Saturday 05 November – Civitavecchia, Italy. Home port to numerous cruise ships (up to 12 a day), Civitavecchia saw the arrival of Brilliance of the Seas at 0700 today (or so we were told). We were also told that our ship felt very high waves and rocking around 0530 this morning. Thank you to our friends for keeping us informed. We slept right through that rough weather.
After breakfast in the Windjammer Café, we decide we wanted to find out where everything was on the ship. We started on the 4th deck, the lowest publicly available deck, and walked each deck fore and aft, inside and outside, to see where everything was. The ship is not as big as I thought it was. I thought the ship held around 3,000 passengers – I think it’s closer to 2,000. The center part, the Centrum is not a huge atrium like on many ships; it’s just a circular open-air area from 4th deck up to the 13th deck.
1340 – We left the ship for our tour of Bracciano Lake and Wine Tasting. Our guide was very knowledgeable and understandable. She was from the UK who had married and Italian pastry chef 20+ years ago. We heard the story of the famous Orsini (plus some other name) castle where Tom Cruise another famous people were married. This castle is near the town of Anguillara. It’s a cute little town on Bracchiano Lake where we had about 30 minutes to stroll around and inclines through the narrow streets.
After we left Anguillara, we went to Casale Cento Corvi, a third-generation wine- and produce-grower. We were served with as much wine as we wanted. It was called a wine “tasting” with three types of white wines (zilath, kottabos, kantharos) and three types of red wines (same names as white), but they poured large samples and you could have as much as you want. There were also large trays of olives, bread with olive oil, prosciuttos, salami, cheeses. On the coach, Darlene heard someone tell our guide that she was from Michigan, so while at the wine stop, Darlene asked where. What a surprise. She and her husband were both from Jackson, Darlene’s hometown! Bill and Jan Slowinski were two years ahead of Darlene, but attended Catholic schools, so there was never any contact. But imagine that – get on a cruise ship in Barcelona, Spain and run into two people from your hometown that had a population of 50,000 people. Amazing. We stayed there for about 90 minutes. The ride back to the ship was amazingly quiet!
1845 – Dinner that evening was with John and Sharon Eash, and with George and Tawni, who were waiting at a table for 6 for us. We discussed our activities of the day (John and Sharon were also on our tour), and we had a lovely dinner. Captain Sorensen came on the PA system to announce the weather conditions (high winds and rough seas), and that the outer decks would be closed again tonight.
The ship pulled out of port as we were having dinner, heading us in a southern eastern direction toward Sicily.
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