Here we are – on the Mediterranean Sea, enroute from Barcelona to Tangier. Sounds like something out of Casablanca but we’re really on our way – another great adventure is born.
Tourists symmetrically resting at Barcelona’s Plaça Reial Fountain.
Barcelona was amazing; we only had a day and a half and, exhausted from our flight, slept through the half and awoke just in time to go to the pier and board our ship.
Look carefully: lots of different things take place on Barcelona balconies – from sunbathing to gardening to laundry.
No Zara, no mementos or gifts, but a brief wander around the old Jewish neighborhood and a spectacular walking tour of the great Gaudi buildings that add so much to what is already a vital, beautiful, cosmopolitan city.
Once aboard* we recalled what is so great about this sort of trip. The word “cruise” may summon visions of blue hair and stodgy folks but the truth is that people who choose this are gregarious (pretty tough to be otherwise in this collective environment) and love to swap travel stories – as well as tales about almost anything else. In our brief first day, we’ve already met and spoken at length with people from Australia, Canada, Minnesota, Florida, Arizona and Arkansas. All of them are avid explorers with amazing back stories. You’ll meet them too, right here, as the days pass.
It’s late though, so I’m keeping my post-a-day pledge without too much detail. Know only that our flights were comfortable and on time, Barcelona enchanting and exhausting and our first half day at sea lovely and a great preview of all that is to come. You’ll hear about all that, too.
Cynthia Samuels is a long-time blogger, writer, producer and Managing Editor. She has an extensive background online, on television and in print, with particular experience developing content for women, parents and families.
For the past nine years, that experience has been largely with bloggers, twitter and other social media, most recently at Care2's Causes Channels, which serve 20 million members (13 million when she joined) and cover 16 subject areas. In her three years at Care2 monthly page views grew tenfold, from 450,000 to 4 million.
She has been part a member of BlogHer since 2006 years and has spoken at several BlogHer conferences. Among her many other speaking appearances is Politics Online, Fem 2.0 Conference and several other Internet gatherings.
She’s also run blogger outreach for clients ranging from EchoDitto to To the Contrary. Earlier, she spent nearly four years with iVillage, the leading Internet site for women; her assignments included the design and supervision of the hugely popular Education Central, a sub-site of Parent Soup that was a soup-to-nuts parent toolkit on K-12 education, designed to support parents as advocates and supporters of their school-age kids. She also served as the iVillage partner for America Links Up, a major corporate Internet safety initiative for parents, ran Click! – the computer channel - and had a long stint as iVillage's Washington editor. In addition, she has developed parent content for Jim Henson Interactive and served as Children’s Book Editor for both Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble.com.
Before moving online, she had a long and distinguished career as a broadcast journalist, as senior national editor of National Public Radio, political and planning producer of NBC's Today Show (whose audience is 75% women) where she worked for nine years (and was also the primary producer on issues relating to child care, education, learning disabilities and child development), and as the first executive producer of Channel One, a daily news broadcast seen in 12,000 U.S. high schools. She has published a children’s book: It’s A Free Country, a Young Person’s Guide to Politics and Elections (Atheneum, 1988) and numerous children’s book reviews in the New York Times Book Review and Washington Post Book World.
A creator of online content since 1994, Samuels is a partner at The Cobblestone Team, LLC, is married to a doctor and recent law school graduate and has two grown sons who make video games, two amazing daughters-in-law and three adorable grandsons.
View all posts by Cynthia Samuels
Here we are – on the Mediterranean Sea, enroute from Barcelona to Tangier. Sounds like something out of Casablanca but we’re really on our way – another great adventure is born.
