Travelin' Fullers Blog: Set Sail on Oceania Riveria from Barcelona

We left Boca to begin our newest amazing adventure - sailing from Barcelona to Istanbul aboard Oceania's Riveria. Our flight was uneventful and landed in Barcelona right on time. We were very fortunate that our rooms were ready fairly quickly once we arrived at the Mandarin Oriental. The location is great and the hotel and service were excellent, but the city is doing major road work in front of the hotel. You have to be dropped off at the corner and walk a short distance to the entrance. I'm sure the hotel will be super glad when the construction is finished. But, as our taxi driver put it, "the orange construction netting has become an ornament!"

Bill and Trey did a walk around the area and enjoyed the mild temperatures and the sights! (Also little shopping for forgotten items-- Bill bought new binoculars.). Duffy and I took short naps to help conquer our jet lag! Dinner was a lovely restaurant, Barcelonita, down on the water. It had wonderful fresh seafood ( as in caught that day) or even good beef dishes. I tried batter fried anchovies. YUM! They were delicious but not nearly as salty as the anchovies from a can. They were much milder but still very flavorful. Trey had land snails (not sea snails) in a wonderful red sauce prepared in a local style. Bill and Duffy played it safe with salmon! Also good...

We boarded our new home for the next two weeks, Oceania's Riveria. We had a very easy time getting checked in. It was swift and efficient! Our suite is ridiculously nice! We have a jacuzzi on our deck with an outside TV! Our deck is HUGE because our room is a starboard bow suite. We have a wonderfully big living room/ dining room, walk in closet, HUGE bathroom, lovely bedroom and even a small exercise room with two bikes in it! Dinner in the grand dining room was very good. We stayed up rather late last night (6 hour time difference) in order to do FaceTime with Annette and Gaby, so we slept in this morning! Tomorrow is our first stop as we will tour Malta! More information tomorrow evening. We are all loving everything so far! We even got to,watch the end of the Miami Dolphins game because Trey has his iPad hooked up to his home TV via Slingbox! OUTSTANDING!