Bleak Looking Day (Friday)

It is our last full day of our cruise as we sail into Venice. We expect to dock around 11:30 am. The weather has turned and it is quite showery, but not cold.

Needless to say our Dubai accommodation stuffup has been at the fore front of our concerns.

By accident while at sea yesterday I noticed I had phone signal and on top of that the data on my phone was working too. There was an email there from Kate, she needed copies of our Saudi Visas ASAP, we suspect to get into the Kaust compound where they live. My first thought was that we couldn't do it.

But after some thought we took a couple of photos on our camera, then transferred them to the laptop for resizing.

Now we had copies small enough to email. As we are an hour or so out of Venice I had phone signal and the phone's data is working as well. The smallest photo files were transferred to my phone, a quick email was written and the two small sized photos of our Saudi Visas attached, the phone data was turned on momentarily and the email was sent. The data then was hastily turned off again.

Just in case the small photos are not detailed enough, Trish has an email ready to send when we have wifi in Venice itself with larger versions of the photos.

Yesterday (Thursday) had an Indonesian lunch with wine put on by the ship to farewell passengers who were completing their second Holland America cruise. We did a double cruise so we were invited along as well. A major topic of discussion was the $23 US per day service charge. Most on the table were older than us and quite experienced cruisers.

All of them had been to the ship's office and had decreased their service charge amounts substantially, some totally.  Needless to say, straight after lunch we went to the desk and decreased our amount substantially as well.

As we enter a dreary looking Venice we have a little last minute shopping to do and some wifi to find.

We have our disembarkation info sorted, we leave the ship around 9:30 tomorrow morning.  And Kate has us booked into a Dubai hotel for tomorrow night (with free wifi).

And we may be lucky with only a couple of showers in Venice as it looks a little brighter away to the west as we sail in.