BlueEyes78
Mouseketeer
- Joined
- Sep 3, 2009
We've been home from our first DCL adventure (yes, there will be more despite the title), and I'm hoping to get some of our memories documented before it gets too far away! I didn't really take good notes this time so I'll do my best to get the highlights of each day!
Quick introduction (for more detailed ones you can see my previous Disney World trip reports):
We are a family of five who lives in the Cincinnati suburbs. The hubs (Shawn) and I (Rebecca) are both 37 and work at a local University doing nerdy data things (he is a senior programmer; I am a project manager). When we get time to ourselves, we enjoy eating out. I am an avid reader and I also enjoy walking to keep in shape. We love beach vacations with very little scheduled or planned where relaxation is the primary goal. Normally we rent a condo in Florida, but I have to admit I loved the idea of cruising where we could get some of the best of Disney (without all the scheduling and Fast Passing) like the characters and the service, and do as much or little as we wanted. The big draw for me was no messes to clean, no dishes to wash, and the occasional child-free dinner. I work part-time and am a stay at home mom most days, so those features were critical for me!
We have three kids - our oldest Caden (10) is our little nerd jr. He is extremely bright and loves to read, play Minecraft and build with Legos. When we do make him go outside, he enjoys running quite a bit. He is also our foodie - he will try anything and loves most of it. Unfortunately, he has a severe peanut allergy so that can make being an adventurous eater a little TOO adventurous!
Connor (7) our middle child, is our sweet and sensitive but "spacey" kid. He would live in an imaginary world in his head filled with talking animals and dragons 24/7 but unfortunately we do occasionally make him do other things like go to school and clean his room. He also enjoys Legos, Minecraft, and reading. His favorite physical activity is swimming.
And last, but certainly not least, is the spitfire, Megan, who turned four two days before we set sail. Megan is a giant personality inside a tiny body who THINKS she is in charge of the family. She is very active, loves Disney princesses and dress up, and does pretty much anything she sets her mind to. She adores her "bubbas" but makes sure they know who the true leader of the pack is (at least in her mind).
We have done three Disney vacations, our last one being when she was an infant, and do plan to do more in the future. But this year we were going to celebrate our 15th anniversary in August and wanted to do something really awesome to mark the occasion.
(Here are our first three trips):
We have talked for years about “someday” doing a DCL vacation, but were waiting until all our kids were potty-trained and old enough to remember it (mostly), and use the Kids’ clubs onboard. Just before our vacation last summer we realized that we were finally at that point and we could start making this dream a reality. And how perfect was it that it was our 15th anniversary in August (the month we normally vacation).
We started looking into pricing, and unfortunately the August prices seemed a little ridiculous to us. But September was $4000 cheaper! OK, yes, we’re pulling the kids out of school!
CHAPTER 1: THE PLANNING
We chose Labor Day week to minimize the school days missed, and booked a Category 4B Oceanview Family Suite with a Verandah. We had cruised twice pre-children with Carnival in a tiny little room with a porthole and decided with five of us, we should splurge and get some space. We booked with Disney and the fabulous travel agent we used recommended Cabin 7600, which is one of the 4Bs with the extra bed (obviously a must for us unless one of the kids was on the floor), plus it was in a great location. Having never cruised Disney, we just took her word for it.
We chose our itinerary based solely on our schedule – Labor Day week was the western Caribbean, and though I enjoyed the Eastern more of our two Carnival cruises, western it was! On the other hand, I could restock my Mexican vanilla which ran out years ago!
We had it booked 13 months in advance and didn’t want to tell the kids that far out (I don’t have to explain that one to any parents out there). So we decided a Christmas reveal would be fun. In retrospect even that might have been a bit too far from our departure date. We had the “Goofy” call scheduled where he told the kids they’d be going on the Fantasy and they assumed he meant TODAY. So it was a bit of a let-down to tell them it would be in nine months! To make it a little more “real” and to keep the kids from taking this sort of trip for granted, we assigned points to a chore list for the boys. Each week they accumulated points with a goal of 2,000 to “pay off” their airline tickets. Anything they earned above that would convert to cash they could spend on souvenirs.
