Wine & Dine Half, Food & Wine, First Disney Cruise Trip Report

I was a little concerned about the whole fireworks off the boat thing...since fire is the most catastrophic event that can happen at sea.

The room was definitely great! Originally I was thinking that we had slightly more space on Princess, but then Benn reminded me that we had more space immediately around the bed, but we had a small table and chair, not a full sized sofa and dresser. We saw the cutout in the ceiling for the dropdown bed. I wanted to ask Rian to pull it down for us so I could sleep there!

Thanks, danijrod! I had lunch with my friend Amanda yesterday and I was lamenting to her about the lateness. We traveled together for 4 days in August 2012 and we were VERY compatible Disney travelers, so she totally got it, too. We went MEMH or rope drop to EEMH/ Downtown Disney every night. I think we slept about 4-5 hours/night and we otherwise, we were out and about!

YES!! I think it's important to spend every waking hour in a park. I don't know about you, but that's how I recharge my Disney Magic. I have to store up enough for all of the crappy days when I can't go to Disney!

DAY 9: Saturday, November 14

Nassau Day. For the first time ever on a cruise, we swapped a port day for a ship day. We went to Nassau on Carnival in 2011 and we did the jewelry scavenger hunt game and checked out Junkanoo Beach. None of the excursions here really appeal to us and since this was our first time on a Disney cruise, I was MUCH more interested in what was going on on the boat!

We work up around 7:30 and sat on the balcony while we watched the ship sail into port. Breakfast was mostly lovely. They had Mickey waffles!! Woohoo!! Topped with strawberry sauce and nuts--even better. Also hard boiled eggs were available (they were in the back, so you had to ask for them) and there was asparagus and bacon on the regular breakfast buffet. That's my kind of breakfast! I'm really particular about breakfast food. I'm not a fan of pancakes because they taste so heavy to me and they're almost always enormous. (Mickey waffles are ok because their small and I like the texture of waffles better than pancakes.) Cereal makes me hungry sooner than if I skip breakfast altogether. Aside from un-greasy bacon and lean slices of ham, I absolutely despise traditional breakfast meats. And let's not even start on eggs. I like them hardboiled and as an omelet/scrambled with LOTS of stuff in them (so you can't taste the eggs) and that's it. I am thoroughly confused why (with the exception of Royal Farms and Chik-Fil-A) everyone serves eggs for breakfast but not chicken. They're the same animal. Even being around breakfast sometimes is unappealing for me because I don't like the smell of sausage, syrup, blueberry pancakes, coffee, scrapple (if you've never had the pleasure, I think it's a PA Dutch thing and it's literally scrap meat that's processed and fried and people put syrup on it), etc. I don't care for those little danishes, donuts, or any kind of pastry that's heavily sugared. Yep breakfast is not my favorite meal of the day. So for me to say that I enjoyed breakfast on the ship--there's literally something for everyone at this meal.

After breakfast, we decided to check out the adults only area, so we headed for Satellite Falls. From what I had read, this area was new/ somewhat reimagined when the Dream was in dry dock last month. The deck area was spacious and especially at 9am on a port day, mostly deserted. The "pool" seemed like it might be nice in under particular conditions--maybe a hot, sunny afternoon when you want to be in the water but still "work on your tan". As someone who goes from ghost to lobster in about 20 minutes, this wasn't going to be my go-to area. Satellite falls was very pretty to look at, but in practice, the water was chilly and the tiles were hot. Since the seat and back were protected from the water, it resembled laying on a heating pad with your feet in a bucket of ice water. I remember looking at the fountains at the mall when I was a kid and wishing that I could swim in there. This kind of reminded me of what that probably would have been like! So for us, Satellite Falls = prettier to look at than it is fun to play in.

BUT...we explored a farther and found my favorite spot on deck--the Cove pool. There are three pools arranged in a row and each is the size of a very small above ground pool. At the one end, you can sit on a wooden bench and soak in water that was I think a little more than knee high. In the center section, you could submerge yourself completely depending on your height (my favorite area--I'm 5'6" and I could touch the bottom with my toes with my head and neck above the water). The third section was ankle deep with benches and bar stools and was adjacent to the bar so that you could be served while staying in the pool. On that same deck was an adults-only hot tub. There was instrumental music playing in this area that was very ballet-appropriate. For me, this area captured exactly was Disney was trying to accomplish--a Titanic era elegance with a modern spin. Really the entire ship captured that ideal quite well, but for me, the Cove pool (and the Atrium) hit the nail on the head.

