back to the cruise ship terminal to get on the boat. And we encountered a tremendous line of probably a thousand people and they pushed us all together like a Disney zigzag line and.

And people were coughing and sneezing and pushed together passengers from both ships, Costa and the Princess ship. Princess only had one person checking your medallion to , let you go back on the ship. So, that slowed things down a lot and, the Italians in Sicily took everyone with a Costa card and put 'em in another line so they can go and express.

So we was stuck in line for about 45 minutes. We did not enjoy that. So I would say in Sicily, we were sorry, we got off the ship. That's the bottom line for that port. And then from Sicily, we cruised over to. The Port of Gibraltar and if, I don't think there was another cruise ship in town in Gibraltar the day we were there, but it's a an English independent area at, in the tip of Spain. Very clean, very well organized. Enough of bus tours, so we took a taxi tour of Gibraltar. We saw the high points. One of the high points was visiting with the apes.

There are monkeys , that roam free in the park there. And you can get close to 'em. You're not supposed to feed them. One of the cab drivers did. And the monkeys were very cooperative. That was a, an interesting thing. And then they had nice shopping centers, shopping area, it's restaurants and from downtown Gibraltar, we walked back to the ship.

It was about 20 minutes all uphill. So we get back to Barcelona on October 15th.

We have to change ships to go on the dock. And the, it was a long. Two or three miles along the dock in Barcelona to get from one ship to the other. So we decided to take a cab and we get to the cab line and it's a hundred people long. And if you know me, you know I don't have much patience. So I see a cab driver out of line just looking at his phone talking. And so I walked over to him and said, Hey, you want to take us over to the other pier? And we jumped in his cab. So we bumped a lot of the line. That was good. So we get over to, and the Norwegian was very careful about telling everyone what time to show up on our boarding paperwork.

It said be there at 10 30. So we got there at 9 45 with this taxi cab. And there was a long line, this disorganized, long line of people trying to get rid of baggage that included us and then go into to check in. It probably took us 45 minutes to an hour to check bags and get in front of the Norwegian people to check in and pick up a room key card.

And after we did that, we gotta get in another long line to and it wasn't quite as long. To check our passports and they put a stamp in it in there that said Barcelona. So we finally get the opportunity to go on the Norwegian Jewel.

We get on the Jewel. We check our room naturally our luggage hasn't made it to the room, so we go to the restaurant called O'Malley's, and I order a Ruben sandwich. It's supposed to be a little bit of cheese, corn, beef and sauerkraut,. So a munch on the sandwiches, and this guy comes by named DiJi from India, and it says Everything okay?

And we said no we're very apprehensive about getting our reservations for the specialty restaurants. We had wanted to make five reservations, and we can only make one of them online because every specialty restaurant on the ship only had 8:00 PM reservations, and we wanted 5:00 PM reservations.

And this fellow Diji was very good. And he said, let me take care of it for you. What days do you want? What times do you want? And we put it down on a piece of paper and we were munching on our lunch. By the way, the, on the Reuben sandwich, there was one thin sliced of corn beef, probably the strangest corn beef I've ever had.

We could have taken the Star home. Boy would've had to stay in Lisbon or someplace else in Spain for another week, and we didn't wanna stay away for another week. That was honestly a mistake. The cruise from Barcelona back to Miami was supposed to have a stop in Lisbon Cadiz Portugal. And then in the Azores.

Before we started the trip, Norwegian canceled Lisbon, we wanted to visit Lisbon again, and they provided us no compensation for cutting Lisbon outta the itinerary. Cadiz was very nice. We visited a family owned winery about 30 miles inland, where they made us a nice lunch and we actually cooked it and with their instructions sampled their wine and Brandy brought some of it back.

And the Azores was, yeah, we've been to the Azores people who took the long tours on the bus to go out to the lake and see this wonderful lake in the mountains. It rained. Luckily we stayed in the port. We had a good time in the port, got back on the ship and the ship, leaves. Oh, a couple of people didn't make the ship.

I don't know what they were doing, but they didn't get on. And maybe that was good. So we get out of the port first night. ,. We have a bad history of when the, a ship, a cruise ship changes captains. The captain changed. The last time the captain changed was in the Tasman Sea in Tasmania. And when they changed captains, the new guy gets on the PA about an hour out of the port and says, Hey, we've been ordered by the New Zealand Coast Guard to go pick up a German sailor whose sailboat has been disabled for the last three days.

So we did that. It was interesting and exciting. Didn't cause much of a delay in the cruise, but this time the new captain doesn't come on the speakers. And at 2:00 AM we hear this announcement code Oscar. Code Oscar. The next day we figured out what that meant. That meant a man overboard.

Yep. Someone jumped the ship and for 10 hours between 2:00 AM and. Noon the next day. The ship sailed in circles around the area where the guy jumped off the ship. Apparently 20 people a year die in suicide off ships. I didn't realize that. But the Norwegian Jewel was out of the dry dock, they put 3,500 routers in to improve the internet signal in the cabins and the hallways which was nice.

