Disney Wonder Nov 16-23: To Galveston and Beyond!

[FergusBC]

On our 1 st cruise we saw the pin trading in the Navigators. I asks DH if he wanted to do it on our last cruise & he said no (I don't think he wanted to bring the lanyard full of pins!). However, I'm sure he will from now on! I'm going to show your pix!

Poor V...she didn't bring her lanyard pins...she just had the few that she had bought on the cruise..she was wishing she'd had her collection on board. Ah, next time...next time! (Next time mommy's bringing hers too! )

 

[FergusBC]

Once I hit that last afternoon and the suitcases have to come out, it's all downhill from there. Still enjoying your TR - you certainly crammed a lot of stuff into your last day though!

I know! Don't ask me how we did it! I wouldn't believe it if it weren't for the photographic evidence

And somewhere in there we must have packed..???

Did you book another Galveston cruise? I was thinking of you when I saw the new itineraries!

 

[ukintheus]

I know! Don't ask me how we did it! I wouldn't believe it if it weren't for the photographic evidence And somewhere in there we must have packed..??? Did you book another Galveston cruise? I was thinking of you when I saw the new itineraries!

Yes, we booked our very first B2B. Very excite to have 14 days of cruising!!

 

[FergusBC]

Yes, we booked our very first B2B. Very excite to have 14 days of cruising!!

Sweet! That will be a blast

 

[FergusBC]

Ah yes, pin trading. V picked up a couple new pins and now I remember where DH went -
he was up in Studio Sea saving us a table for the family talent show.

Yeah, that's right. Saving a table.
Living on the edge, baby!

We staked out a spot to support our tablemates - their youngest was supposed to play piano in the talent show.
Unbeknownst to us, she had withdrawn from the talent show so we didn't get to see her, but it was a fun event anyway...

And the fascinating photo to support this bit of phototravelogue:

The Table!
But it is a cool table, all film reel-ish and everything


And then, at long last, after what seems now to have been a very long day but at the time it flew by in a flash,
it was time to head for dinner. Our last supper (snicker) was in Parrot Cay.

Passing by the Internet Cafe on the way


Evidently I was feeling photo burnt out as the only photo I have from dinner is the dessert menu.


Now we could argue quite successfully that the dessert menu is one of the most important photos...
but still, seems odd that that was it from dinner!
I think we were too busy chatting & socializing and saying our goodbyes to our tablemates and our serving team
(we weren't doing the dining room breakfast in the morning) to 'focus' on taking pictures (Hehe! Did you see what I did there?)

After dinner, we popped back to the cabin to make sure our suitcases were in the hall by the deadline.
And double checked that we all had clothes and toiletries set out for the morning.
Our flight home wasn't until 5:30pm so we were going to spend the day at the Johnson Space Centre.
Therefore, with excellent forethought, we had kept out two outfits for the next day:
shorts & t-shirts for the day, and jeans & sweaters for the flight home.

DH headed off for his long anticipated whisky tasting in the Outlook bar (#4 for those who are still counting!),
so V headed down to the Edge to see what was shaking and I was going to take K to the kids club
so that I could hang out with DH for the whisky tasting and then have a last night cocktail with him.

Yeah. That was the plan.

Somehow K didn't get the memo.

I begged. I pleaded. I may or may not have threatened.

But she would not go back to the kids club. She finally conceded and said she'd go for a half-hour
but by then I felt so guilty for trying to force her to do it when it was her holiday too that I said we'd just go to turn in her wristband.

Now that is when the holiday is officially over.

And for those that read that and worry that 'oh my goodness the kids clubs must be terrible if she couldn't get her daughter to go',
don't worry...there were more issues at play and most had nothing to do with the clubs themselves
(and more to do with the fact that big sis had freedom to come and go from the Edge and wasn't playing with her).

In other words, it's complicated

So we turned in her wristband, and went back to the cabin for cartoons. I vented my frustration in my comment card to Disney,
giving kudos to the CMs and jeers to Disney for changing their on board booking policy....THREE STINKING DAYS before our cruise.
No, I wasn't bitter. Just because I mentally flipped the bird at the Future Cruise desk every time I walked by...nope, no bitterness there!!!

Apparently my comments fell on deaf ears as they haven't changed their mind

K had crawled into bed by this point so I sat sulking when freedom arrived - in the form of V,
back from the Edge and ready for bed.
Please please please will you watch your sister while I run to have a drink with daddy?
(oh the stories she'll have for the therapist when she grows up!!)
And with a quick "I love you. You're the best!" I was off to the Outlook!

The tasting was just winding up when I got there ("hey, what took you so long?")


