No kidding. Our Mediterranean Cruise did that to me. Not saying I wasn’t in on the deal, but it made me do it. There’s a gelato place a block from our apartment here in Chicago that I’ve gone to only once and then decided I didn’t like it. But get me to Italy, and I change my mind and order two scoops of gelato every day but one. On that day, I had Tiramisu from two different places. And on other days, I added a dessert or two to my daily gelato intake.

So, you ask. How was your trip?  We describe it in superlatives. Megan at GoNext Travel earned a Golden Crown for her cheerfulness and organization of details. So excellent accommodations, food, fellow travelers, and tours, plus a clean, friendly, and smallish cruise line.

In my last post, I said I’d come home with lots of trip stuff to revise. Not so. I came home to my couch and stayed there for a week. When I finally got in to acupuncture to find some chi, my Chinese doctor said, “Your body is totally depleted.”

If she only knew! Me, who functions medium-like every other day when I ‘m home, marched at least two hours a day for much of fifteen days, climbing mountains of steps and stumbling over kilometers of cobble-stoned streets.

But what else can a traveler do? It was our first time to see these countries—Greece, Turkey, Sicily, Italy, France (we have been to Paris before), and Spain—and we may never get there again, so we signed up for tours, plus two extra days in Athens beforehand and one extra day in Barcelona at the end. After all, we’re there anyway, right?

Naturally, with all that physical tumbling around, I fell asleep every night before it was time. I wrote not one line of travel stories.  And my memory is blurred, so all I have is a thousand-some photos and Wikipedia to torch it up. 

Those photos have consumed this second week off the couch. I’ve made my first electronic photo book. It only took the better part of five days—the learning curve in my brain felt like another trek up Mt Etna–but it’s finished and ordered. If it’s a mess, I’ll say beginners should get a break.

I now hope to get back to normal life. I hope to be back on the blog again in some regular irregular fashion. Until then, I need to hit the couch some more and give my gelato abs a rest.