Our next item on the to-do list was to book our flights. We had points saved up enough to buy 3 on our travel rewards credit card by January, and a colleague that used to be a flight attendant pointed out we may not want to wait to have all 5 because we were flying on Labor Day weekend. So we booked our flights and then slowly paid ourselves back with the Travel Rewards cash instead. Our Disney agent said flying in on Saturday should be no problem as long as we got the first flight out of Cincy. The plus to this is that we wouldn’t even have to pick up our own luggage – just disembark, and hop on the Magical Express and then on to Port Canaveral where our bags would “magically” appear outside our room. The one negative was that flights home the following Saturday were astronomically priced for some reason, and out of the range of our travel rewards. But if we flew home Sunday they were half the cost. Even including the cost of a night at the Orlando airport hotel. This was not ideal, but to use the rewards we had to do that.
In the spring we decided to be safe we should renew our passports and get them for the kids. WOW is that expensive! We saved some money by taking the pictures ourselves and attaching them to the applications.
After that we didn’t do much more in the way of planning until late July. We would write down questions as they came up, and bug a Disney agent every now and then. We researched the ports and figured out what dining rotation we’d want (ERAERRA with dinner at Palo on Tuesday). We decided to stay on the boat at Grand Cayman (a lot of folks assured us that they never visit the ports and instead enjoy the lighter crowds on the ship on port days), to just get off at Cozumel for lunch and vanilla, and do a tour on Jamaica. I saw a lot of neat reviews about the Blue Hole, and after a lot of review-reading on private guides (since most of the DCL tours were VERY expensive and had age restrictions), chose to go with Marvyn’s Paradise tours. We’d get a private driver, and we asked to visit the Blue Hole and do lunch at Scotchie’s. Marvyn was responsive and dealt quickly with all our questions.
We also made a “100 days till the cruise” chain in late May and hung it over our fireplace. This was to help deal with the incessant questioning from our toddler about how many days were left. She would say, “How many days till the Disney boat?” When we said “A LOT of days,” she would respond, “Ten?” All she could do when she saw the chain was shake her head and say, “That is a LOT more than ten.”One night while Shawn was adjusting it, it fell down off its hooks and she nearly lost her mind. “It’s gone!! That means we go on the Disney boat tomorrow!!!”
August was rough on all of us because it’s our normal vacation time, and it seemed like everyone was at the beach. And then it was time to get ready to start school, which just felt super weird with our vacation just 3 weeks away finally. During those last few weeks we made a list of things we needed to pack, and from that, what we needed to buy. We got a couple of new carry-on suitcases since we only have two and one of them is pretty beat up. Our goal was to check just one huge bag and have all five of us take a carry-on. We borrowed a pirate costume for Megan and bought two matching ones for the boys online (I was assured that I could hack something together but I am not crafty AT ALL so I went the easy route). Shawn and I each purchased black pirate T-shirts. The items we bought special for the trip were a pop-up hamper (which I loved) and a hanging closet organizer (which we never used – more on that later). We also bought filtered water bottles but we probably could have gotten away without those. As it turns out, the water on the boat tastes just fine, and that is from a very “picky about our water taste” family. We are water snobs and it tasted just like home to us. AND because jelly-fish LOVE me but I wanted to enjoy Castaway Cay with my kids, we also got one bottle of SafeSea sunscreen which supposedly protects you from jellyfish and sea lice stings. The kids had water shoes but Shawn and I did not so we got those. At the last minute, Shawn decided to rent a really nice point-and-shoot camera for the week instead of taking his nice Canon with all the interchangeable lenses. This was a great decision. It took really good pictures and was less of a hassle. He also purchased a ten-picture package from Disney in advance.
Meanwhile I was on the boards, researching, and got a little nervous about our decision to fly in the day of. We both knew chances were, everything would be fine, but all it takes are a couple of horror stories to make you second guess yourself. One night after work I went to check the time of our tickets again to make sure we’d have enough time to get to the port, and found that Delta had moved our flight about 50 minutes later. Putting us in Orlando around noon instead of 11. That made me even more nervous, and made up our minds for us. On top of that, school had just started and we had recently been reminded that our schools were off on Friday the 4th (something we did not know when we originally booked). We called Delta, pessimistically because in the past we have not had good luck moving flights. But luck was on our side and the very nice person who answered understood our concerns, and put us on the first flight out on Friday. That same night we found an incredible deal for Port Orleans Riverside, and booked a room there. We had only stayed on property once, on our first trip, and it was the campground. So this gave us something else to look forward to! Plus we still got to skip the whole luggage carousel rigmarole and get straight onto the bus. Even better – I was sure I could finagle a trip to Fuddruckers out of this now! It is a running joke in my family that I can’t go to Orlando without a Fuddruckers burger. All the Fuddruckers in the Midwest have gone out of business and I miss them so much! Those buttery buns are like crack to me.
