We arrived after a long day, last Saturday.  We got up at 4:00 AM and were out of the house by 4:30.  That was early! The drive to the airport in Marseille was uneventful and we easily found a parking place in lot 3. Checking in took a long time since there were only a few people at the counter and the line was long.  But we made it to the flight, found our seats and we were off on our adventure.
The first stop was Munich, Germany.  We had a 4 hour layover and put it to good use.  Breakfast came first, then some window shopping and finally just plain waiting for our next flight on Air Malta to Valletta, Malta.
Robin arranged for transportation to our hotel in Mellieha, on the north end of the island.  Niko, Robin and I decided to take a little walk down the road to see what we could find,  we found some restaurants, 2 pharmacies and a church.  By the way, there are suppose to be at least 365 catholic churches in Malta.  Each village has a least one if not two.
Upon our return to the hotel, Solana, we collected Lexie, Stephen and Jacques and went to a quick dinner.  It was only ok, thought my fish was very good.
Day 2 in Malta started at a reasonable hour.  We met for breakfast at 10:00.   After breakfast we decided to go to Vallette.  We bought bus tickets, very cheap at 2.60 euros each for all day tickets, and ended up in the old city of Vallette.  We were surprised at how modern the city is.  Our sightseeing goal was to visit the big St John’s Co-Cathedral and several old buildings.  But our first stop was lunch.  And then we found that the cathedral was closed and the state rooms in the palace were closed.  We took the Christmas train for a tour of the waterfront.  We are disappointed that our day wasn’t what we wanted so decided that we would have to return later.
Next stop was the bus terminal and a 45 minute bus trip back to Mellieha.  The hard part of taking a bus in a strange city is that you aren’t exactly sure where you are suppose to get off.  We were pleasantly surprised when the bus stopping right in front of our hotel.  Since it was raining, this was especially nice.  Robin scouted out another restaurant for dinner.  Jacques said, “But we just ate lunch.”. Even though this was only almost true, we decided that we would eat.  I had a very good rabbit dish.  Everyone was pleased with their choices.
Day 3 of our adventure was Monday.  Breakfast started at 9:30.  Then we took the bus down to the ferry terminal and by the skin of our teeth, caught the ferry to Goza.  Goza is a small island north of Malta.  It is quite interesting.  The soil is very rocky and you see rock walls of limestone everywhere.  We bought tickets for the Hop On – Hop Off city sightseeing bus.  At 12 euros each this was a good value.  The bus took us all over the island. I could tell you all the places we stopped but your eyes would glaze over and you would fall asleep.  So the pictures will enlighten you, if I can get them uploaded.  I’m doing this on my iPad and I don’t have a program to reduce the pixels in the photos.
I will talk about the best stop on our adventure. Dwejra where the main sightseeing spot is the Azure Window.  The place is really pretty and best of all Stephen proposed to Lexie.  Guess who said YES?  You can tell by the pictures that this was a good day.

We ended up having lunch at 3:30 and had only 45 minutes before the last bus left.  Lunch was great and we made it to the ferry.  Since lunch was late, we will find a nice place for a celebratory drink in honor of Lexie and Stephen but skip dinner, or not skip dinner.
Since we will be here for the week, there will be more stories to follow.  I hope you are enjoying our adventure.

I’m sorry about the lack of pictures.  My camera takes vey large files and I don’t have anyway to reduce them on the iPad.  I will do a blog when I get back to my computer that includes all the photos or I will edit these blogs and add the photos.


Judy