Since we were already swimming and many people were off the ship because we were in port, it seemed like the perfect time to try the AquaDuck. On our way there, we met the nicest couple from Pittsburgh. They were one of the few more senior-aged couples that we saw onboard. I would have guessed them to be upper 60's, maybe even early 70's. I was a little bit nervous about the AquaDuck because I'm a huge sissy about new rides and I've never done a waterslide on a boat. They fact that these folks who were nearly twice my age were all about it definitely put my mind at ease! One thing that I was not prepared for was how much water splashes in your face as you go move through the tube. But, claustrophobia issues aside, I loved it! In typical Disney fashion, they've devised a ride that is tame and comfortable enough for little kids and older folks and thrilling enough (I think) for everyone in the middle. After the AquaDuck, we called pool time a success and headed back to the room to get ready for our full slate on onboard activities.

We had a little bit of difficulty here because there were SO many appealing things to do. We've never found this to be the case on a ship before, so that was really exciting. We had a ticket to build a gingerbread house at 1:00 and we had the private mixology class with the Facebook group at 4:00, so we were trying to fit in Disney Trivia, The Making of the Dream, and The Art of the Theme Show Tour. Plus you can't skip a meal on a boat. That's just crazy talk. We stared The Making of the Dream at 11, but quickly realized that the only way that we could make it to trivia was to ditch what turned out to be a slide show presentation and get to lunch early. So we made it up to Cabanas around 11:15 only to find out that lunch isn't served until noon. Oops. Flo's cafe was open, but after the seafood feast that we had on arrival day, I was holding out for something better than wraps! Since having a later lunch meant that we were going to miss trivia anyway, we decide to just sit out on the back deck and enjoy a ("free!!") coke while we watched people from the FIVE other ships that were also in port that day. Holding out was a good decision because the shrimp and stone crab trolley was out again for lunch!!! AAAHHHH!!! I also tried some chicken and zucchini and had a tasty like strawberry pillow puff pastry for dessert. Once again I was in seafood coma and I have no idea what Benn ate!

We finished lunch just in time to go to Gingerbread House Making. What fun! Benn and I had tried to build a gingerbread house once before. We got married two days after Christmas and after seeing the prices of wedding cakes, I was determined that we were going to make our own. We spent about a year making several different test designs in our spare time. One of our ideas was, given the season, that we would build a gingerbread house and a gingerbread Christmas tree and that would be our "cake" since neither of us actually like cake anyway. Well, on our trial run of idea #3, our tree tipped over and our roof caved in and that was the catalyst that finally made us call in a professional! Gingerbread house making was held at Animator's Palette and it was hosted by Chef Harold. The helpers were all smiles and looked like they were loving all things gingerbread, but if Chef Harold had a thought bubble over his head, it would read "two years of culinary school and twenty years of making the finest pastries in the land to teach these morons how to put together a friggin' pre-cut gingerbread house". Poor guy. This was about a 30 minute activity and we had a great time building our little cottage. You get to take the house with you back to your cabin, but you can't take it off the ship. We managed to eat the roof, and a little bit of the one side wall, but we definitely didn't have enough people in our cabin to demolish an entire gingerbread house in 48 hours.

Benn decided that he'd had enough activity for the morning and that it was nap time. Since there was another Making of the Dream presentation, I decided to go back and see if there was anything interesting in that slide show presentation after all. Well this time, the room was nearly empty. It was me and one other couple...and just before the presentation started, the other couple left! So I got a solo presentation about the making of the ship. It was pretty cool. Jamezy, the guy doing the presentation was the lead activities coordinator and he was very personable and informative. Some of my favorite tidbits were:

• The blue that the hull of the ship is painted is called "Monica Blue" and is named after the woman who wore a pair of pants to the meeting that inspired that color.
• DCL is the only cruise line to have non-orange lifeboats. They are yellow because the boat colors are supposed to represent Mickey Mouse and Mickey Mouse has yellow shoes, not orange shoes. DCL had to do two years of research and testing to prove that the Coast Guard could see yellow life boats as well as they could see orange lifeboats. The color is called "Mickey yellow."
• The Magic and the Dream share an art deco style with more "masculine" styling, while the Wonder and the Fantasy are more art nouveau with a "feminine" styling
• I have a note about Pirates that I didn't write enough detail on, but I think it's that when Disney is in Castaway Cay, the ship is technically a pirate vessel...but I forget why!!
• Disney did special excavation around Castaway Cay to be able to pull the boat directly into the dock, but it's a very touchy maneuver because the passageway where the boat fits is very narrow.
• The Magic was assembled in two halves and basically glued together in the middle. The Wonder was but in one piece. The Dream and the Fantasy were built like legos and each piece crosses over the one below to create a more stable structure for the larger ship.
• I asked at the end that with this ship being at capacity for this sailing if there are any plans for another ship on the horizon and apparently the current line from the CEO of DCL is that "we'll build a new ship when this one is paid off!" LOL

