We began looking for a week long Mediterranean cruise for May or June of 2011 to spend an extra week of our vacation. After doing some looking around, we stumbled across the Best of the Mediterranean cruise offered by NCL aboard the Jade- a 15 night cruise stopping in Monaco, Italy, Greece, Turkey and Egypt. The pricing was awesome, and we just couldn't turn down this great itinerary. We booked the cruise on Jan 1, 2011. Happy New Year!
Shortly after booking the cruise, a friend mentioned the Cruise Critic website. I started reading the details available for the various ports on the cruise, and checked out the Roll Call for our sailing. We got very lucky - there were a few people who had booked this cruise more than a year in advance, who were very organized! Most of the small tours had already filled up, but I decided to jump in and organize a few tours on my own (even though I had never done this before). With almost four months before we left, I figured I still had lots of time to find some people to join the tours I organized.
Our initial plan was to take a couple of NCL organized tours, a couple of small group tours (either organized by myself or another CC member) and explore one or two ports on our own. Once I began doing more research, though, I decided I really didn't want to take a large 'cattle tour' organized by the ship, and wanted to have a guide in the ports to ensure we maximised the time we were there. When all was said and done I organized tours in 6 ports, and joined another persons' tour in the remaining port.