Robert and Jeanette's Trip to Europe and Assorted Islands
by Robert Luban


Chapter I - Jeanette and Robert Luban's Tour of England, Italy, Israel, France, and Assorted Islands

We started on a European and Israeli tour on April 21, 1998.

We got our tickets from AAA and our own personal travel association. Although the trip cost about $9,000.00, it was well worth it as neither of us had ever been overseas.

We hired a limo to take us to the airport in Newark and left our home in Barnegat, New Jersey at 12:00 noon. Our plane was supposed to leave Newark Airport at 3:30 p.m. and we arrived in Fort Lauderdale, Florida at 6:30 p.m. Jeanette had never flown before, but she loved it and I hadn't been in an airplane since1945 and loved it, too. Neither of us had been on a jet and would recommend everyone try it. We arrived in Fort Lauderdale and took a taxi to the Motel Six where we had reserved a room. It was rather small, but comfortable. It was raining when we arrived, but it was a warm rain so it dried right up.

When we arrived at Motel Six, my small bag fell apart so I decided to try to find another suitcase. After spending the night in the motel, the next day we walked down to McDonald's about three blocks away. We had breakfast and, luckily, found a store that sold used suitcases. The one we found was very large, so I decided to keep the small one for small items and use the large one for other items. Now I had three bags and Jeanette still had two bags.

After having breakfast and buying a suitcase, we slowly walked back to the motel and got ready to leave, check out and get a taxi to take us to the ship as we were taking a cruise to Europe.

We had to get out of our motel room by 12:00 noon, so we checked our bags at the motel and just hung around till about 2:00 as we weren't able to get on the ship until 4:00 p.m. We finally got our bags, but had a hard time trying to get a taxi to take us to the boat.

When we arrived at the boat, the 17-day cruise to Genoa, Italy, it took us two hours to go through Customs and fill out different papers before we were allowed to get on the boat. We also had to check our bags and put labels on them as I now had three bags including the broken one.

After getting on the ship, we finally found our cabin. It was a nice roomy cabin, but without a porthole to look out. All the announcements on the ship's loud speakers were in five languages - English, Italian, German, French and Spanish.

When we sailed at 6:00 p.m., we were eating our dinner. It took us a while till we found our table as we went in the restaurant from the back and our table was at the other end of the ship. We were very lucky as we had a very good and efficient waiter who spoke Italian, but very little English, as it was an Italian ship. So the only way we could communicate with the waiter was by pointing out what we wanted from the menu. But, most of the things on the menu were in Italian and the waiter had to first translate what the dish was to us before we ordered. The busboy was Indonesian and he didn't understand the waiter or us as he didn't speak English or Italian, but by pointing to what we wanted on the menu, he gave us good service. The food was good, but we ate mostly pasta.

After eating our dinner on the first night on the ship, we went back to our cabin and Captain Massa announced on the loud speaker that we were going to have a lifeboat drill and told us that every cabin on the ship is equipped with life jackets. To start the lifeboat drill we had to first find our assigned lifeboat. When we heard the blast from the whistle, everybody grabbed their life jackets and made a dash for the lifeboats. Most everyone that was on our lifeboat was German. They didn't understand us and we didn't understand them, but we managed to get along pretty good when we came to the lifeboat.