When I got back to the room, the emergency alarm sounded...seven short blasts followed by one long blast. Hmmm...That's concerning. So we just kind of looked at each other and waited to see if anything else would happen. We went out on the balcony and saw the crew assemble on deck and start fiddling with the boats, but they were getting them down and putting them in the water with no people in them and the were laughing and carrying on, so we decided that they must have just been taking the boats out for a joyride.

After our brush with "maritime disaster", I filled Benn in on on all of the wonderful new things I had learned, we headed back out for the Art of the Theme Show tour. This tour was a lot of fun. Our guide, Pau, was excellent. She informed us that she had only been with DCL for two months and this was her first time giving the tour. She was so good that you would have thought that she should be training other tour guides. She kept a great pace and dropped one fascinating fact after another. She had answers for every question that she was allowed to answer. She was comfortable, warm, and personable throughout. I hope that she stay with DCL for a long time because she is definitely an asset to Disney. The tour started in the Meridian lounge and then went to Palo and Remy before going through all of the lounges in "The District". This was definitely the tour of "places where you can spend the most extra money on the ship", but obviously with Disney's attention to detail, all of the spaces were really interesting.

• The Meridian: an old-world-travel-themed lounge located between Palo and Remy that is scarcely mentioned on the ship's directories--and with good reason. Disney doesn't want kids stumbling upon this adults-only are accidentally.
• Palo: An Italian restaurant themed after various cities in Italy. In the Venice area, even the wine bottles get into the act. Each bottle is placed in it's own individual gondola. The main chandler at the entrance is supposed to represent Spaghetti and Meatballs! There is a family table in one section that seats 12 people and represents the Italian ideal of making everyone who comes t visit part of the family.
• Remy: A French restaurant themed after Ratatouille, and very well done. There are representations of Remy and Emile all over the place! The chef that the movie Ratatouille was based on was actually the first chef to cook at Remy, the restaurant. Because John Lasseter sometimes sails on the Dream, his personal wine from his wife's vineyard (named after Pixar movies) is on hand. But it's not for sale. Remy is also home to the most expensive bottle of wine aboard the ship. It's valued at $25,000!
• The District: the main lounge area and contains 5 separate lounge/gathering areas. Forced perspective is employed to make the bars look far away to discourage children from wandering down the hall toward the bars. The silhouettes on the walls are supposed to make you feel like a VIP.
• D Lounge: the family lounge where e a lot of the larger onboard family-friendly activities are held--character meet & greets, trivia, animation academy, excursion meetings (this was interesting me. Unlike the other lines, Disney has guests assemble for their excursions onboard the ship instead of getting off the ship first and looking for someone holding a sign), etc.
• Pink: the wine and champaign bar with a Dumbo theme. Pink elephants appear and disappear in the bubbles on the wall. Apparently people like to use them as a sobriety check. When you can't find the elephants anymore, it's time to go home! The whole lounge is colored in pinks and frosty whites so it's like you're inside of a champaign bubble. This was my favorite aesthetically.
• Skyline: this lounge is really dark and the background on the wall and art over the fireplace changes to a new city every 15 minutes. The cities are Rio, Paris, New York, Chicago, and...Hong Kong I think. It was a very cool effect, but this is where we were for mixology and trying to focus in the darkness was actually bothering my eyes after a while.
• Evolution: this lounge has large black butterfly forms all over the place and the insides of the butterflies slowly change colors as you sit there.
• 687: there are three numbers and I think that I have them in the right order, but I think that they signified that the Dream was the 687th ship built by its construction company. This is the sports lounge and the walls are decorated with the ship's blueprints and photos of its construction.

Fortunately we had mixology at Skyline lounge AFTER this tour. Otherwise, I never would have remembered all of these things. We took turns within our group mixing 5 different drinks for the group--a cosmo, a captain's mai tai, a mojito, a margarita, and a woowoo shot. It was very fun and thanks in part to the gal who overused a little on the cosmo, we left the event quite drunk.

