Family, More Friends Join Nieuw Statendam for Adriatic Sea Ports

Days 126-129, 2025 European Odyssey

Saturday to Tuesday, Nov. 1-4, 2025; Athens and Corfu, Greece; Kotor, Montenegro.

Well, I can see that I’m not going to get much on my to-do list done during the next two weeks.

By early Saturday afternoon, I sat above the Lido pool welcoming friends who just joined the cruise that day in Athens. Deb, a good friend from previous world cruises, knew just where I would be. Later Rick and Tina, also world cruisers who had spent the summer working in Alaska, passed by. We will have lots to catch up on. And over the next couple of days, we continued the conversations, early in the Crow’s Nest for coffee, by the Lido and later for dinner. Fair warning: Blog updates and new watercolors may be running a bit behind.

Of course, my highlight Saturday was welcoming my nephew Colton on board. He had flown into Athens a couple of days earlier, and when I realized his youth hostel (did I mention he’s 28?) was just a half-mile from my favorite Athens bakery, I taxied from the Piraeus port to meet him after stopping for koulouri, a sesame-covered bread ring.

Back at the port, my five-star Holland America key card and status as an in-transit passenger got us through the priority line and among the first on the ship by 11 a.m.

I have loved traveling individually with my nephews since I took each to Disney World at ages 4 and 7. And they have joined us on several family cruises.

But one of our best trips was a three-week road trip back east with Colton when he was 11. We hit all the major cities and joined an Audi TT club rally in West Virginia. (And, yes, he drove the TT, after I taught him to drive when he was 8).

On this cruise we’ve only booked a couple of tours for the next two weeks (Game of Thrones tour in Dubrovnik, Godfather tour in Sicily – see a trend?), along with a few specialty dinners. Mostly we will just explore ports on our own.

That’s just what we did in Kotor, Montenegro, today. It was a new port and a new country for me, and I was blown away by the beauty of our dawn sail-in, which was hard to capture with no forward-facing space without reflective windows on the ship.

Kotor is at the head of the Bay of Kotor, a winding sail up what some call Europe’s southernmost fjord (it’s really a submerged river canyon).

One of the two Viking Ocean ships in port had the single pier, and our tender into the town took about 30 minutes due to the distance and a stiff breeze. Those who wanted to go ashore early had to wait more than an hour for a tender, even though local boats supplemented our own tenders.

Cats are a symbol of Kotor, so our first stop was the Cat Museum, but sadly it was closed. There were plenty of cats within the old town fortifications to keep us company. In the Maritime Museum, I filled in my shamefully sparse knowledge of Balkan history. Audio guides described the many ship replicas, portraits of leading explorers and all sorts of nautical instruments.

We walked narrow pathways shaded by tall stone buildings that mark Kotor as one of the best preserved medieval old towns in the Adriatic. It seems that ports around the world have adopted the habit of hanging colorful umbrellas over small plazas, but the Kotor umbrellas were closed today. It is getting late in the season.

I had hoped to sketch the Cathedral of Saint Tryphon from our lunch table in one of many outdoor cafes, but the proprietor closed the awning and blocked the view shortly after we ordered.

Once back at the pier, the winding line for tenders was long, but it moved fairly quickly to return hundreds of passengers to the ship.

On Monday, after Sunday’s day at sea (and another wine tasting), our first port was Kérkira, Greece, better known to us as Corfu. The forecast for rain most of the day gradually changed, leaving most passengers not needing the umbrellas they took ashore. I decided to take advantage of a day on the ship, as I had been there before. Colton walked to the Old Fortress almost two miles from the cruise pier while I spent the afternoon painting.

This week we will continue our exploration of the Adriatic Sea, stopping in Split, Croatia; Trieste, Italy; and Kopor, Slovenia, before our next sea day. I’ve crossed my fingers that our days of mostly sunny skies and highs in the low 60s will continue.