Civitavecchia 10 November

Civitavecchia is the port for Rome, but it's quite a long drive.  We have seen most of the sights in Rome that are available on shore excursions and so we decided not to leave the port today.  Not saying I don't want to see Rome again, I do, I just want to actually stay there again.
We did go ashore and got a shuttle into Civitavecchia itself - had a nice coffee and a wander around, and then back onto the ship.  It's not a particularly attractive city, at least not the parts we saw, it seems to be very much just a working port.
This is an interesting day today, because it's a new leg of the cruise - a lot of people have left the ship here and more have joined.  And, although we purchased the entire cruise from Southampton to Dubai as one single cruise, the way the "new cruise" is being managed onboard is really interesting and a bit contradictory:

• Internet access - because of our loyalty status, we get some free internet minutes on each cruise - and of course we had both paid for more minutes on top of that.  We got a new set of free 'loyalty' minutes today, but we lost the rest of the minutes we had previously paid for.
• Coffee card - we both purchased a coffee card at the start of the cruise and we haven't used up all the coffees on either.  It looks like we don't lose those coffees.
• Casino - it's treated as a completely separate cruise; you had to cash in whatever winnings you had on your card last night, or lose them.  Not an issue for us; we've played plenty but as expected, lost plenty  :-)
• Minibar - again because of our loyalty status we get one free minibar set-up per cruise - we always swap it for soft-drinks.  Again, this is treated as a new cruise, so we got a new mini-bar set-up.
• Safety drill - it's not mandatory for us to attend today's new drill, although they strongly recommend that we do.  I'm pretty sure I remember enough of the first one to give this a miss.

Up to now, and for the next three ports, we have had internet access in port because we bought SIM cards (including data) from Three in the UK - they work in lots of places overseas (and not just in the EU, they work in Australia for example).  But, that ends once we leave Rhodes; the last few ports are in countries that aren't part of the Three deal.  Not too big a drama though as we aren't planning to spend any time on our own in Jordan or Abu Dhabi, and we can probably manage to get around in Dubai without too much of a problem.