Dinner tonight was at Animator's Palette, which was the thing that I saw that first got me interested in sailing with Disney, so to say I was looking forward to this dinner was a gross understatement. It took us a while to change for dinner--there was seriously a lot of alcohol flowing at that mixology party. I think I had about a five-minute argument with myself about how flip flops worked. SO unfortunately, we were a few minutes late for dinner and we missed the transition from still photos on the wall to the interactive animated show. The cuisine tonight was Pacific Rim and relative the French offerings at Royal Palace and the next evening at Enchanted Garden, this was definitely my least favorite food-wise. The food was good, but not my favorite. We both had a Tomato Tarte (check it out below to see the change in lighting during the show) that was delicious and I had a bowl of butternut squash soup--a highlight for me as that's one of my favorite soups. I had the Ginger-dusted beef tenderloin and it was a hair on the side of tough for me. Benn really enjoyed his pork chop, so I'm not sure that he shares my sentiment that this was our weakest meal food-wise. I have this weird thing with beef. Almost every time I order beef, I'm disappointed in it, but if Benn orders beef and I taste it, it's always amazing. I don't remember what I had for dessert, but Benn had the "make your own pie", which he thought was just super. So food, good but not my favorite, but oh, the show! I was taking a picture of Crush when he came to our screen, so he picked me to have a conversation with and he posed all different ways and kept asking me how he looked in the photos! Ohmygosh it was so much fun! Also, out third pair of tablemates showed up tonight. They had been at Palo the night before. Well we got to talking and discovered that the girl was childhood best friends with Benn's and my RA from college! Our RA was from Dillsburg, a REALLY small town near us, so since she was close to our age, there was no way that they wouldn't have known each other.

After dinner, we hit the re-booking desk to lock in our 10% discount and stateroom credit. We'll probably end up using for the meet-up cruise, but we want to price check when the new 2017 offerings drop because we're thinking about Alaska or maybe even N. Europe for 2017 and if we wait until the meet up cruise to book them, the prices will probably already have gone up. I can't see booking a trip like that for 2016 because we have valid AP's right now. We also had a chance to do some shopping and pin trading before Villains Tonight. Pin trading on the ship was pretty good--much better quality pins that are usually out in the parks. I was really looking forward to this show and it was better than The Golden Mickey's but still didn't totally grab me. The current shows on board are definitely not on the level of Aladdin at DCA or of the Disney Broadway Musicals. I would say that they're less "quality theater" and more "entertain the kids", which honestly disappoints me a little bit. However, our experience on other cruise lines has been that the evening show had better be good because there's not much else going on during the day that sounds like fun to us. This wasn't the case on Disney. There was so much that we wanted to do that we couldn't squeeze it all in. Benn didn't get to the Star Wars movie. I wanted to go to every trivia and animation academy and I think I missed two trivia and one animation. For the show-style entertainment that I most enjoy, I still have to give the edge to the 2015 Ruby Princess singers and dancers.

It was pirate night, so we grabbed the shortest character line we could find, which happened to be Pirate Minnie, on our way to the deck party. I finally found the ice cream machine. I wanted to try the pistachio ice cream?/gelato? at Vanellope's Sweet Shop, but once I found the machine that made the free ice cream and THEY HAD BANANA!!, I never did end up trying Vanellope's. I thought that the pirate show on deck topped anything that we saw onstage for this cruise. It was immersive, the actors where really good, and they shot fireworks off the side of the boat. What's not to love? As it turned out, we could have seen the fireworks from our balcony. The "late night buffet" was taco night, so that was awesome. Still full from dinner, we each managed to cram in a taco or two and then headed back to the cabin. It was a very full, very awesome day. I felt like we had crammed about 3 days worth of fun into it and I couldn't wait to do it again the next day!

DAY 10: November 15

Castaway Cay day! I've heard nothing but amazing tales of how fabulous Castaway Cay is, so I was very excited to stop here even though it's "just a beach". Our day started early because we had signed up to run the Castaway Cay 5K. Benn has not trained to run in over a year and my right foot was still killing me from the 1/4 marathon the weekend before. So we were an interesting pair as we set out to conquer the day.

