July 24 – Portofino, Italy

26 degrees, mostly cloudy, humid

We get off to a late start this morning as we aren’t meeting until 9:30…nice. The boat is tendered this morning, so we have that to get through before setting off. The seas are a bit rough this morning. It’s amazing how on the big boat they don’t seem rough at all, but once on the little tender boat, it’s obvious how rough they are.

Our tender brings us to Portofino, but we get on another boat that takes us to nearby Santa Margherita – a similarly small town very close by in Tigullio Bay. The boat ride is very interesting, scenery and boats

…once again we are in the land of huge yachts. Although it is a hot day, it is mostly overcast so we are able to sit on the top, uncovered deck with no problems with heat.

We start with a walking tour of the town, visiting the church ( as usual) along the way. We also visit some pretty amazing gardens built into the hill we walk up to reach the 17^th century Villa Durazzo Although beautiful, the villa isn’t particularly interesting. One interesting thing was that there is a chapel right in the villa that is still being today – mostly for weddings.

There is no ‘comfort’ stop on this tour, so only for the purpose of using the facilities do we sit and enjoy a beer before getting on the PACKED public ferry back to Portofino, to then get into a PACKED line to get onto the ship’s tender to finally get back to the boat.

This is when the day got interesting…as I mentioned earlier, the sea is a bit rough today, well this means that emptying 100 people from a tender in what should be about 10 minutes took about 30. Rather than streaming off one after the other with minimal assistance, everyone had to stay seated until each was directed to move to the exit, then we had to wait for the exact moment when we were directed to move and were

basically lifted off the tender. It was truly something else! Considering how many tenders we’ve been on, we’ve never experienced anything close to this. We are told later that the swells were 2 metres – no big deal from a big ship, but from a little tender boat…a very big deal. It was a bit unnerving sitting on the tender while it bobbed and smashed against the side of the ship that more workers than usual were trying to steady it.  I’m thankful we

are relatively young, relatively it and capable of lifting, hoisting and moving ourselves…others aren’t so lucky and needed a lot of help today.  Oh, and I’m also thankful I’m not prone to sea-sickness and had just used facilities…that would not have been pretty.

After all that excitement, lunch ended up being room service and a bottle of wine

Our departure time over two hours delayed…no big surprise!