The ship spent the night in Venice and this morning the disembarkation started. For some guests very early (like 5 am.), depending on what time their flights were leaving. For those staying in Venice there was not such a hurry of course. Getting to a hotel in downtown Venice is different from the rest of the world. Venice is pedestrian and hardly any of the hotels can be reached by car. There are two options. One is by motorized transport from the ship to Piazza Roma, which is a big square at the edge of Venice near the train station is and from there porters will help you to walk you to the hotel with your luggage. The second option is to take the boat. Most of them are called Vaporetto’s and they maintain regular services throughout the Venice canals with fixed calling points. It is a sort of bus service but on the water. Some of their routes stop at the major hotels and near the minor ones. Transport into Venice is not cheap as nearly everything is done by manual abor.

For us the day was fairly quiet as we did not have many supplies to load this time. Just fresh vegetables and fruit came on board and some spare parts for the engine room. Still the longshoremen had enough work to do with loading all the luggage. The ship is sailing with a full house again and most of our guests are not traveling light. The luggage either arrives with the Bus that transports the guests or by separate truck from the airport. It is screened by security and then loaded on the ship. Luggage transport here at the Venice terminal is nearly identical to the little luggage trains you see running around the air planes at the airport. Once the luggage has been received inside the ship, Housekeeping comes into action. A supervisor checks the label of each suitcase and directs it to a trolley. The trolley is loaded with luggage just for one deck and when full is then taken up to that specific deck. There it is offloaded in the lobby and picked up by the cabin steward. He carries it by hand to the correct cabin and puts it inside. Quite often the luggage is there before the guest reaches the cabin but that time frame depends very much on how fast the longshoremen can get the luggage from the terminal. Luggage that lost its label ends up at the Front office and the Guest relations manager will then try to match the bag with the correct owner.

The ship sailed on time and as it was a sunny day, Venice was showing its best side again. It being a Sunday, Saint Marc Square was full of people, who were enjoying the sunshine and had of course the additional benefit of seeing a beautiful Holland America Line Ocean Liner coming by and going to sea.

The major part of this cruise will be spend sailing around Italy. Venice is located in the top corner of the right side of the Italian peninsula and eventually we will end up in Monte Carlo which is located on the top left corner of Italy. That meant that after leaving the port of Venice we sailed on a south easterly course, hugging the Italian coast, until we reach the The South East point late tomorrow evening.