|
|
|
boarding the M.S. Monet
Monday, July 6 2026
location: room 2 in the annex some distance west from the main building of Hotel Kastel, Split, Croatia
The neighborhood had been somewhat loud overnight, but nothing like being near an outdoor nightclub in Berlin.
This morning Gretchen and I bickered a little before she set out on her own to find a place in the Adriatic to swim within walking distance of our "hotel" room. Meanwhile, I did what I love to do on vacation: drinking room coffee (in this case Nescafé, since that's how it is in Croatia) and noodling around on my laptop. Gretchen was much happier when she later returned, having successfully found a place to swim. She reported that the water seemed saltier than other sea water with which she was familiar (though was hardly her first time swimming in the Mediterranean). We'd bought the bread and fruit last night because our hotel didn't offer good vegan breakfast options, and that bread was so good that it could be eaten as if it were cake, with nothing on it. In that respect, Croatia seems to be right up there with other European countries like Germany.
After checking out of our hotel room, Gretchen and I wandered around with our backpacks and all our stuff, mostly looking for a piazza with a café where we could sit and I could enjoy either a cappuccino or an espresso. Along the way, we passed back through Diocletian's old palace yet again and saw a few more charming aspects of the medieval Split. Eventually we found a large piazza with a restaurant that didn't demand that we eat a full meal, and there, because they had no non-dairy milk, I ordered and espresso, which was perfectly good. Then I ordered the house beer, a locally-brewed lager of some sort that was much better than any megabrewery lager you can get in the United States. As for Gretchen, she ordered a lemonade that was presented completely unsweetened with some packs of sugar, and she had to end up adding twice to three times the sugar it came with to make it drinkable. As we watched the people in the piazza, a tiny trash compactor truck (no bigger than our Chevy Bolt) arrived and a guy got out and filled it to overflowing with cardboard.
From there, we walked to the place in the harbor where our cruise ship was supposed to be docked, but of course somehow we ended up walking on the wrong side of some immigration buildings, ending up behind a fence with no view of the boat. Fortunately, someone else from the cruise recognized Gretchen as a fellow vegan from her message shirt and then the four of us managed to backtrack and find the boat.
Dirk, the guy who owns the vegan cruising company, was there loading an enormous amount of wine onto the ship, the Claude Monet-themed M.S. Monet. It would be doing three or four consecutive vegan cruises and the wine at lunch and dinner for all those days would all be gratis, so it came to a lot of wine. The ship itself was small for a cruise vessel, with room for somewhat fewer than 60 passengers. But it also had to be robust enough to handle the open Mediterranean (which, it would turn out, was never all that bad). We climbed aboard and went to the lounge area and sat with Kelly and Brian of course. There were others we knew from other cruises on this boat, but Kelly and Brian were the only people we were excited to see.
For whatever reason, there was none of the formal welcome that we usually get when beginning the cruise. Finger food was provided and we cut directly to the safety drill, which involved putting on a floatation device. And that was pretty much it. As for internet, this was the first time it had ever been treated like a basic service: we were all given the password and could connect with as many devices as we wanted for free. It wasn't very good and cut out a lot, but when it worked it was good enough.
Gretchen and I explored the boat to see what the public spaces were like. There was a fairly large indoor lounge, a mid-sized outdoor place beneath a tarp at the back of the boat, and a small outdoor place with a jacuzzi tub at the front of the boat. As for the dining room, it was a little more than half the size of what we were familiar with on river boats or the Caribbean sail boat. While we were doing all this exploring and being a little nervous about the lack of public space to retreat to, a youngish Asian woman came up and said hello. She knew both of our names and was excited to see us, but we could barely remember her at all. It turned out that she'd been on the Danube cruise back in 2018 and had gotten heavily into animal rights after talking with us way back then.
At our first dinner, we sat with Kelly and Brian and a couple slightly younger than us from Brighton, England. Dave, the male half of that couple, was a short energetic Scottsman, so he and Brian hit it off right away. Mary, the female half, was a tall (we're talking six foot) blond woman from the Hudson Valley. They were both veterinarians, though they worked for different companies. Mary owned a company that provided premium end-of-life services for companion animals, and when she got to talking about it, there was no getting her to stop. Gretchen immediately liked them but I was concerned that perhaps they would swamp the witty banter of our normally four-person clique. As for what was served for dinner, it was a buffet due to initial staffing issues (or something), which made it better for someone like me who likes control over his food. There was a creamy pasta and a separate mushroom bourguignon that worked well together, and I'd brought some of that amazing habañero hot sauce that they now sell at the Bear Cantina back home.
Our room on the ship was on the lowest cabin floor, meaning it was one of the crappier (cheaper) rooms. But it had a nice enough bed and a couple circular portholes one could look out if one wanted to see. Unfortunately, the walls between cabins on that floor were paper thing, and we could hear voices coming through it as if we were in the same room. At around midnight when Gretchen and I couldn't get to sleep and started talking, one of our neighbors started banging on the wall. Later we were awake again at 2:00am and started talking again and again someone banged on the wall.
View of the Split harbor from our boat, the M.S. Monet. Click to enlarge.
Split and its mountain backdrop. Click to enlarge.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?260706 feedback
previous | next |