The weekend before the trip we started packing things as we were able. We were excited to be able to pack for a vacation for the first time and NOT be taking a stroller, pack n play, and car seats. Despite the fact that we did end up filling all our bags to the brim, we felt we were packing light. We packed about 5 pairs of shorts/Tshirts/underwear each (obviously we planned on doing laundry at least once). We had a formal night and semi-formal night outfit for everyone (and dress shoes), and two swim suits each, and one pair of pajamas each (half the time my boys end up sleeping in their undies anyway). We also packed light-weight sweaters for me and Megan in case the ship was chilly. We packed all our prescription meds and emergency meds like ibuprofen and decongestant in our carryon. It was obnoxious to put all the kids’ liquid medicines in clear, labeled 5 oz bottles, but we wanted it in our carry on just in case. I got conflicting reports on whether or not we’d need shampoo/conditioner but I took a risk and did not pack it. That turned out to be fine as it was restocked daily. We packed the kids’ goggles and snorkels and water shoes. We loaded books onto the boys’ kindles, but I did take a few traditional books in my carry-on. Finally, we printed all our documents (including copies of our passports), pulled out some cash and divided it into envelopes for each day depending on what we’d be doing. We also took a digital clock for the kids’ side of the room but never used it. The other thing we took were a couple of small card games, but we never played those either. I really wanted to take a white noise machine to make sure they slept well (and drown out Shawn’s snores since we’d all be in the same room), but Shawn talked me into using a white-noise app on my phone and that worked just as well! The one thing I WISH we had packed was an air freshener. After all, five people were sharing one bathroom and honestly I thought as the week wore on, even right after our bathroom had been cleaned it had an odd kind of sewage-like odor. It wasn’t overwhelming but I wonder if that happens as the plumbing is used more and more as the week wears on. I don’t know where all the “stuff” goes on a boat, so maybe my theory is completely wrong, but at any rate, I wish I’d brought that.
Thursday was a LOOONG day. About two hours into my workday, I got a call from the school nurse. My heart dropped. Apparently my oldest was sent to the nurse because his eye was incredibly red. That happens to him a lot due to his allergies. But the nurse saw bumps on the eyelid indicating pink eye. This is when you think to yourself “Universe, you have GOT to be kidding!” Shawn and I had driven to work separately since he was taking a half-day to do some last minute errands, clean, and mow the lawn, so he left immediately to take Caden to an outpatient clinic. Yep, it was pink eye. He got antibiotic drops and she assured us he’d look fine in 24 hours. We called our amazing pediatrician and got a SECOND prescription in case any of the other kids came down with it on the cruise.
Needless to say, the mowing and cleaning didn’t get done. I got home around six and started working on the house (I HATE coming home to a dirty house – did I mention I’m a clutter-phobe?). Then I saw that Connor had somehow completely SHREDDED on of his shoelaces (of course he has no idea how) so I had to run out and buy new shoelaces and relace them. Shawn had to go to a meeting at one of the boys’ schools. So we didn’t get to really start on all the FINAL packing till around 7, plus we still had to get the kids in bed! We had another item added to our to-do list when we went through the boys’ backpacks and saw what homework they needed to do for the week – it was a LOT of text books and we had not counted on packing those. Shawn used an app on his phone to take pictures of the pages they needed to read, and scanned them to pdfs they could use on their kindles. Sometimes being a nerd really does come in handy.
There is definitely a downside to vacationing during the school year. By around midnight, it was finally done and loaded into our van. Each of us had a carry-on and a backpack (one quart-sized ziplock bag full of liquid medicines in each backpack), and our “checked’ bag weighed in at 47 pounds on the bathroom scale. We finally fell into bed, exhausted, around 12:30, double and triple checking that the alarm was set for 6:30 the next morning. Let the adventure begin!!