Here's DH finding Jesus.


Seriously, that's Jesus...it was his last night of his contract so his mind may have been on other things.
I see he's back on the Wonder there's a recent trip report where he was doing the Mixology class.

A close up of DH's awesome cool shirt (that I bought him):


Random Outlook pictures that I took while waiting for DH to wind down so that we could have our nightcap:




Where's REVERSE?!?!

That is officially the last photo I took on our last full day on the ship.

A moment of silence, if you please.

Of course, that wasn't the end of the evening.

Once I managed to tear DH away, we decided to head to the Cadillac Lounge for our (first and) final nightcap.
We were the only ones in there other than the Ivan and Polly, and the piano player.
Dh and I sat at the bar (ooooh...so sophisticated!) and chatted and savoured our final cocktail.
Of course, the inevitable happened...once we stopped moving around, we hit the wall. Full speed.

So with final good byes to our favourite bartending staff, we crawled back to our cabin.

~~ End Scene ~~​

 

[Poohbear 64]

Hey FergusBC,

YAY, more of your trip, boo that it is coming to an end. I have a question from your recent post, you said.....

and jeers to Disney for changing their on board booking policy....THREE STINKING DAYS before our cruise.
No, I wasn't bitter. Just because I mentally flipped the bird at the Future Cruise desk every time I walked by...nope, no bitterness there!!!

What does the 3 stinking days before your cruise mean?? Did I miss something or in my case forget something??

.

 

[FergusBC]

YAY, more of your trip, boo that it is coming to an end. I have a question from your recent post, you said.....

and jeers to Disney for changing their on board booking policy....THREE STINKING DAYS before our cruise.

What does the 3 stinking days before your cruise mean?? Did I miss something or in my case forget something??
.

LOL...that was just about their on board booking policy. It used to be 10% off, $200 on board credit (something like that), half the usual deposit and no limitations on when you had to take it. So we had budgeted in $$ to book a future dummy cruise. But then three days before our cruise, Disney changed it - the key for us was you NOW had to take the future cruise within 18 months. There's no way we could get another cruise in within 18 months so I was rather peeved with them. If they'd just waited another week, we would have had our dummy cruise booked and been grandfathered in for most of the perks.

 

[Poohbear 64]

OH, got it, thanks for filling me in!!! I agree 18 months isn't a lot of time, in my case I usually have my vacations planned already. The "other" cruise line that we frequent gives us 4 years for future bookings.

 

[FergusBC]

So believe it or not, if anyone is still listening, I am almost ready to post the conclusion. I should have had it up by now but it's been a weird couple of months. Not to mention just the general reluctance to have it all come to an end

Looking back, even as detailed as I tried to be (perhaps excessively in some spots!) I can still think of things that I forgot to put in.

There was the near-divorce on our first sea day as we prepared for formal night and Dh's antique monogrammed cufflinks (see! told you we were all classy and stuff!) were nowhere to be found! I was in charge of packing so what did I do with them?! I felt just sick about it because they should have been in the suitcase. If it was an 'oh damn, I forgot to get them off the dresser', then I would have been peeved but oh well, they were somewhere safe...

To my everlasting relief they were discovered when Dh did one last sweep of the suitcase pockets right before dinner!

And how did I forget V's trip to the medical clinic early in the cruise? She'd been bitten by something in Galveston and her foot was swollen. Come to think of it that was one of the reasons she didn't wear her shoes on formal night - it was too tight on her swollen foot! I was very laissez-faire about it, adopting a 'what doesn't kill her will make her stronger attitude.' But after a couple of days, Dh couldn't take it anymore and took her to the clinic. The nurse told him the doctor could have a look at it for a couple hundred dollars or we could buy some antihistimine in the gift store.

We bought the antihistimine.

It must have worked because there were no more foot issues after that and we totally forgot about it

And did I mention our leaky cabin? When we first got into the cabin, K noticed that the carpet was wet in the hallway just outside the bathroom. When our cabin host came by I mentioned it to him. He pointed to the ceiling vent above and said it wasn't unusual for condensation to form when the balcony doors are open. Ha, I thought to myself, likely story! He's just covering up for the ol' girl showing her age!

Of course, this was all right after the Magic came back after her drydock and the disboards were rife with complaints about the cabin conditions so I may have been a bit uber-sensitive to possible flaws.

Then we proceeded to forget all about it.

Later in the cruise (Grand Cayman day? Jamaica?..I can't remember which) we left the sliding doors open as we were going back and forth to the balcony and hey, guess what? There was ceiling vent condensation and wet carpet again! Heh, I'll be darned. Those stateroom hosts do know what they're talking about.