Unfortunately, they left the software from 2015 to get on the internet. So to get on the internet, they had a line of about 30, 35 people with only one server. One guy who knew what he was doing. The, at one point in, I wanted to print something out, and they had a printer there that you could use, but the instructions on the printer didn't have any relation to the reality of what you had to do to get on the printer and print the page out.

That was disappointing. The Brazilian restaurant on the Jewel was absolutely fantastic. The food was phenomenal. The French res restaurant was so good. We ate there twice. Yeah. The specialty restaurants, I'm not gonna talk about. The food in the main dining room was only fair from a villager standard.

If you know what the type of food they serve at the country clubs, the average country club, that was the dining room. The dining room was called the Czars Palace. And it was a gigantic room decorated as if it was a Czar's Palace. It was gorgeous. The men's room didn't say men on it, it said Czar.

And the it had a picture of a Czar and the women's room had a picture of his Czarina with a crown and nice restaurants. The the self-service Garden Cafe or food court was always crowded and difficult to get a table at. The biggest problem, and I'll talk only briefly about it for us, which was the killer, was the first morning we get up, try to take a shower. There's absolutely no hot water. We complain about it. Second day, we have no water until 9:00 AM and then it was only very hot or very cold. Third day, we have either very hot water or very cold water, nothing in between.

 Fourth day. They replaced the regulator unit and that didn't fix the problem. And then they tell me that they have to turn off the water to 25 cabins to fix the plumbing so that we can have a moderate temperature water, which was almost unbelievable.

But they did that. And after they did that, we had hot water. Oh yeah. When we complained about it I asked for a different cabin and the people at the customer service desk said, oh no, we don't have any cabins. We can't upgrade you. Nothing available.

Sold out. Which I thought was strange for a first voyage after a dry dock. I tried to buy some of the Haven class suites, but they had a bidding process that was a little bit insane and I was unsuccessful in buying that upgrade. So I figured those cabins were available. The. Not the manager of this customer service, but the person directly under him finally offered us an interior cabin to shower in.

We would have to walk from the port side of the ship to the starboard side of the ship to take the shower. We did that for one day. We were very unhappy, and then they gave us $500 shipboard credit. Whoopy do. Anyway, the seas were relatively calm. The passage from east to west was okay.

 I took a tour of the ship, the , the engine control room, not the engine room. And I was surprised about how many cameras there were. They had great 4K cameras looking in every elevator. The elevators were a little bit crowded, but not too bad.

They actually took us onto the bridge. We didn't meet with the captain. And this was after the the day after the code. Oscar, the the captain later was unwilling to say very much about what happened since the family was still on board. We left the search area when the Portuguese Coast Guard arrived. There were three search planes and a couple of other cargo ships that were searching in the same area. I don't believe the guy was found. We get to Miami, we get off, and then we take a cab to the Miami Airport and we rented a Enterprise rent a car.

Drove it back to Leesburg in about 5 and a half hours. Turned it in and it cost, there's only $70 plus tolls and gas to get back , from Miami, which was great. And if anyone has any questions, you know how to contact me. mike@rothvoice.com.

Now, let's listen to a short Alzheimer's tip from Dr. Craig Curtis.

Dr. Curtis, can you give, our listeners a tip on keeping their brain healthy? 

[00:25:52] Dr. Craig Curtis: Absolutely. My favorite tip is, involves a change in eating patterns, but it's not a drastic change. It's simply increasing the amount of fresh fruits and vegetables, fish, other white meats, and lowering the amounts of red meat.

Sweetss and sugars, and also carbohydrates. It's essentially following a Mediterranean type diet plan. 

[00:26:22] Warren: With over 20 years of experience studying brain health, Dr. Curtis's goal is to educate the village's community on how to live a longer, healthier life. To learn more, visit his website, craigcurtismd.com, or call 3 5 2 5 0 0 5 2 5 2 to attend a free seminar.

[00:26:38] Mike Roth: Thank you, Dr. Curtis.

 Listeners, I'm thrilled to share with you this podcast, which is my passion project, to bring knowledge, inspiration, and things you need to know about Villages and the people living here. Be sure to hit the follow button to get the newest episode each week, or you can hit the purple supporter box.

Even a small donation of three to $10 a month makes a big difference. And you can cancel your subscription at any time. Your support means the world to us. Stay curious, stay inspired, and keep those headphones on. 

[00:27:17] Nancy: Remember, our next episode will be released next Friday at 9:00 AM Should you wanna become a major supporter of the show or have questions, please contact us at mike@rothvoice.com.

This is a shout out for supporters. Tweet Coleman, Ed Williams, Duane Roemmich and Dr. Craig Curtis at K 2 in The Villages. We will be hearing more from Dr. Curtis with short Alzheimer's tips each week. If you know someone who should be on the show, contact us at mike@rothvoice.com. The way our show grows is with your help.

Text your friends about this show. If you enjoyed listening or just tell your friends about the show. We thank everyone for listening. The content of the show is copyrighted by Roth Voice 2025, all rights reserved.