Cindy's Spain/France/Switzerland adventure 2026

Our boat docked in Bordeaux on Monday, June 15, and we got a day before we had to disembark on Tuesday so Debbie and Sandy booked an all-day wine tour, and Jose joined us. It was a most delightful day. We met our guide, Miguel from Dominican Republic, at 11 am, and got into a van for an hour-long drive to our first of three wine tastings. There are two wine regions here: the left bank and the right bank. Each has different soils and different climates that produce different grapes. It’s complicated. The wine regions on the left bank of the Gironde estuary are bordered by large coniferous forest land that have a tempering effect on the maritime climate of the area. The area has gravel-rich soil and is comprised of three prestigious sub-regions: the Medoc, Graves and Sauternes. The soils of the Medoc and Graves are varied and essentially made up of gravelly earth (which is how Graves got its name; in French, graves means gravel. The main grape variety grown on the Left Bank is Cabernet S...

  Coming into the Bay of Biscay. A closeup of the entry through which our boat cruised to the San Sebastian port. Today was all about eating and less walking. Had a small glitch, however. The original itinerary had us in port until around 5-6 pm, but we learned the prior evening that we were docking at 7:30 am and leaving at 3 pm. We had to be back on the boat by 2:30 pm. It was an issue for us because we purchased a San Sebastian: Eating Beyond Pintxo tour that could only start at 11 am (because the bars didn’t open until then) and was supposed to have concluded at 2 pm. AND we also had to calculate the half-hour it took to get into San Sebastian and the half-hour it took to get back to the boat. Thankfully, our tour company was flexible. We’re still in Basque Country, and San Sebastian is a lovely resort town on the Bay of Biscay. It’s known for Playa de la Concha and Playa de Ondarreta, beaches framed by a picturesque bayfront promenade. We did not visit the beaches, but we drov...

Yesterday was a sea day, so I wrote the blog for our days in Lisbon and Porto but didn’t have time to transfer photos from phone to laptop to post.  Our day at sea included a wine tasting event hosted by our sommelier June from the Philippines in the steak house on board. We tasted four wines – one white, three reds. Not only did we taste the wines, but June had them paired with some food so we could taste how certain foods reacted with the wine. We learned something about how to better balance food with wine. Then we visited the bridge of our ship. Dario Guerrieri is the Staff Captain, and he’s from Croatia. He greeted us along with some others on the staff. It didn’t look anything like the Starship but it reminded me of what I saw in the movie with Tom Hanks – Captain Phillips. There was a bank of electronic stuff from nautical charts, equipment to turn the boat and control the engines, radar that showed its global position and its route to the next destination. There also was eq...

Our Azamara excursion got canceled today, so we decided to make it a lazy day and do whatever we wanted, so we took an Uber from our terminal up to the Riberira, which is Porto’s old town. We docked around 1 pm, so we snarfed some lunch and headed out because I bought tickets the previous night to Levraria Lello for a 2 pm timed entry. If you’re not familiar with Levraria Lello – well, it’s often linked to J K Rowling and the Harry Potter series. And it does, indeed, feel very Hary Potter-like because it has a red staircase that curves through the center of the space. The interior is stunning – it’s not large; in fact, it’s a rather slim building; it has beautiful carved wooden shelves and a stained glass ceiling. The Harry Potter connection has turned the bookshop into a massive tourist attraction, thus the timed entry – can’t get too many people in there at one time. It was warm, and we saw a woman faint that was kind of scary but several people helped her and she recovered. From the...