So PSA, the air conditioning will drip on you if you don't treat it nicely .

Sigh...More to follow...

 

[Poohbear 64]

Well look who showed up in my thread subscriptions, I needed to remind myself why I was subscribed. Good to hear from you again, I will be waiting patiently for the conclusion, I love a good story!!

 

[FergusBC]

Bwahahaha...I know, I know! Trust me...part of me wants to wait till the one year anniversary to wrap things up...I mean, it's not that far away now.

 

[FergusBC]

At some point in the wee small hours of the morning, I woke up. I got the bright idea to go see if I could spot any oil rigs. I opened the sliding glass door and stepped out on the balcony.....

....and screamed like a little girl before leaping back into the cabin.

Holy jumpin' dinah!

It.
Was.
COLD.

Not 'oh there's a fresh breeze blowing off the ocean today' cold.

I'm Canadian. I know cold. Okay, I'm a bit of a hothouse flower Canadian but still - I've been to Saskatchewan in the dead of winter (April! )

I stopped caring about oil rigs at that point. As I crawled back under that wonderful duvet to warm up (sorry 'bout the feet, sweetie!) I did register that it was pretty foggy outside and fell asleep to the faint hope that maybe we wouldn't be able to dock because of the fog....

By the time I woke up again, it was just starting to get light. Not being a complete idiot, I put on shoes & my sweater before going out on the balcony this time. We were just coming into the harbour.

​

Adding insult to injury, there was no fog, just rain. Cold rain.

So the shorts & t-shirts that we had kept out for the day?
Yeah, they went straight back into our carry-ons (I guess at this point they were 'carry-offs'!)
and we dressed in our jeans & sweatshirts, and wished we had heavier coats with us!

​

While Dh showered and dressed, I went out to grab some breakfast stuff from the buffet - taking some detours for a few last photos:

Boo! Hiss!


Here's a shot that shows how close to the elevators our cabin is:


Our door is on the far side of the big laundry bag - another sign that the ship was preparing to evict us all

Some random cabin photos:




​

Not really all that random, I guess. I'm never quite sure why people always recommend the (now banned!) over the door shoe holders, etc for extra storage. There's four of us in the cabin and there seems to be lots of space for all our stuff. I don't think we travel particularly light so not sure what we're not bringing that we would need extra storage for....?

Once we breakfasted and finished getting ready, it was time for one last sweep of the cabin and (sob) we said goodbye and went down to wait for debarkation. We were....the Daisy Duck group. Because they go by characters you have no idea if that's good or not. Does the Daisy group get called before the Goofy group? Is there any hierarchy? I dunno. But we did have a bit of a wait so Daisy can't be all that important LOL.

It was crowded when we first got down to Deck 3 and we perched in a porthole. As people got off the ship more spaces opened up and we grabbed some chairs in the Promenade Lounge.

The fish-eye lens effect was by accident, not for artistic effect!
​

Hmm...maybe we weren't Daisy. She's second up in those photos so I'll come back and edit when I figure out who we were. Or I'll just make it up. Whatever's easiest.

As I mentioned, our flight home wasn't till 5:30pm so we weren't in any extreme rush to get off. Our plan for the day was to pick up a rental car and spend a few hours at the Johnson Space Centre (oh sorry, Center) before driving to the airport.

Eventually our character was up and we joined the crowds to leave the ship. As we got down to the luggage area, we ran into our tablemates so got to say goodbye again as Dh went off with a porter in search of our suitcases.

Exiting through Customs was quick and painless and the porter took us straight out and got us a cab. We had booked a car rental with Budget in Texas City - Galveston Enterprise was going to charge an additional $150 drop off fee for a one-way rental to the airport! Um. No thanks.

The taxi to Texas City cost us $50 (tip included) and the rental was booked at $37. I think we ended up paying a bit more because Dh upgraded to an SUV...and we got the all important GPS with it. We should have brought our own GPS but I thought we could just use our phones. But with the phones in airplane mode, we couldn't get GPS to work so live and learn, darnit.

The taxi driver tried to give us directions for getting to the airport. It probably made sense to him but we kind of lost track after about the third turn and decided to just trust the GPS and highway signage.

The rest of the conversation was mostly discussing the weather - they were forecasting SNOW! Yep, holiday's over. Let's go home.

At Budget, we had a bit of a wait for the rental car, as someone else was ahead of us and it's a small rental place - basically a desk inside of the car repair shop at the mall. While we were waiting another family arrived off the ship and we had a 'hey, great minds think alike!' moment LOL.

