Ports of Call Continued-Part 4
Day 10-Valencia
To see our pictures of Valencia, click here.
We weren’t sure what Valencia would be like but our overall impression of Spain’s third largest city was of cleaner, newer Barcelona with a much smaller old town and a much newer modern part of the city.
We also decided that much of our time in Spain has been about architecture. From the Modernista movement in Barcelona, the gothic and baroque old towns and now the beyond belief ultra-modern Arts and Sciences complex in Valencia.
Valencia is in the process of remaking itself after being chosen to host the 2008 America’s Cup yacht races. The Cup race is usually hosted by the last country to win but in 2004, Switzerland won the cup and as we all know, Switzerland is kind of land-locked so they took bids and Valencia was chosen by the Swiss to be their stand in. For this reason they are going great guns to clean up and revitalize the city and they are doing a great job of it.
We started off with $10 shuttle tickets from Celebrity on a cool and overcast morning (it did warm up later on). There is really no way to walk off the ship in Valencia. It is too far to walk to get into the city and the security arrangements for entering the port looked like they would be tough on walkers (no sidewalks, lots of barricades, etc.). The shuttle dropped us off across from the train station (an interesting architectural piece in itself) and the bull ring. We went into the train station to look for the ever-popular WC and after using those facilities we headed downtown into Old Valencia. We were looking for...what else...the cathedral.
Along the way we found wide streets lined with interesting architecture. The buildings were clean and well kept up. In many cases much better than parts of Barcelona or Malaga. The cathedral was OK as cathedrals go. After seeing it we grabbed the ever-popular Hop-on, Hop-off bus (12 euro each) for a five stop (we got off at the fourth) tour around Valencia. The tour seemed to double back a number of times so we got a great view of both the front and the back of many buildings and statues. After riding around the downtown the bus took us to the most astounding group of buildings I have seen in a while. The brand new Arts and Science center. Check out all the pics of them in our Valencia gallery to see what I mean.
After we got our fill of the Arts and Sciences buildings we grabbed a quick cab (we could have taken the HoHo bus back into town and the shuttle back to the ship but it would have taken about an hour to do that and we were within a 5 minute, 5 euro cab ride of the ship) back to the port as we had been invited to join a very special group for a very special tour later in the afternoon.
After a quick lunch onboard we joined about 10 other Elite (this means we have more than 10 cruises with Celebrity) Captain’s Club members for a tour of the navigational bridge of the Century. This may not sound like a big deal to those of you who have never cruised but post 9/11 it is a very unusual occurrence. It had all been arranged by our outstanding Captain’s Club hostess, Marisa who treated us like gold on this cruise. Our buddies Ed and Andrew were also on this tour and even Andrew (the ultimate cruiser) said he of many cruises had not been on a bridge tour since before 2001.
This pretty much concludes our ports of call. It was a great cruise but as I mentioned at the beginning, we would not do this itinerary again. It was just too exhausting. Great for ports, but not great for cruising. We are really looking forward to our next cruise (that we currently have booked) to Australia and New Zealand where after sailing from Sydney we have alternating sea and port days on our 14 day trip to Auckland, New Zealand.