Quick introduction (for more detailed ones you can see my previous Disney World trip reports):
We are a family of five who lives in the Cincinnati suburbs. The hubs (Shawn) and I (Rebecca) are both 37 and work at a local University doing nerdy data things (he is a senior programmer; I am a project manager). When we get time to ourselves, we enjoy eating out. I am an avid reader and I also enjoy walking to keep in shape. We love beach vacations with very little scheduled or planned where relaxation is the primary goal. Normally we rent a condo in Florida, but I have to admit I loved the idea of cruising where we could get some of the best of Disney (without all the scheduling and Fast Passing) like the characters and the service, and do as much or little as we wanted. The big draw for me was no messes to clean, no dishes to wash, and the occasional child-free dinner. I work part-time and am a stay at home mom most days, so those features were critical for me!
We have three kids - our oldest Caden (10) is our little nerd jr. He is extremely bright and loves to read, play Minecraft and build with Legos. When we do make him go outside, he enjoys running quite a bit. He is also our foodie - he will try anything and loves most of it. Unfortunately, he has a severe peanut allergy so that can make being an adventurous eater a little TOO adventurous!
Connor (7) our middle child, is our sweet and sensitive but "spacey" kid. He would live in an imaginary world in his head filled with talking animals and dragons 24/7 but unfortunately we do occasionally make him do other things like go to school and clean his room. He also enjoys Legos, Minecraft, and reading. His favorite physical activity is swimming.
And last, but certainly not least, is the spitfire, Megan, who turned four two days before we set sail. Megan is a giant personality inside a tiny body who THINKS she is in charge of the family. She is very active, loves Disney princesses and dress up, and does pretty much anything she sets her mind to. She adores her "bubbas" but makes sure they know who the true leader of the pack is (at least in her mind).
We have done three Disney vacations, our last one being when she was an infant, and do plan to do more in the future. But this year we were going to celebrate our 15th anniversary in August and wanted to do something really awesome to mark the occasion.
(Here are our first three trips):
We have talked for years about “someday” doing a DCL vacation, but were waiting until all our kids were potty-trained and old enough to remember it (mostly), and use the Kids’ clubs onboard. Just before our vacation last summer we realized that we were finally at that point and we could start making this dream a reality. And how perfect was it that it was our 15th anniversary in August (the month we normally vacation).
We started looking into pricing, and unfortunately the August prices seemed a little ridiculous to us. But September was $4000 cheaper! OK, yes, we’re pulling the kids out of school!
CHAPTER 1: THE PLANNING
We chose Labor Day week to minimize the school days missed, and booked a Category 4B Oceanview Family Suite with a Verandah. We had cruised twice pre-children with Carnival in a tiny little room with a porthole and decided with five of us, we should splurge and get some space. We booked with Disney and the fabulous travel agent we used recommended Cabin 7600, which is one of the 4Bs with the extra bed (obviously a must for us unless one of the kids was on the floor), plus it was in a great location. Having never cruised Disney, we just took her word for it.
We chose our itinerary based solely on our schedule – Labor Day week was the western Caribbean, and though I enjoyed the Eastern more of our two Carnival cruises, western it was! On the other hand, I could restock my Mexican vanilla which ran out years ago!
We had it booked 13 months in advance and didn’t want to tell the kids that far out (I don’t have to explain that one to any parents out there). So we decided a Christmas reveal would be fun. In retrospect even that might have been a bit too far from our departure date. We had the “Goofy” call scheduled where he told the kids they’d be going on the Fantasy and they assumed he meant TODAY. So it was a bit of a let-down to tell them it would be in nine months! To make it a little more “real” and to keep the kids from taking this sort of trip for granted, we assigned points to a chore list for the boys. Each week they accumulated points with a goal of 2,000 to “pay off” their airline tickets. Anything they earned above that would convert to cash they could spend on souvenirs.
