At 9:50 our train arrived and we settled into our upper level seats and enjoyed a pleasant 59 mile ride to school the port town. Interestingly we were never checked for a ticket although we had them electronically stored on our phones. Arriving at Civitavecchia about 15 minutes late, we disembarked the train and bought our 2€ shuttle tickets and helped an Australian couple do the same.
At the terminal gate we transferred to another bus to the cruise processing center where the was a bit of a line. Once we got inside the 'building', being 4 Star Mariners, we were quickly processed and immediately allowed to board.
The ship is brand new and had that brand new smell like when one purchases a new car. We found our inside room 5087 and it's quite small with the largest shower we've had on a ship. Our safe was not unlocked, so I made a call to get that fixed. The hold time was over 20 minutes and another 45 for someone to show up to fix it. We then went up to the Lido Market on deck 9 for a late lunch before attending a Mariner reception where we met several people from Cruise Critic. We noted that announcements in the Lido area couldn't be heard and when we reported it, the Cruise Director acknowledged it was a known issue. At 3:15 we had to return to our room for a mandatory muster or safety drill. This drill is done differently on this ship in that we only needed to report to a staging area on deck 2 in a lounge where they scanned our ID cards and on completion of that by all passengers we were released. It was good to be able sit for this drill instead of standing on an outside deck like so many cattle waiting for slaughter
While we were scheduled to depart at 4 pm, the Captain indicated in an announcement that we would be leaving about 15 minutes late. We ended up leaving around 45 minutes late. We like the early dinner seating which is 5:15pm, so we showed up for that and had a nice table with a couple from Virginia and a couple from California. While the service seemed slow (it took an hour for the main course to arrive) we were we pleasantly surprised to be greeted by Marlin our wine steward from our Nieuw Amsterdam trans-Atlantic cruise last November. He even remembered our name and that was impressive and reflects well on Holland America personnel selection. We both had the seared scallops as an appetizer and a nice steak salad as the entree. We skipped dessert in order to watch the Classic performance on the Lincoln Center stage which is part of what they call the music walk. We followed that with a 70's music set in the Billboard Onboard stage (a pair of dualing pianos) and a few minutes of the Country music set before watching the movie, The Dress Maker, on the outside movie screen located above the main pool. It's sort of like watching a drive-in movie from lounge chairs. I view it as an invitation to fall asleep.
This ship has an electronic guide (app) which can been accessed on one's smartphone that looks good on the surface. It does, however, have an annoying feature in which the events disappear from the screen as soon as they start. So if one is a bit tardy in arriving, it won't show up on the app.
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