Sounds wonderful doesn't it? A dreamy day in beautiful Venice, wandering around the canals, over bridges, generally getting lost in the back streets.
Well a dream is all it was, because although the itinerary proclaimed the day after we embarked Ruby Princess as "Venice", by 9am we were reversing out of the port - a tricky manoeuve given Italian drivers are just as mad on water as they are on land and clearly don't believe in giving way, even to a giant like Ruby Princess - sailing past St Mark's Square and off down the Adriatic en route to Athens.
Confused? Well so was I, not because we had left Venice so early, as I had read on the itinerary that we would be leaving at 8am - so actually we were late departing - but because the ship insisted on calling it a Venice day even though we were very much at sea.
So I couldn't understand why the teens' club wasn't open - it was operating on port times, not sea day times - and why it wasn't a formal night, as it always is on the first day at sea. Most shocking of all, it meant the rest of my itinerary was thrown because after "Venice" there was the real day at sea so we were arriving in Athens a day later than expected.
Luckily we had raced into the city as soon as we dumped our bags on the ship the previous evening or the only Venice we would have seen was as we sailed out, but I bet several others missed out.
Just to emphasise it was a sea day, at 11am the whistles sounded to call everyone to the lifeboat drill.
"No need to have your lifejackets on yet," DJ Mark told us incessently as he killed time waiting for everyone to saunter to their muster stations. Well it is supposed to be an emergency you know! "In fact, if you have yours on, can you take it off because we will show you after the briefing how to put it on."
Make sense of that...!
Jane Archer