I had a lot of trouble finding information about this race online, so I'll try to give the best detail that I can here in case you're thinking about doing it. I was concerned that since you couldn't register ahead of time that it would fill up quickly once we got on the ship, but it seems to be a virtually unlimited activity. We had no trouble getting tickets when we arrived on board and it was a MUCH less formal affair than any other runDisney event. Pau (our tour guide from yesterday) was in charge. We met in the Evolutions Lounge and I'm bad at this, but I'd estimate that there were roughly 100 participants there. Everyone received a number, but there was no tracking chip on the number like their is with a regular runDisney event. I think the only purpose was so that they could identify you as a participant so that only people who actually did the course got a medal. And I suppose it made everyone feel official. Pau went over the race course with us. We would run from the area near the Pelican Point bike rentals at the family beach to the airport road, around a loop, to the end of the airport road near Serenity Bay, turn around, repeat the loop, and return to the bike rental. Pau informed us that if we chose not to complete the second loop, there would be no penalty and we would still receive a medal. My foot was very excited to hear that.

I was under the impression that the runners were supposed to be let off the ship early and that basically the rest of the guests were just getting off as the runners were returning. I also assumed that the run would start and end right by the ship. Both of those assumptions were incorrect. (In general, I pictured the boat being parked kind of beach-adjacent at Castaway Cay and that's not so much the case.) Other guests were being let off at the same time that we were and it was a mile walk to the starting point. There was an opportunity for parents who were running to drop off their children who were under 10, and thus not eligible to run, off at the kids' camp area. There was also an opportunity to run out and park your belongings on a beach chair, a possibility that we had not considered. We would need to return to the ship at the end of the race--which was fine because we had literally rolled out of bed and tossed on running gear, fully intending to shower at the end of the "run".

It was very humid the morning of the run, but the temperature was low--roughly 72F. There is a fairly permanent marker that indicated the start of the 5K and a timer is provided for fun. Well maybe there's an official winner, but no one really seemed to care about it. The path was not to bad at first, but when we entered the loop, it reminded me of Chappaquiddick Island off the coast of Martha's Vineyard. It was just a plain path with no markings adorned by nothing but vegetation on either side. It was very disorienting as you had no idea where you had started or how much distance was left, so pacing was incredibly difficult. I couldn't run the GPS because we weren't in the US and I didn't want the roaming data charges. Fortunately the health monitor on my phone still works in airplane mode, so I had sort of an idea about the distance that we had traveled, but it wasn't exact and I hadn't checked it at the start of the course. We ended up walking nearly all of the loop anyway because I was in a lot of pain, but I would definitely check the health monitor at the start so that I could gauge the distance better. The airport road was better for staying oriented on the course, but there was no tree cover. On our overcast day it didn't make much of a difference, but I don't know if I'd want to run this course on a sunny day. Fortunately, there was a water stop at the entrance to the loop, so there were four opportunities to get water. Because we estimated that the loop was roughly a mile and because we knew that we had walked about a mile on the way to the course and because I really was in a lot of pain, we opted to skip the second lap around the loop. Benn felt very guilty about not doing the whole course, but I assured him that the health monitor said that we had walked/run 3.2 miles for the day before we received our medals. So we called it a day on the 5K and headed back to the ship to have breakfast and get ready for the beach. The "medal" is a rubberized plastic, but it's lots of fun. It's very colorful and has a DCL 5K ribbon on it that matches the width of the other runDisney medals with the velcro closure. For a free event, it's a nice keepsake.

After we were all prepared to hang out on the beach, we took the tram to Pelican Point. Technically, we could have done that at the start of the race instead of walking, but we were instructed to walk. I assume that was so that the runners weren't clogging up the trams and more people could get onto the island more quickly. I realized when we were on the tram that I had left our tickets for our float rental in the room. So we asked the gentleman who was manning the booth if there was any way that he could look us up to see that we had tickets for pre-paying our float rental. He was not able to do so, but he was so super nice that he just let us go ahead and borrow two floats. We headed out into the little roped off area at the family beach where we quickly learned that using the floats on a windy day is an exercise in futility. We kept getting hung up on the rope on the one side. I couldn't paddle my arms fast enough to counteract the current + the wind. At one point, my tube got away from me and sailed over the line and in the process of trying to retrieve mine, Benn's cut loose and went off in a slightly different direction. I'm the stronger swimmer, so I took off after the first one and brought it back to Benn and by that time, the second on was already about 50 meters away, but eventually I caught us to it and dragged it back and paddled our way into shore. So that wasn't a very relaxing experience, but it makes for a pretty amusing story and I got a good workout out of it. The moral of the story is that there is no need to reserve floats ahead of time. If it's windy that day, you don't want one and if you just wait until you get there, you don't have to worry about forgetting your ticket!

