Not even half a year ago we (both in our thirtees living in Munich) took our last SeaDream cruise: 12 days of caribbean sunshine on Seadream II. In the meantime lot's of changes happened in our live including a little seadream baby that is in the works (you can see how we liked our first cruise ;).

This resulted in us having to change some of our travel plans for this year. Instead of going to Caribbean again with a 12+ hour flight we were now looking at a vacation in the Med - and of course at Seadream again. Juggling with availability and pricing we came up with a 7 day cruise on SeaDream I departing from and returning to Venice and going to a lot of Croatian islands in between. On this trip, we would also take our parents to convince them off the Seadream way of doing things.

Venice proved to be a very convenient starting point for our voyage. It is only a one hour flight with Lufthansa from Munich and the airport is within reasonable range of the port and the city. And obviously the city has a lot to offer as destination.

Departing on June 28th our flight left Munich at 6:50a.m. Ummm. Still had to get up at 4am to catch the plane. The flight is a Lufthansa / United codeshare flight operated by Air Dolomiti running on small turboprop planes (ATR 72) and takes little over one hour. We arrived in Venice shortly after 8am after spectacular sightseeing over the alps: No clouds, sunny skies and great mountains. In fact we saw several places we usually use to go skiing or hiking from above which was very nice.

Venice airport is a nice small airport (and surprisingly has a lot of international direct flights as well) not too affected by the italian creative chaos that got us when we landed at Rome once. In fact we got our bags very quickly and were off the airport in 20 minutes or so. Our choice of transporation was Alilaguna, the public water bus connecting the Airport and downtown. The blue line went all the way to Zattere, which should be a short walk to Quay St. Basilico where Seadream was docked. After quite a wait for the boat we boarded the water bus which tooks us  on a sightseeing tour (passing through Murano, Lido, St. Marks Square. Price is 12 Euros per person (which is really cheap), but the bus can ge crowded and carrying your own luggage can be a pain. The trip took 1.5 hours (compare that to 40 minutes on a water taxi at a steep 100 Euro).

Ending up in Zattere, the ship's docking point was short 15 minutes walk from the drop off point. BUT: There are two bridges in between and they are not made for luggage. We bravely carried it all across but my dad hurt is back while doing the heavy lifting and had to see the doctor on board later.

The St. Basilico terminal is a small ship terminal which receives yachts and smaller cruise ships (you can argue about which of these two categories best fits SeaDream). Other than Seadream, it would also have the Seabourn Spirit today which was scheduled to leave on hour ahead of us. Getting there at 11 there was nothing open in the terminal yet. The agent showed us to the porters who would stow our luggage and we went about to go an explore Venice. The city was both incredibly hot and incredibly full but still fun to explore. However after two hours we were simply exhausted and walked back to the terminal. Seabourn was boarding their passengers through a counter at that time. Nothing yet for Seadream. We continued to wait (together with a growing crowd) until after 2pm (which would be the scheduled boarding time), but noone would appear at the counter. Then a few brave souls just got up and walked through security towards the ship and we joined them. It turns out that they never intended to use the counter and were waiting for us on board.

We were meeting the Captain (Bjarne), the activities director (Meredith) and quickly got our first glass of champagne - which we refused since Britta is pregnant. Our first surprise here: The old fashioned room cards and sliding boards have been done away with and you now get a plastic card with your picture on it. Embarkation now takes a little longer since it takes a minute or so to print the boarding pass. We really enjoyed the wooden board and are a little bid sad to see it go away and being replaced with technology. On to the reception where we met Maxi - the receptionist from Austria.