Our next item on the to-do list was to book our flights. We had points saved up enough to buy 3 on our travel rewards credit card by January, and a colleague that used to be a flight attendant pointed out we may not want to wait to have all 5 because we were flying on Labor Day weekend. So we booked our flights and then slowly paid ourselves back with the Travel Rewards cash instead. Our Disney agent said flying in on Saturday should be no problem as long as we got the first flight out of Cincy. The plus to this is that we wouldn’t even have to pick up our own luggage – just disembark, and hop on the Magical Express and then on to Port Canaveral where our bags would “magically” appear outside our room. The one negative was that flights home the following Saturday were astronomically priced for some reason, and out of the range of our travel rewards. But if we flew home Sunday they were half the cost. Even including the cost of a night at the Orlando airport hotel. This was not ideal, but to use the rewards we had to do that.
In the spring we decided to be safe we should renew our passports and get them for the kids. WOW is that expensive! We saved some money by taking the pictures ourselves and attaching them to the applications.
After that we didn’t do much more in the way of planning until late July. We would write down questions as they came up, and bug a Disney agent every now and then. We researched the ports and figured out what dining rotation we’d want (ERAERRA with dinner at Palo on Tuesday). We decided to stay on the boat at Grand Cayman (a lot of folks assured us that they never visit the ports and instead enjoy the lighter crowds on the ship on port days), to just get off at Cozumel for lunch and vanilla, and do a tour on Jamaica. I saw a lot of neat reviews about the Blue Hole, and after a lot of review-reading on private guides (since most of the DCL tours were VERY expensive and had age restrictions), chose to go with Marvyn’s Paradise tours. We’d get a private driver, and we asked to visit the Blue Hole and do lunch at Scotchie’s. Marvyn was responsive and dealt quickly with all our questions.
We also made a “100 days till the cruise” chain in late May and hung it over our fireplace. This was to help deal with the incessant questioning from our toddler about how many days were left. She would say, “How many days till the Disney boat?” When we said “A LOT of days,” she would respond, “Ten?” All she could do when she saw the chain was shake her head and say, “That is a LOT more than ten.”One night while Shawn was adjusting it, it fell down off its hooks and she nearly lost her mind. “It’s gone!! That means we go on the Disney boat tomorrow!!!”
August was rough on all of us because it’s our normal vacation time, and it seemed like everyone was at the beach. And then it was time to get ready to start school, which just felt super weird with our vacation just 3 weeks away finally. During those last few weeks we made a list of things we needed to pack, and from that, what we needed to buy. We got a couple of new carry-on suitcases since we only have two and one of them is pretty beat up. Our goal was to check just one huge bag and have all five of us take a carry-on. We borrowed a pirate costume for Megan and bought two matching ones for the boys online (I was assured that I could hack something together but I am not crafty AT ALL so I went the easy route). Shawn and I each purchased black pirate T-shirts. The items we bought special for the trip were a pop-up hamper (which I loved) and a hanging closet organizer (which we never used – more on that later). We also bought filtered water bottles but we probably could have gotten away without those. As it turns out, the water on the boat tastes just fine, and that is from a very “picky about our water taste” family. We are water snobs and it tasted just like home to us. AND because jelly-fish LOVE me but I wanted to enjoy Castaway Cay with my kids, we also got one bottle of SafeSea sunscreen which supposedly protects you from jellyfish and sea lice stings. The kids had water shoes but Shawn and I did not so we got those. At the last minute, Shawn decided to rent a really nice point-and-shoot camera for the week instead of taking his nice Canon with all the interchangeable lenses. This was a great decision. It took really good pictures and was less of a hassle. He also purchased a ten-picture package from Disney in advance.
Meanwhile I was on the boards, researching, and got a little nervous about our decision to fly in the day of. We both knew chances were, everything would be fine, but all it takes are a couple of horror stories to make you second guess yourself. One night after work I went to check the time of our tickets again to make sure we’d have enough time to get to the port, and found that Delta had moved our flight about 50 minutes later. Putting us in Orlando around noon instead of 11. That made me even more nervous, and made up our minds for us. On top of that, school had just started and we had recently been reminded that our schools were off on Friday the 4th (something we did not know when we originally booked). We called Delta, pessimistically because in the past we have not had good luck moving flights. But luck was on our side and the very nice person who answered understood our concerns, and put us on the first flight out on Friday. That same night we found an incredible deal for Port Orleans Riverside, and booked a room there. We had only stayed on property once, on our first trip, and it was the campground. So this gave us something else to look forward to! Plus we still got to skip the whole luggage carousel rigmarole and get straight onto the bus. Even better – I was sure I could finagle a trip to Fuddruckers out of this now! It is a running joke in my family that I can’t go to Orlando without a Fuddruckers burger. All the Fuddruckers in the Midwest have gone out of business and I miss them so much! Those buttery buns are like crack to me.