After the float situation, Benn was basically done with the beach for the day. I kind of wanted to go down the waterslide, but not enough to swim out by myself and Benn wanted no parts of more time playing in the water by this point. Oh I forgot the most disappointing thing. This was our first time playing the in water in the Bahamas more than just sticking our toes in a Junkanoo Beach. i thought the deal was that you're supposed to be able to see the bottom because the water is so clear. The water was blue, but it was opaque, so I couldn't see a thing! And of course they have to post jellyfish warnings, so I was all paranoid about stepping on something. Not very relaxing. I think next time we're on a cruise that stops here, we'll try Serenity Bay.

Since lunch was about to be served, we dried off and hung out for a few minutes. We ate a Cookie Too, which had four stations serving identical options. We tasted most of the offerings and decided that we most preferred the Mahi Mahi, the chicken, and the German potato salad. The ribs were fatty and the burgers were a little on the dry side. There was a very nice picnic area and when we were there, it was full, but we were able to find a spot. We had been informed on the ship that the only place that you could buy Castaway Cay merchandise was on the island, so of course we checked it out, but I didn't see anything that super fabulous.

We decided that we were beached out for the day, so we headed back to the boat. Benn decided to grab a nap, but I decided that while I was appropriately dressed, I would go up and ride the AquaDuck while the line was hopefully short. There was a sign up the single riders were not permitted due to high winds, so I hung out for about 15 minutes until I met Mike from Nashville and his family of 3 that was willing to adopt me. I enjoyed the second ride much more than the first now that I knew what to expect. I headed back over to the Cove pool and for about 20 minutes, I was the only person in the pool. It was pretty great. I felt like since the bar was right there, I might as well have a banana daiquiri.

After that I went back to the room to switch to street clothes so I could make the 3:00 Animation Academy--we got to do two characters--what a treat! We did a profile view of Mickey and we drew Grumpy. That was the first time I've ever drawn a dwarf. I decided to check out the Midship Detective Agency game. From what I could tell, it basically uses the same tech as Sorcerers of the Magic Kingdom, but I enjoyed the premise of the game much more. I ran into Benn in the atrium just as I was finishing up. We went back the room and enjoyed out balcony for a while before changing for dinner so we could have time to play Ultimate Disney Trivia! Finally.

From there, the night got incredibly busy! We made it to trivia, which was scheduled in Evolution. It was moved to 687 because of Bingo and ended up in Pink because 687 was too crowded. Cool. I liked Pink the best. It's pretty. Two of our tablemates from dinner were there to witness our victory. We got 22 out of 25 questions and we won a pair of DCL luggage tags and a copy of the Haunted Mansion movie (which I now have to admit to owning ) by one point! We had just enough time to hustle to the dining room.

Tonights dinner was at Enchanted Garden. This was my definitive favorite of the three meals. We were back to French cuisine, of which I'm generally a fan. Also, I thought that decor here was particularly nice--sort of a french countryside meets Secret Garden sort of feel. We had Lobster Ravioli for a starter that was just delicious and a spinach and raspberry salad. I love salads with nuts and berries on them, so this was fabulous. For entrees, I had the caramelized sea scallops and Benn had the Prime Rib. Jude and Eak were upset that no one ordered the Sea Bass, so they brought one to the table for everyone to share. It was good, but my scallops were better! For dessert, I had the chocolate mousse and Benn had the apple cinnamon crunch sundae. We both loved our desserts and neither of us much cared for the other person's choice.

I felt a little badly because I had to leave dinner abruptly, but we were running a bit over and it was the only opportunity to pin trade with the crew members! I picked up four of the new hidden mickey character necktie pins. I also got oversized pins from other cruise itineraries--a Mediterranean and 2 Northern Europe. I almost got a hidden Mickey Cheshire cat apple, but a little girl in front of me traded for it. I was late getting to the second round of trivia in D Lounge, so Benn started without me. We didn't do quite so well at that one and we lost the coveted DCL keychain by 2 points. We had 21 out of 25 and the winning score was 23.

