Trieste

This morning Darren's latest dream came true. The ship had moored in Trieste, Italy and Darren stood outside an Italian café and drank an authentic cappuccino. We will start on something a bit more challenging like world peace next week.

After the coffee based excitement, we set off to explore the town on a route devised by Darren.

There was some lovely buildings and what seemed to be a series of well known men reading library books.

We discovered that Trieste is built on a very steep hill and our route randomly took us up many steps to see an old church, followed by many more steps down before we headed straight up again to see an old castle.

At 10.20am we finished our walk and arrived at the waterfront to find that it was starting to get really busy. 

Thousands of people were out on the streets to see the Barcolana. This is an enormous regatta with almost 2,000 sailing boats entered in a race starting at 10.30am.

We walked to the end of a pier where people had gathered at least six deep. A cannon sounded and everyone raised their phones ready to take a photo of the start. Nothing happened, and I stood and waited for about five minutes before taking this photo.

Far away on the horizon are hundreds of boats all excited and ready to go, but there is no wind!!

Eventually we got bored and headed back to our boat. Darren looked it up online later and the organisers had to shorten the route, and the race winner took about two hours to get round.