All in all we were at the Space CentER by 10am. We did some suitcase shuffling in the parking lot - putting stuff from our carry ons into our suitcases, etc. I also made the sad discovery that the batteries in both cameras were dead so all of our photos from then on were just taken with our phones so we missed a lot of good shots

 

[Poohbear 64]

It is always sad to read the ending of a story, thank you for sharing your trip.

 

[FergusBC]

And thank you for following along!

There will still be a bit more. By gum, I'm taking this to the bitter end!

 

[pepe3penelope]

Thanks for the update! Still here!

 

[ukintheus]

Still here too.

 

[FergusBC]

So back to the parking lot of the Johnson Space Centre, with us hastily repacking our suitcases in the trunk of our SUV. We were very sad to say good bye to the shorts & flip flops we *thought* we would be wearing on our last day. Instead I think there may have been thoughts expressed about stopping at a clothing store to buy long johns! Once the summer clothes and the highly dangerous 30+ml bottles of liquids had been safely tucked into the luggage, we locked up and hightailed it into the Centre.

Stepping in was mind-blowing, so much to see at once....

A friendly docent came over to greet us and give us the tips on what to do and see.

"Make sure you take the tram tour" he said.

No worries...top of my list!

This caught our eye and drew us over like a magnet!


We can go inside it? Brilliant!


​

I don't know if the kids were as awestruck as we were. They're growing up in an age where space travel isn't science fiction any more.

Dh and I were a little more nostalgic. Even though I am <ahem> too young to even remember the moon landing, he isn't.

After coming out of the shuttle we were pleased to realize there was a small food court around the corner, which meant we now knew what we were doing for lunch later.

Based on pun value alone, we decided we just *had* to eat here:


Not to mention, we love Chinese food.
​

But before we got to that, I wanted to do the tram tour.

"Why don't we wait?", says dh, "it might warm up."

"No, now. before it gets busier"

In retrospect this might be one of those times where I should have listened to DH (shhh....don't tell him that).

There was no line up so we walked out and got onto the tram, close to the back.

It was cold.



And you know what? When the tram gets moving, it gets even colder!

Too cold to take hands out of pockets for photos even.

Except for this one.

Cold enough for ya', honey?


Once we got to the mission control building, it was a relief to go inside and tour around.


​

In fact, we may have just stayed and hid out in there if they hadn't insisted we go back out and onto the tram to continue the tour. Meanies.

Now to the major bummer and the most ugh annoying part of the whole trip. ...There was a group of tourists ahead of us on the tram, obviously all part of one tour group and apparently non-English speaking. No problem with that. But apparently because they couldn't understand the tour spiel, then they didn't care if anyone else did because they were LOUD. Obnoxiously so. Disgracefully so when we stopped for a moment of silence in the Memorial Grove. They weren't silent. Someone finally (may have been dh) yelled at them (hey, we were cold and cranky too!) which lowered their volume temporarily.

Yep, sometimes I really ought to listen to my husband.

Wow! Who said that?!

Finally we arrived at the rocket park. By this point we had no feeling in our toes so our enthusiasm for space travel was fast disappearing. Then we realized there was a building there so we tried to look like we were interested in the ones outside:



Then we hightailed it into the building.

It wasn't noticeably heated but at least we were out of the wind!

<sob>...thinking of Jamaican beaches....
​

We dilly-dallied a bit to let the obnoxious group get ahead of us. We could jump on any tram to get back to the Centre so we wanted to make sure we lost them in a hurry!

Then we turned our attention to the main attraction: Saturn V!







We spent quite a bit of time walking around and just trying to take in the immensity of it all!

And of course, cartwheeling...

We were starting to get hungry so finally jumped on a return tram
(thankfully the obnoxious group had long disappeared!)

Look...an authentic Longhorn!

Heh, are they always so...unfocused?​

 

[pepe3penelope]

As usual, loved your update! Can't wait to show your space center pics to DH.

 

[FergusBC]

As usual, loved your update! Can't wait to show your space center pics to DH.

Thank you. I wish I had more photos to post. As you can tell from my report, I do like to take pics of Every. Single. Thing! LOL.....it broke my heart to just have my phone, which rarely can focus due to <ahem> having been dropped once or twice or ten times!

We barely scraped the surface of things to do at the space center. We'd love to go back and have more time. Of course, listening to the 'Houston, we have a problem' jokes did get old really fast (Sweetie, you listening?)

 

[ukintheus]

At least you got a change to look around the Space Center. There is a lot to see if you are interested, and if the weather is a little warmer....although you would be hard pressed to find that teeny, tiny opportunity of not too cold/not too hot in Houston.