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January 23, 2018 by TravelXena Leave a Comment

DaVinci Museum Florence Firenze Italy

DaVinci Museum Florence Firenze Italy

DaVinci Museum – March 2017.

There are 72 museums in Florence, Italy, so if  you don’t see even a small percentage of them on a single trip, that’s more than easy to understand. However, if you are interested in technology and engineering from 500 years ago, or simply enjoy learning more about DaVinci this is the place for you. It’s a small museum yet it’s easy to spend an hour or two here trying out the wooden recreations of some of DaVinci’s designs and learning more about what he created and why.

From Anthropology to Engineering with a dash of Steampunk thrown in, I found it an interesting spot to spend some indoor time in Florence. It’s about $10 to enter, which I think it too high considering the size, however it’s a great place to bring kids (and adults) out of the sun on a hot day and it’s worth it to see it once. From paintings to a diving suit from the mind of one of the most innovative people in the Western world.

 

 

All Material Copyright TravelXena 2018.

Filed Under: Florence, Italy Tagged With: Ancient Engineering, Ancient Technology, Art, DaVinci, DaVinci Museum, Engineering, firenze, florence, italy, Museum, Steampunk, technology, travel, travel blogger, TravelXena, Xena

August 30, 2016 by TravelXena 2 Comments

Stavanger Norway – Wandering Highlights-TravelXena.com

Stavanger Norway – Wandering Highlights-TravelXena.com

The Happiest Man in Norway…that was my name for him anyway.

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The first stop on the Midnight Sun cruise on CDF was Stavanger Norway a quaint town with a lot of history we decided to walk around and do a little exploring.

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The old town area is fairly small and if you’re taking a day trip from the ship you can easily walk around yourself and not need a HoHo bus or ship sponsored excursion unless you going pretty far. Within a few mile radius there are museums shops, markets and residential areas to see.

Stavanger is very big on street art. You can find it at every turn be they murals or wooden sculptures. Check out my post on that here.

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Note:

How to get to Calais from Paris when you fly in the same day from the airport.

Yes my traveling friends, I did the ultimate “no-no” when it comes to cruising out of non home ports. I flew in same day as my cruise! Did it work out, yes it did thanks to the on-time and fast TGV train, and fast walking between stations approximately 2 blocks away from each other in Lille. You heard that right, we had to switch trains in Lille…but it wasn’t at the same station (which we were assuming) and I didn’t see anything stating that we’d have to switch. Switch we did. There are direct train from Paris to Lille however they didn’t run at the time we needed them.


FlightHub

My recommendation would be to book a transfer with the agency if possible (it wasn’t for us) or go by bus even though it takes longer unless a direct train runs at the time you arrive. Of course your best bet is to fly in at least the day before. We did have a plan B, if we missed our ship we were going to simply spend the time in France which is a pretty awesome plan B.

Enjoy the photo tour of Stavanger below!

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All written material and photos © Copyright TravelXena.com 2016

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Filed Under: Europe, Norway, Scandinavia, Stavanger Tagged With: cruise, highlights, Norway, Scandinavia, Stavanger, travel, travel with a friend, wandering, wanderings

August 23, 2016 by TravelXena Leave a Comment

Stavanger Norway – Petroleum Museum-TravelXena.com

Stavanger Norway – Petroleum Museum-TravelXena.com

Are we running out of time for helping to helping the Earth? When should we fully switch to sustainable fuels? That question along with many others is a question this museum takes a crack at. Which is quite interesting considering Norway’s main export is Petroleum.

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Not far from the center of the old town and the cruise ship area is the museum, buying a ticket to the Maritime Museum gives you a discount to this one. I think it came to about $10 per person USD.

If you’ve ever wondered how people get off of an oil rig it during a (heaven forbid) emergency. Try out the escape net which is on top of the attached portion of the museum that is directly over the water. Climb to the top for a magnificent view and then…

Down the Rabbit hole!

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I’ll be honest before going in I didn’t expect the museum to be interesting but there were plenty of interesting things for the big “kids” too.

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All text and photos © Copyright TravelXena.com 2016

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Filed Under: Europe, Inspiration, Norway, Stavanger Tagged With: cruise, Europe, Museum, Norway, Petroleum, Scandinavia, Stavanger, travel

August 15, 2016 by TravelXena 2 Comments

CDF Croisiers de France Horizon Ship Boarding in Calais

CDF Croisiers de France  Horizon Ship Boarding in Calais

While I still have about 500 photos to post from my visit to Jordan in late Winter I have to start posting from my latest travels to someplace new. Well folks we all know that Travel Xena enjoys cruising so after a rather unpleasant experiences trying to book with her usual cruise line Norwegian, she scraped that vacation and managed to convince her travel companion to go to its namesake of Norway instead. So we did. In wading through my email I noticed one from VacationstoGo.com and an amazing deal to go on a “Midnight Sun” Norwegian Fjords cruise with Crosiers de France known as CDF.  A full week cruise in an ocean view cabin that came to about $650 per person with tax and with inclusive of a basic beverage package.

Let me take a minute here to describe what has to be the best beverage package on a non-luxury line. It was truly ‘tout-inclusiv’ at stated. We had house wines and all drinks with standard liquors, if we wanted something with a high end liquor like the J&B I ordered. It was 1-2 Euro more…that’s it. I think I might have seen one think on the menu that was 3 euro, but short of about 2 drinks everything bit of alcohol that touched my lips I didn’t  pay any extra for and tips weren’t expected.

This wasn’t to say that my friend “M” and I didn’t tip our three favorites that regularly made sure we were never without but there was no space for a tip even when ordering something that was ‘higher end’. If you wanted a fuller drinks package you had two choices, one was an additional 5 Euro a day and the other 10 Euro a day. Yes you read right. The equivalent of $6 – $11 USD at current exchange rates, with NO automatic gratuity added on. It really begs the question of how much American marketed cruise lines are truly making off of us, even with so called Free Beverage Packages that some of them espouse.

Now that we have the booze out of the way which is fairly important to any cruise, (I’ll get to the ports later), but the next series of posts are my thoughts the whole process of booking and getting to the port taking CDF Croisiers de France cruise from Calais to Norway at the ports of Stavanger, (Helllsylt briefly) Gerainger, Flam and Bergen, in that order. With the above agency you don’t book online, so we called in and were connected with Bia who took our info and arranged everything quickly and smoothly. Getting to Calais was interesting and I’ll discuss that in a future post.

Note: After several unsatisfactory exchanges with the “new and improved” recently gone public Norwegian Cruise Line, my sailings on that line will be limited until their pre-boarding customer service is as high as their on-board. I work diligently for my salary, and think that money should be spent on worthwhile vendors and when it comes to cruises there are certainly many lines to choose from. I have had many great experiences aboard NCL ships and hopefully their service industry company will become customer centric again one day.

I have a cruise booked with them in a couple of months, I have high hopes for my time on board despite my experience with their customer service ahead of time.

Filed Under: Croisieres de France, Cruise Ship, Cruises, Europe, France, Horizon, Norway, Scandinavia Tagged With: boarding, Calais, CDF, Croisiers de france, cruise, Cruising, Cruising from Calais, France, Midnight Sun Cruise, Norway, travel, TravelXena, VacationstoGo.com

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