Boundless Horizons

Day 4 – May 23 – Civitavecchia, Italy

Ashore 07:00 – All Aboard 19:00

Another day with long port times! The primary destination from Civitavecchia is Rome, which is about two hours by coach. While we’d both love to see Rome one day, it’s an easy flight from the UK so we decided not to do a Port Adventure here.

This morning we decided to do the main dining room breakfast, which we hadn’t managed to wake early enough for on previous days. We dragged ourselves out of bed and down to the dining room for 8:30am, Rhys ordered chocolate chip pancakes and I was looking forward to the Eggs Benedict with Canadian bacon to make up for the ones in Cabanas! The food was good, it was just a shame that the dining room didn’t stay open later for breakfast on port days as I don’t enjoy eating so early in the morning.

After breakfast we decided to get off the ship to stretch our legs and see a bit of Civitavecchia. There was a free port shuttle bus into the town, which dropped us off the Ponto de ônibus Porto – Estação trem. Once we stepped off the bus, we had the gauntlet of taxi drivers offering to take us to Rome. We walked on into the town itself, until we reached Fort Michelangelo.

We walked around the outside of the fort, then strolled back into the town to go to the Pam supermarket opposite the cathedral to buy some more wine for our stateroom. After stocking up on wine, we headed back to the bus stop to take us back to the ship. The bus for the ship was easy to find as it was clearly marked with Disney Dream, and there were people working there who asked to see our ship ID (Key to the World card) so they could check we were going to the right place.

We were back on board the ship by 12:30pm and headed to Cabanas for lunch. After lunch, we relaxed by the pool with a drink of the day for me (with souvenir glass!) and a beer for Rhys. The ship seemed quieter today, which gave me the chance to get lots of nice empty ship photos. The atrium looks great with the 25th Anniversary decor. And that art deco chandelier is beautiful!

We really wanted to try Midship Detective Agency, but somehow ran out of time on Day 3 so it became a priority on Day 4. We picked The Case of the Stolen Show, featuring the Muppets. It was a lot of fun, we certainly got a lot of steps in as we investigated clues across the ship. If you’re going to do this case, take a photo of Pepe’s door! There’s clues in the signs on the door which came up during the case, we’d taken a photo when we passed on Day 1 so that saved some running around.

We kept playing until just after 5pm, then got changed for dinner. By now we were in a bit of an evening routine of grabbing a glass of wine while we got ready for dinner, then heading down around 5:30pm to take photos in the atrium while it was quiet. We got the photo package on this sailing so we really wanted to take advantage of every opportunity for photos – we ended up with 187 over the 7 nights!

We were in Animator’s Palate again for dinner tonight, which is definitely my favourite of the MDRs. Photos and videos don’t really do it justice, the atmosphere is so fun. Tonight was Animation Magic, where I regretted not practising my character in advance. Rhys and I both had the beef wellington, then I had the Orchard Peach Tart and Rhys had the Chocolate Decadence. The food was really good, and the show was just as much fun as on the Magic.

After dinner we got back to our room in time to have a glass of wine on the verandah as we sailed away from Civitavecchia. We sailed by the Mein Schiff 2 again, we’d previously seen them in Barcelona so it was a brief reunion!

Tonight’s show was The Golden Mickeys, I’d read this was usually on formal night but I guess the Silver Anniversary celebration caused a schedule change. It was our first time seeing the show and we grabbed the same spot at the front of the balcony that we’d had the previous night.

We really enjoyed it, so when we got back to our stateroom we checked to see what time it would be airing on the TV and caught some of the later broadcast. I really like that they show the stage shows on the stateroom TV. Our previous cruise was 3 nights so we had a stage show every night – it was nice to have the option to relax on the sofa one night rather than go to the theatre. We’d thought about doing that this time around, but we quickly realised that our stateroom host tended to do the turn down service during the second dining / show time, so if we skipped the show then we’d interfere with his schedule.

The other fun thing on our TV were the on demand presentations from Bruce Kimbrell, I managed to watch about half of them over the course of the sailing but I really wish those were online.

Day 5 was going to be an early start for our only Port Adventure, so we just relaxed in our stateroom after the show, no late night walks this time!