The last stop of our cruise honeymoon was supposed to be Tunisia. I was really looking forward to stopping there, especially after getting all kinds of great advice on a previous posting. Unfortunately, while checking in we were told that our itinerary had been changed to remove Tunisia and add Palermo, Sicily. Needless to say, I was pretty disappointed. We later found out that the change was made after previous cruisers expressed their opinions on the stop and suggested that the ship should stop in a different port.

I’m not sure if the change is really justifiable or not, but after our trip I made the suggestion to consider a port different than Palermo. Overall, I was not impressed by this city at all. Perhaps it had a little to do with my bitterness toward the itinerary change, but I honestly felt that the city was dirty and rundown. Sure there were some interesting sights to see, but we found them to be not very well kept up and were surprised to find graffiti covering even some of the most famous landmarks. After being disappointed on our walk around town, we decided to take a bus trip to the nearby town of Mondello and to visit the beach there. Though it was a bit crowded (and a little dirty too) it provided a much nicer day than Palermo.

One nice result of the itinerary change, was that our ship had extra time on our day after our stop in Croatia, so we cruised past the island of Stromboli. This island is home to one of three active volcanoes in Italy. The captain stopped the ship for a half hour or so, as we took in the frequent eruptions of the volcano in the nearly pitch-dark night. It was pretty hard to photograph, but I was able to balance the camera on railings and set the exposure to a second or two to get a couple of decent shots. Here are some of those pictures and a few from Palermo and Mondello.