Less than 24 hours after landing in the UK after our Princess New England cruise, my daughter and I were back at Heathrow, this time on the way to Venice for a Greek Islands cruise on ultra-luxury cruise line Yachts of Seabourn's 450-passenger Seabourn Odyssey.
A bit of a change from the 3,400 passengers with us on Caribbean Princess last week!
Venice was cloudy when we landed and gradually got wetter and wetter - much like the UK we had left and the weather when I was in Venice last June for a two-night pre-naming inaugural on Odyssey.
Then everything went wrong because the ship wasn't quite ready; this time everything has gone right.
We woke up in Split, in Croatia, next day to baking hot sun - and it was only 9am. Everyone raves about Dubrovnik, the walled city in Croatia, and it's a brilliant place, but Split is as amazing, built up around the palace of Roman emperor Diocletian, the only one to resign rather than be assassinated or just die (actually I'm not sure any managed that).
The picture shows the walls of the palace, and how the new houses have been built on the side of it.
We decided it would be fun to go up the bell tower and have a view across the city. Bad move. My daughter got nervous and turned around when she saw the iron staircase start to bend; I made it up three more stairways, white knuckles clutching the handrails, until my fear of heights turned me completely to jelly and I had to go back as well.
Next day we arrived in Bari, Italy, and took an excursion to Alberabello, about an hour's drive from the city, to see the trulli houses - houses built using the dry-stone wall technique and with conical roofs.
Maresa, our guide, explained the gentry in years gone by didn't want to pay taxes on houses for the farmers who worked their land, and they didn't want the farmers to pay the taxes wither as that would mean it was their land.
So they came up with these trulli, which could be demolished fast by removing the keystone at the top if tax inspectors came sniffing around.
There are about 1,000 trulli in Alberabello, and they were impressive, but a traffic jam on the way home meant we were delayed getting back to Bari and missed the chance to look around there too, which was a shame as I was looking forward to having a Marinara pizza - that's one made without cheese that is only available in Italy as far as I am aware.
Today has been very different - Seabourn Odyssey anchored off the Greek island of Cephalonia this morning, the one made famous by the film Captain Corelli's Mandolin (although the book was far better), and the marina at the back of the ship was lowered.
The crew spent ages getting everything ready, including a rather bizarre makeshift swimming pool (so small that a beach ashore would have been a far better bet for anyone wanting to swim) before the powers that be decided there was too much swell in the sea and it was unsafe.
So then they had to pack away the marina, which has sail boats, kayaks and pedal boats. But they did let us go out on the banana boat, which was a bit sedate although we kept asking to go faster, and in the donuts, which were much more fun.
Basically you sit in an inner tube and get pulled behind a speed boat, getting half-drowned in the process! If I could market the massage your posterior gets in that 15 minutes or so, I would be a rich woman - especially if I charged the kind of prices they levy in the spa on this ship!
Tomorrow it's Katakolon and a trip to Olympia, site of the first Olympic Games. See you there.
Jane Archer
