Rome and Silversea Day 8

Start of day: València, Spain
End of day: Heading to Cartagena, Spain

Welcome to València, Spain! We came into València under sunny skies and 72 degrees, close to perfect walking weather. Truthfully, it made me miss living in the SF Bay Area. 🙂

Silversea runs a shuttle… A framed printed notice on a stand reading 'Silversea Shuttle Bus, Valencia, Spain, Monday, May 11, 2026,' with a paragraph of service details above two columns of departure times for buses from the pier to town and from Santa Rita street back to the ship

… but I needed to catch up on my steps, so I kicked off in the general direction of downtown. The pedestrian path out of the cruise port was well-marked, and from the terminal it was about a two-mile walk to the City of Arts & Sciences (Ciudad de las Artes y las Ciencias) complex.

The city made an easy first impression. Wide boulevards run everywhere, each with a dedicated bike lane, and the city center was noticeably clean — not much random, blowing trash, and a sense that people here are genuinely mindful about not littering. (I imagine the wide boulevards part might be different in the Old Town but I didn’t make it over there this visit.)

From a media perspective, I wanted to try something new. I did a walk-and-talk that covers some of my surface-level impressions:

During the walk from the ship to the museum, what struck me most was how calm it felt. It was mid-day on a work day, in an area of higher-rise buildings, and yet there were far fewer people out and about than I’d have expected. The sidewalks never felt crowded, and when I crossed a street, only a few other people were doing the same. The exception was the area around the museums, which was busy with tourists and local schoolkids on field trips.

I didn’t go inside the museums themselves, deciding to save that for a future visit.

The Príncipe Felipe Science Museum in València, a long white building of repeating skeletal ribs and angled supports resembling a whale's skeleton, beside a turquoise reflecting pool, with visitors walking along its base and the domed Hemisfèric visible at right under a blue sky with scattered clouds

The eye-shaped, glass-and-steel Hemisfèric building mirrored in a turquoise pool at the City of Arts and Sciences, with the white curved Palau de les Arts opera house to the right, dark palm-tree sculptures rising from the water at left, and apartment blocks behind

I grabbed lunch outside the museum: a long hot dog topped with “crunchies” — fried onions. It was fine. A long hot dog in a cardboard tray topped with fried-onion crunchies, ketchup, and mustard, resting on a white table beside a clear plastic bottle of water with a red label lying on its side

The woman working the lunch stand was the only local I really spoke with all day. Her English was enough to handle the transaction, but when I tried to ask whether fried onions on hot dogs (“crunchies”) were a common thing in Spain, the question didn’t land. I can’t really gauge how much English is spoken here, given I only spoke to her.

Maybe it’s the sunshine and comfortable temperature stoking my optimism, but I like the idea of this kind of life: good weather much of the year, a real commitment to quality of life, effective mass transit, clean and walkable streets. I want to walk to a market, to a gym, to a library, to a cafe, to a park; for exercise, for mental well-being, for socializing. I strongly feel we’ll live overseas at some point after the kids are grown. It’s more a question of where than if. That said, you can’t truly learn a place on a day trip. I could see us doing multi-week stays in short-term rentals in several different cities to get a feel for what clicks and what doesn’t. Anyway, that’s in the future. But even a few hours in València really got me thinking.

A large black-and-white mural on the brick side wall of a building depicting a woman scientist seated and writing among hand-drawn equations and diagrams, with a sidewalk below and a blue sky with clouds above

Once back on the ship after the two-mile walk, I had a late lunch at the new open-air Riviera restaurant.

A shallow bowl of ceviche — white fish with red onion, cilantro, corn, and cubes of sweet potato — on a wooden table beside two condiment bottles, a Coca-Cola can, and a glass of cola, with the València container port, its cranes and stacked shipping containers, visible through the window behind

A skin-on fish fillet plated over wilted greens with a pale purée and a diced-vegetable garnish on a speckled plate, on a wooden table beside a Coca-Cola can and a glass of cola, with the port waterfront visible through the window

As afternoon turned into evening, I took advantage of the clear skies to capture some sunset photos.

The teak-floored veranda of a Silversea suite with two folding chairs and a small table behind a metal railing, looking out over deep blue open sea under a clear sky

A canopied aft deck of the ship with woven armchairs arranged around a curved bench, looking out past the railing to the sun setting low over a calm sea in warm golden light

Open sea at sunset with an orange glow along the horizon, a faint distant coastline, and the ship's foaming wake trailing across the rippled water toward the right under a clear graduated sky