The weekend before the trip we started packing things as we were able. We were excited to be able to pack for a vacation for the first time and NOT be taking a stroller, pack n play, and car seats. Despite the fact that we did end up filling all our bags to the brim, we felt we were packing light. We packed about 5 pairs of shorts/Tshirts/underwear each (obviously we planned on doing laundry at least once). We had a formal night and semi-formal night outfit for everyone (and dress shoes), and two swim suits each, and one pair of pajamas each (half the time my boys end up sleeping in their undies anyway). We also packed light-weight sweaters for me and Megan in case the ship was chilly. We packed all our prescription meds and emergency meds like ibuprofen and decongestant in our carryon. It was obnoxious to put all the kids’ liquid medicines in clear, labeled 5 oz bottles, but we wanted it in our carry on just in case. I got conflicting reports on whether or not we’d need shampoo/conditioner but I took a risk and did not pack it. That turned out to be fine as it was restocked daily. We packed the kids’ goggles and snorkels and water shoes. We loaded books onto the boys’ kindles, but I did take a few traditional books in my carry-on. Finally, we printed all our documents (including copies of our passports), pulled out some cash and divided it into envelopes for each day depending on what we’d be doing. We also took a digital clock for the kids’ side of the room but never used it. The other thing we took were a couple of small card games, but we never played those either. I really wanted to take a white noise machine to make sure they slept well (and drown out Shawn’s snores since we’d all be in the same room), but Shawn talked me into using a white-noise app on my phone and that worked just as well! The one thing I WISH we had packed was an air freshener. After all, five people were sharing one bathroom and honestly I thought as the week wore on, even right after our bathroom had been cleaned it had an odd kind of sewage-like odor. It wasn’t overwhelming but I wonder if that happens as the plumbing is used more and more as the week wears on. I don’t know where all the “stuff” goes on a boat, so maybe my theory is completely wrong, but at any rate, I wish I’d brought that.
Thursday was a LOOONG day. About two hours into my workday, I got a call from the school nurse. My heart dropped. Apparently my oldest was sent to the nurse because his eye was incredibly red. That happens to him a lot due to his allergies. But the nurse saw bumps on the eyelid indicating pink eye. This is when you think to yourself “Universe, you have GOT to be kidding!” Shawn and I had driven to work separately since he was taking a half-day to do some last minute errands, clean, and mow the lawn, so he left immediately to take Caden to an outpatient clinic. Yep, it was pink eye. He got antibiotic drops and she assured us he’d look fine in 24 hours. We called our amazing pediatrician and got a SECOND prescription in case any of the other kids came down with it on the cruise.
Needless to say, the mowing and cleaning didn’t get done. I got home around six and started working on the house (I HATE coming home to a dirty house – did I mention I’m a clutter-phobe?). Then I saw that Connor had somehow completely SHREDDED on of his shoelaces (of course he has no idea how) so I had to run out and buy new shoelaces and relace them. Shawn had to go to a meeting at one of the boys’ schools. So we didn’t get to really start on all the FINAL packing till around 7, plus we still had to get the kids in bed! We had another item added to our to-do list when we went through the boys’ backpacks and saw what homework they needed to do for the week – it was a LOT of text books and we had not counted on packing those. Shawn used an app on his phone to take pictures of the pages they needed to read, and scanned them to pdfs they could use on their kindles. Sometimes being a nerd really does come in handy.
There is definitely a downside to vacationing during the school year. By around midnight, it was finally done and loaded into our van. Each of us had a carry-on and a backpack (one quart-sized ziplock bag full of liquid medicines in each backpack), and our “checked’ bag weighed in at 47 pounds on the bathroom scale. We finally fell into bed, exhausted, around 12:30, double and triple checking that the alarm was set for 6:30 the next morning. Let the adventure begin!!
'nudity' 
