Apparently on all the special cruises Disney will create some special trading pins. This cruise was no exception. I'm sure this is all for the benefit of those on the cruise...not to make money.
They only make a limited number and we got notified that they would be offering these pins on the 13th (which happened to be today). You could start getting wrist bands at 8:30am, and if you get a wrist band that allows you to purchase two full sets of pins. There were 6 pins I think, one for Los Angeles, Cabo San Lucas, one for Puerto Vallarta, one for the panama canal, one for Costa Maya, and one for Miami. Apparently they didn't like the quality of the Cartehena pin. We all saw that as a pretty funny thing because
well, more on that later.
Foreshadowing. or something.
Anyhooo, DW wanted to get a couple of the pins, no not a couple of sets, we aren't like that. But she did want to get the Panama Canal pins to give to our kids. At least I think those were the ones we wanted, she will correct me if I was wrong.
So she had Mickey call us and wake us up at 7:15. Well, ok, wake her up. I was lazy and stayed in bed!
Audrey also wanted the pins so she and DW met outside the stores. In fact Audrey got there at 6:45, and saved DW a spot in line. In true
DCL fashion they had coffee available and were passing out pastries. So at least they didn't go hungry. At about 7:45am a CM came around to tell everyone they would hand the wrist bands out at 8am instead of 8:30. That was nice. I wish they had done that on Black Friday! But that's a whole other story that you don't need to be bored with!!! DW got her wrist band by 8:05, about the time I was waking up. Oh wait, no that's not true.
She came back and went out on the balcony to wait for me to wake up. She saw dolphins out there jumping around and got a few pictures of them. Then she decided rest was a good thing so she came in and laid down for a while.
Dolphins are awesome. funny how they love to play around ships.
Obviously one picture was not enough
I like this one because you can see the sun coming up.
No breakfast this morning because we had our group Palo lunch
so I viewed that as meaning there was no reason to get up early!! We got dressed and headed up around 10, looking forward to stuffing ourselves on Palo brunch, generally one of our favorite things on the ship. There were 12 Disers in our group, Audrey, Doug, Jennifer, Jim, Linda, Terri, April, Michael, Rochelle and her husband
we didn't get his name (Sorry!!! We will try to look it up, if not hopefully someone else can chime in with his name).
Our brunch group. Note Doug and Audrey with the cool Santa hats. These were awesome and it made them easy to spot. In fact there was one point when, apparently, Doug walked right past me and I ignored him. When he didn't have his hat on I didn't recognize him and apparently became rude!
Our server was Sasha and he did a nice job corralling all of us. We were in the private room which we had never done before (yup, chalk that one up!). Brunch was good, but I don't know if I would go as far as great. They had some excellent cheeses which is usual, I had Eggs Julia, and I think the hollandaise sauce on this ship just isn't good because the flavor issues remained even in Palo. One huge thing that was missing was Stolen Bread which we have always really liked, but it wasn't there. I asked Sasha about it and was told the recipe was stolen. Ha! Get it! But that was very disappointed! The Smoked Salmon and Smoked Trout mousse was very good as usual, as was the blue cheese and grape pizza. So given all that why am I saying it was only good? Not sure to be honest, but again I think it sort of goes with the whole cruise
ie. that the food just wasn't up to the level we expected There have been a lot of theories kicked around about this
and I'm hoping it is just a temporary thing.
One of the frustrating things about this is that we cannot mark Disney down for their food quality as they have somehow managed to tie food quality to the servers. The theory as I understand it is that the servers should get you something else if what you got the first time wasn't good. But they don't cook the food and I won't hold them accountable if the kitchen can't cook a steak. That was one of our biggest issues, I don't think a single person at our table had a steak cooked perfectly. That should be one of the easiest thing to do
but it's not. So basically Disney gets feedback that the food quality is excellent...which is isn't...because we are all too guilty to mark it down because it hurst the servers. AAAAARRRRGGGGGHHHH! More on that later as well.
Dang, I better stop doing that, you guys have to keep me honest if I forget to actually talk about the various things I claim I'm going to talk about!
So after brunch we headed back to our room and sent a couple of e-mails out. OH! funny story about e-mail. one day we were out on deck with my computer sending out and receiving e-mails. We were in port and a woman asks if we have wifi. I said we didn't , but that I was using the ships internet. Holy cow, you would have through we were worshiping satan the way this woman recoiled, like "why would you do that" as she turned her nose up at us. Very strange. We pointed out that our kids were not on the ship and this was how we were maintaining contact with them
and she walked away. Funny how people have to get all up on everyone's business like that. Strange stuff! Frankly if I was working while on the ship that's up to me, isn't it? And it's not like we were bothering anyone.
Since DW waited in line for the wrist bands we had to go pick them up
mainly so she could get the black wrist band off of her wrist. As I said before they had several options, but the ones we got were Costa Maya (which had Chip and Dale on it which is Nick's Favorite), and Panama Canal which had Pluto. Connor's favorite is Stitch, but as Stitch didn't make the group no luck. Maybe he was the reason the Cartagena one was rejected!
In fact we spent a good chunk of the rest of the cruise trying to trade for Stitch pins, but apparently those get snapped up really quickly. We finally found one
.but are still looking for one more. The funny thing is that a few years ago you could not find a single Chip and Dale pin
but now they are everywhere in every form
kind of funny how the characters ebb and flow.
I was crying like a baby. I think I actually kneeled and kissed the ground.
