So much for my resolution to get back blogging regularly again, eh? Well I’ve got a terrific excuse. We spent the last two weeks away from home – cruising to Alaska on The Disney Wonder and checking out the sites of Vancouver. We traveled with Grammy Sherrie, Aunt Theresa and “Baby” Autumn (20 mos and not so much a baby!). It was a wonderful once-in-a-lifetime sort of trip.
As with anything like this, the first day was a long day of travel. We left our house around 3 AM (MST) and didn’t get on the ship until around 3P (PST). There was a lot of hurry-up-and-wait which is always frustrating, especially with kids. There was also some sort of SNAFU with a passport and whereas we thought we could skip immigration/customs, we ended up having to go through it after all. No idea how much time that would have saved us, but anything would have been welcome because once we got on the ship, none of us had eaten in hours and were all starved, but everything was closed for the mandatory drill and we couldn’t get food until after we sat through a 30 min lecture on how to put on a lifejacket.
Irritating, but it was quickly forgotten when we could get a nice snack (tasty pizza) on deck 9.
We spent the first day (an at-sea day) exploring the ship. The sucker is huge. 11 decks (3 pools fit on one deck to give you an idea how long they are) and it’s pretty easy to get turned around at first, forgetting what you’re headed to is forward or aft. The ship was put into service in 1998 and it’s in remarkably good shape especially since it probably sees around 1000 kids per voyage.
Speaking of kids, I’m sure you won’t be surprised to hear that lots and lots of stuff really caters to kids. After we got our kids tagged, we checked them into the club or the lab at least once a day for an hour or more. They had non-stop stuff to do at one place or the other and the kids could go back and forth as they desired. They built pasta houses and tested them ala the three little pigs. They went to Ratatouille cooking school. They became Rescue Rangers. They also played hours of Mario Kart and princess dressup. They loved it and frequently wanted to go there over doing anything else.
And when they were with us we had lots of fun too. We all spent a lot of time in the pool watching “Funnel Vision” on-deck Disney movies played over the mid-ship pool, and watching movies in the indoor Disney movie theatre (including Monsters U, Peter Pan and Wreck-It Ralph). There were lots of other great family activities – game shows, contests, karaoke, dancing, etc. that will be a bit more appropriate as the kids get older.
While the kids were busy, Matt and I did lots of the adults-only stuff the ship has to offer. We did a whiskey tasting. We spent hours relaxing in the hot tub, in our state room, in the cafes. We had dinner at the ship’s adults only restaurant, Palo, which was awesome. We even got workouts in on all of the at-sea days. There was a running track on deck 4 that went around the whole ship (about 1/3 mile) and a gym in the spa area.
Our whole family got dressed up for formal night (nod to Black and Bianco where we got Ben’s suit for $25). It was fun to get dressed up though it’s not very strictly enforced we noticed. The same night they did The Golden Mickeys for the main evening entertainment.
So the kids got to walk the red carpet and take in a “live” show. We did two of the 7 evening’s entertainments. Since they didn’t start until 8:30 it was hard after a long day to keep the kids up ’til 9:30, but they did this one and Matt also took them to Toy Story the Musical another night. They were fun for the kids but a bit tedious for the adults. They also had some magicians, a hypnotist, Monsters U in the big theatre and Disney Legends, which is another musical type show.
The entire ship experience was excellent and we had a wonderful time. I’ll share more tomorrow about our off-ship experiences.
I’ve heard really good things about Disney Cruises. So glad you got to go.