We darted out of trivia quickly so that we could make it to Believe, which people had been telling us all day was the best show. I'm inclined to agree that on this cruise it was the best, but the parts with the father and daughter seemed very forced and I didn't really identify with the daughter's character. I found her to be...annoying? The style of the broad story arcs on all of the shows was just not my cup of tea. Once again, the performances of the traditional Disney segments were great, but the plots that were created to tie them altogether were thin in my book. I'm glad that we went to see them and I might try them a second time, but if I miss these shows on subsequent cruises, I wouldn't be heartbroken. One thing that I did thoroughly enjoy was when Jimmy the Cruise Director came out to introduce the show and gave us some stats for the cruise. Our ship used 47,000 eggs, 16,000 ice cream cones (16,001--I had an ice cream cone after the show that he missed in that tally ), and 450 lbs. of mac & cheese.

Say after the show, we had to return to our room to pack quickly. We had about 30 minutes until we would have been in the group of people who were carrying off their own luggage. We tagged everything with a color coded character page (orange goofy) for retrieval in the terminal. Originally we intended to turn Eak and Jude down on their offer for breakfast at 6:45, but it becomes apparent that the Cabanas weren't scheduled to be open, so it was 6:45 or no food, so 6:45 indeed it would be. We had to be out of our room by 8:00 anyway, so we figured that we might as well eat! We had received a set of envelopes for gratuities, which I understood were to be added to our stateroom account automatically, so we also needed time to stop by Guest Relations and make sure that we had been charged for gratuities as we had very little cash with us.

Here are a few pics. I'll upload the rest in a separate post. The attachment tool is not getting along well with iPhoto tonight and I'm too sleepy to fight with it anymore right now.

Have you done a big boat before or do you get sick on the little boats? I'm perfectly fine to spend an afternoon boating on the bay, but this is the first time that I haven't felt sick at some point on a cruise ship. Or maybe check out river cruises if you've tried ocean cruising and it hasn't worked. It's crazy expensive, but Adventures by Disney bought a company that does Danube River cruises in Europe. That's on my dream Disney vay-cay bucket list.

Thanks, Allie

Serenity Bay sounds better and we will definitely check it our next time! The loop area was decently shady and there were 4 opportunities to get water on a 3-mile run, so that should help.

It seems that I maxed out the attachment storage for this thread while I was trying to conserve space on photobucket. More photos from Day 10:

The boat

Captain Jack Sparrow island meet & greet

Mele Kalikimaka

Eak and Jude, the best servers on the boat!

Dinner at Enchanted Garden

Princess meet & greet from the glass elevator

A picture of people who should spend more time cruising

DAY 11: Monday, November 16

We have reached the saddest day, the last day ( . Unfortunately in the cruise industry, there is nothing relaxing about getting off of the ship. On DCL, you have to be out of your stateroom by 8:00am. Our breakfast was scheduled for 6:45 because we were the first dinner seating. I believe that the late dinner seating was served breakfast at 8:00. Breakfast was served in the restaurant where we ate our last evening meal, so bonus, we got to go to Enchanted Garden again. I thought it was a nice touch that Eak and Jude were specifically assigned as our servers one last time. We've never done a dining room breakfast on a ship on the last day. We've always done the Cabanas-style restaurant, but on DCL, we couldn't find any information about Cabanas even serving breakfast, so that doesn't seem to be an option. Of course, everything was lovely. Even though I'm not a breakfast person, I did enjoy whatever it was that we ate. The night before, our tablemates had all said that they would skip breakfast, but our friends from the UK did turn up, so it was nice to enjoy their company again.

We were a little bit confused about the disembarkation procedures. With the other lines that we've traveled on, walk off passengers carrying their own bags are permitted to go ashore first. Then everyone else is assigned a waiting area and you are called by groups to leave the ship. Had we been driving, we would have done walk off, but since we had a 2:55 flight and we were using Tragical Express, we didn't see the need to worry with our bags. No information was provided about who should leave the ship when. finally after about an hour of just hanging out around the atrium enjoying the ship, we asked someone. We'd heard somewhere that everyone was to be off the boat by 9:15. I thought maybe they would call us by the color & character on our luggage tags. Instead we were told that it was an "open gangplank". This system was brilliant. Instead of everyone in Orange-Goofy trying to access the same area to retrieve luggage, people were streaming off the boat a few at a time. The whole process was rather leisurely. We were through customs in less than 10 minutes.

