Sunday, the big day. We packed our bags for the second last time and took the city bus up to the train station. Unfortunately, in our attempt to be hyper alert and organized, we realized at the station that we were 1 1/2 hours early. Then we stood waiting at the wrong track realizing less than 5 minutes before the train was to arrive. We had to go back under the track and back to the other side. Thank god for the ancient elevator that helped us manage the switch without collapsing in nervous exhaustion.

We still had a few hills to climb as we weren’t sure how to get to the cruise ship from the the Genoa train station. I stayed with the bags while Anne went to a higher floor in the station and found the cruise representatives picking up bags for cruisers arriving by train. How cool is that. The dock was a 5 minute walk away and without our bags, we had a hot but uneventful walk to the main dock. As we were very early boarding, we breezed through all of the security, were greeted with a welcome glass of juice while a representative tried to up-sell our cruise with drink packages etc. €260 for the drink package. You would have to be drunk for the whole journey to break even at that price!

We found the free cafeteria, had some lunch and were told we could get into our room at 4pm. We did a little check to see where our room was about 1pm, found it and just went into an air conditioned room with a fabulous balcony.