I think this is a perfect excursion... but is there enough time to check out every destination? did you guys have to rush? We wanted to be able to take good pics, buy souvenirs etc... Also, were there long lines to get inside St. Peter's Basilica?
We are booked for this cruise in June '11, i know i still have a year to go research on diff. ports, but already overwhelmed with all things/places that we'd like to see, and there's not enough time!! Like you guys, if there's one place to splurge on excursion it would be in Rome also.
There were many positives to this excursion. The private train ride was one hour to Rome, while it takes the tour busses 1 1/2 hours on average (plus they can get caught up in traffic). The guide takes you to the Basilica in the afternoon and times it for when the line is a bit shorter.
It is a tour group, though, so there are some drawbacks. You also are seeing a lot that day, so each stop is not for long. When our guide would start us walking, we would start up right with her....that way, if we saw something that caught our interest, we would have time to snap a photo of it, or a moment or two to look at it, and still not fall behind the group. Our children are 10 and 13, so this was quite easy. It would not work near as well if you had a stroller along. There were many families with young ones and strollers on our tour, and they seemed to do fine, but they were not able to "squeeze" as much out of the day as we were.
We took our restroom breaks on the train coming and going and at lunch....this way, we had all of our touring time for touring...restroom lines can be long and eat into your time.
You are given a window of time at the Trevi fountain area. We took photos and video of ourselves throwing in coins at the fountain, bought a gelato and slipped into a shop and picked up a pen for DD's collection. The other window of time, was at the Vatican. After the tour of the Basilica, we were given about 15 min. This is when we picked up a magnet for us and a postcard for my MIL that we all wrote on and then mailed from there.
We would take photos as our guide was talking, I enjoyed it this way. I could hear her quite well because of the earbud. I was learning about each thing I saw and taking photos as we went.
Rome can be done on your own by train, and now that I've had this experience, I would be comfortable to do it on our own. I did not enjoy doing the port of Naples on our own (we were wanting to take the train to Pompeii). Naples is where I would make sure to book a
DCL excursion or private tour/driver.
We enjoyed the entire day, even though it was over 10 hours, it was completely stress-free and that is because we were on a high-quality tour. Happy planning, I'm sure you will love your vacation!!
. Thanks also for the positive feedback, always nice to hear 
, my Dad has a "thing" for trains so I pay extra attention!