When using Magical/Tragical Express to transfer at Port Canaveral, the procedure is VERY simple. There was an entire bank of buses waiting for us and we just followed the appropriate colored line to the airport bus area. Once our bus was mostly full, it departed. The Cast Member manning the door verified the we intended to board the airport bus and the driver made a second announcement, so if you can manage to get on the wrong bus by accident, well then...

We arrived at the airport around 10:15 for our 2:55 flight. We were scheduled to fly to Raleigh, where we would have 2 hours to change planes and then arrive in Baltimore at 7:30. In this case, we could have booked an earlier non-stop flight, but at the time that we booked, the 2:55 nonstop was hideously expensive and based on Disney's overcautious recommendation, that was the earliest Southwest flight we dared to book. I can understand why they use the time guidelines that they do. On the way to the airport, we saw a dump truck that had run off the side of the road and traffic was completely stopped waiting for a tow truck. 528 is basically the only decent way in and out or Port Canaveral. If that had happened on our side, we could have been cutting it close to make our flight.

So we figured that we'd just get rid of our bags awhile and walk around the airport. We never have time to shop at the airport Disney store (turns out that there are two Disney stores--one in each terminal), so what the heck. Turns out that Southwest will only let you check bags 4 hours prior to your flight. SO we hing out for about half an hour until bag check opened for us. We did some Disney shopping and had lunch at Macaroni Grill before going through security. I was really glad that Southwest is in B terminal, because we saw the security line for A terminal--WOW I've never seen our side that bad! Someone said that they had been waiting for an hour. I believe that a lot of the international flights go out of A terminal and we hadn't heard about the attacks in Paris yet at that point, so that had to be contributing to the delay.

We walked down to our terminal only to find out that our flight was delayed until 3:20. As long as that 3:20 turned out to be accurate, we were still fine, but we were concerned about being delayed a second time and missing our connecting flight. Because our delay was more than 15 minutes, we were eligible to fly standby on another flight without any additional fee, so we trekked to the other side of the terminal where the 2:55 nonstop would depart. We were the first people on the standby list, so we felt pretty confident that we would make the flight and if not, we had 25 minutes to get back to the other terminal. No problem. We were, however, informed that our luggage would still be on our original flight because there wouldn't be time to pull it and get it on our plane. Still, I'd rather be in Baltimore waiting on luggage than to risk us missing our connecting flight in Raleigh.

We did make it on the flight, so we arrived back in Baltimore at around 5:00. Our luggage was in fact not at the airport yet, so we found a little restaurant styled after a British pub to grab some dinner. After dinner, we still had about an hour until our luggage appeared, but we did find all of the pieces without issue and made our way to the parking lot. The drive home was uneventful and there were 4 very happy kitties waiting for us when we finally rolled in at around 9:30. It's amazing. On Friday 11/6, I had left the house at 3:30am and within 5 hours, I was in the park watching the trolley show. On Monday, 11/16, we left the boat at 8:45am and didn't return home for nearly 13 hours. In the future, I believe that we will tighten the flight timeline and take our chances.

Also another consideration, we didn't end up taking Magical Express to the port from WDW, but it was my understanding that doing so would have caused us to arrive at the port around 1:30-2:00, thus catching the tail end of lunch. Whereas when we got off the ship, we could have gotten a bus to WDW at around 8:15 in the morning. For efficiency's sake, I think it is better to cruise first and do the land portion second if you elect to do land & sea.

Overall, it was an amazing trip. We really did have so much fun. Even the WDW experiences that were out of character for me were enjoyable for the most part and there were things that my friends reacted differently to than Benn and I usually do and if was helpful to me to see their perspective. The cruise was the epitome of decadence from start to finish. It was a bit more expensive than a similar cruise on an alternate carrier would have been, but WOW! What an amazing experience. We did rebook a placeholder on board and I expect that we will probably use it to do the meet-up cruise, but we are going to wait to see what is released for May-September 2017. I've got my eye on Northern Europe or Alaska!!

Here are some clean-up trip photos:

Back in Port

Benn's opinion of leaving the ship

Breakfast--BBQ chicken omelet I think?

Wine & Dine medal

The pin haul and the chip & dale we picked up for our little "nephew". He's 5 months old and his parents were our first "Disney buddies"

Some of the fun items we received from our Fish Extender group

That's all she wrote, folks. Thanks for following along. I hope you enjoyed reading as much as I enjoyed writing!

hmmm...good thinking. Next time I'll order an extra shot root beer schnapps for my "root beer float"

Thanks, Vettelover! Just over a month away from your next trip, eh? You must be excited!