An Eastern Mediterranean Cruise

Now that we’ve finished our Spring 2025 blog series on our Tulip Time River Cruise and Disneyland Paris trip, it is time to move on to our Fall 2025 vacation.

We choose many of our vacations to experience countries we haven’t traveled to before. So, this Eastern Mediterranean Cruise checked off quite a few new countries and was the perfect choice for us.

While the Eastern Mediterranean is a broad term, most people consider it to include the Adriatic, Aegean, and Ionian Seas. So, we covered a lot of territory.

 

Random Weird Stuff

Yes, because we have so many individual blog posts for each vacation, we are STILL a full year behind! Since this trip, we’ve had multiple adventures and are working diligently to catch up, so blog posts will still have the same great content and photos; they might just come a little closer together! Enjoy, and thanks for following along on Mark and Chuck’s Adventures!

 

The Countries

This vacation was a cruise (we’ll dive into that a little later) that started in Istanbul, Türkiye, and made additional visits throughout the Greek Isles, Montenegro, Croatia, and Slovenia. It ended in Trieste, Italy, and we added a few days in Venice before heading home.

This gave us five new countries, with multiple stops in some and unique history, culture, and food throughout. Also, while we’ve been to Italy before, Venice is still a bucket-list trip, and we’re really glad we added it.

 

 

The Cruise

Over the years, we’ve cruised quite a bit; however, we moved away from causing as new land adventures arose.

Lately, as we’ve gotten older, cruising more has become a regular topic for us. We’ve done both large- and small-group tours and traveled on our own. For us, the long bus rides, packing and unpacking every few days, and sometimes uncomfortable accommodations have gotten harder.

Cruising has changed a lot over the years. We can now find longer itineraries, with unique ports and often longer port days.

We can pick accommodations that best suit our likes and needs, with a comfortable retreat after busy ports and excursions. Best of all, we unpack ONCE, and everything travels with us!

And while meals are usually on the ship, we find more and more local cuisines being offered, and we can eat in the ports whenever we want.

 

 

Getting There

The other thing we have come to realize is that air travel is HARD! Even with upgrading our seats, we find that many of the really interesting places we want to visit require multiple flights.

Having retired in Mérida, we find that wherever we travel, we have to fly to Mexico City or through the US and then make at least one or two other stops along the way.

For this trip, we actually found another option – a carrier out of Cancun with non-stop flights to Istanbul.

Cancun is a short four-and-a-half-hour drive from Mérida. Taking the regional ADO Platino bus to Cancun is inexpensive and relaxing, and we usually book a local hotel for the night before departure.

It absolutely made for much less stressful travel days.

 

ADO Platino

ADO is a regional first-class bus line across Southeastern Mexico. We generally travel on their Platino bus. The buses are very clean and comfortable; the seating is incredible, and our only complaint is that sometimes the air conditioning gets too cold! They offer you water, headsets to view movies on the seatback monitors, and most buses have wifi. A round trip to Cancun costs us about $95.00US and is so worth it! And the seats are almost lie flat.

 

LOTS More To Come!

With all of that said, we’ve got a lot of blogs coming in this series.

We’ll start with how we got there, along with our exploration before the cruise. Then we’ll move on to the incredible cruise ship, including our accommodations and food. Finally, we’ll wrap up with what we did in each cruise port along the way.

Get ready to set sail on our amazing Eastern Mediterranean adventure!