A kid lost their shoe again...our Southern Caribbean Adventure!

[Kari0180]

And we're back!

Life has been a little crazy so I'm a little delayed in writing this report, but I still have all my notes and photos and am excited to share our Southern Caribbean Cruise on the Disney Magic! So first up are our introductions!


I'm Kari and with me as always is my DH, Bill. We live outside of Minneapolis, MN. By day, I work in the veterinary field and DH is a photojournalist for a lifestyle show. We also have a vlog, KABI Treks that keeps us busy. In addition to this report, we also vlogged our cruise and I will attach those videos as I go along. This was our 15th Disney Cruise and our 2nd time on The Magic. I've been wanting to do a Southern Itinerary for a really long time, so I was very excited when I convinced DH to do this cruise. The cruise left from San Juan, Puerto Rico, we had stopped in San Juan on a previous cruise in 2019 and loved it, so we decided to fly in a couple of days early to enjoy San Juan!

Our itinerary:
Wednesday, October 29th-Leave Minneapolis, arrive in San Juan
Thursday, October 30th-Food Tour in Old San Juan
Friday, October 31st-Embarkation Day
Saturday, November 1st-St. Kitts
Sunday, November 2nd-Saint Lucia
Monday, November 3rd-Barbados
Tuesday, November 4th-Dominica
Wednesday, November 5th-Antigua
Thursday, November 6th-Day at Sea
Friday, November 7th-Debarkation Day, fly back to Minneapolis

What are we waiting for? Let's get this report started!

 

[Kari0180]

Day 1, Travel Day

Our travel day actually started the night before, we packed up our "kids", our dog, Morty and our cat, Hef and took them to DH's dad's house. We grabbed some dinner with dad and then spent the night at his place since our flight was so early, and he was our ride. We had a very uncomfortable night of sleep (not a fan of the bed). I think in the future, we either just need to stay at our place and leave our house very early or spring for a hotel at the airport because we both only slept for a couple of hours.

The next morning, FIL dropped us off at the airport, it was really early when we arrived, so check-in and getting through security were super quick! We found our gate and then grabbed some breakfast. Chik-fil-a was close and the only thing open at the time, so that's where we went.



We both went with the chicken biscuit combo; I had mine with a vanilla cold brew and DH got a coke. Once we finished eating, we headed to our gate until it was time to board our flight.

There was no direct flight (on any airline) to San Juan, so we had to deal with a layover at JFK. We had a pretty uneventful flight to JFK, it took a little bit to get off the plane, but once we did, we located our next gate and then headed to find some lunch. We didn't have a lot of time, so we just grabbed food from the places closest to the gate. DH went with a Reuben from a deli and a grabbed a burger and fries from Shake Shack. I don't have any photos because my food took FOREVER! By the time I got my food and met back up with DH, he was already done eating and they were getting ready to board the plane. I had to scarf my food down but managed to eat everything with a little time to spare before we got on the plane. Again, our flight to San Juan went really well and before we knew it, we were in paradise!

Once off the plane, we grabbed our bags and made our way to the Uber pick up. Once there, we met up with another couple who were also from Minnesota and going to be on our cruise, they were also staying at our hotel, I'll call them M & M. We had some small talk before their Uber showed up and shortly after ours did too and we were headed to our hotel.

We were staying at the Caribe Hilton; this was the hotel that Disney uses for Puerto Rico cruises, we booked independently and not through Disney. There were A LOT of us staying at the hotel. Thankfully, we made it to the hotel at a quiet time and only had 1 person in front of us in line to check in. At check in, we were upgraded from a regular room, to an ocean view. We got our wrist bands and headed to our room. I really liked our room, I forgot to take a picture of the room, but did grab one of our view.

We didn't really have any plans for this evening, and we were pretty tired, so we decided to do some exploring around the hotel.
As I mentioned, we were really tired, we decided to just grab a quick bite at the pool bar before turning in for the night.

Menu from the pool bar

I went with the Rotisserie Turkey Wrap. I really enjoyed this, there was good flavor in the wrap and the French fries were perfect, crispy on the outside! I didn't get a photo of DH's food, but he got the Tripleta Sandwich, he really enjoyed it. While we were eating, we came across our first of many kitties

After dinner, we headed back up to our room to get ready for bed. We had an early day the next day and were very excited about what was to come!

Up Next: A food tour in Old San Juan

 

[Kari0180]

Our Travel Day video if you're interested

 

[DCL58]

Following along. We were on the 8 night on the Fantasy in 2019 that stopped in San Juan too! I remember watching your YouTube videos from that sailing.

 

[Kari0180]

Following along. We were on the 8 night on the Fantasy in 2019 that stopped in San Juan too! I remember watching your YouTube videos from that sailing.

That was such a fun cruise, one of our favorites! It was after that cruise that I became obsessed with wanting to do a southern itinerary, took a few years, but so worth it!

 

[Kari0180]

Warning: This post is heavy on food and drink porn, proceed with caution, especially if you're hungry!

Day 2: It's Food Tour Time

We had a good night's sleep and woke up refreshed from our long day the day before. I will say, it was so hot in San Juan. I was messaging with one of my coworkers and at 8am, I told her that it was already 83 degrees with a real feel of 90! When we booked our hotel room, I also booked breakfast for us each morning, so we headed down to the restaurant for breakfast. With our pre-paid breakfast, we had access to the full buffet, we had a hot bar, pastries, also a create your own omelet and a waffle bar. It also included a beverage, they had both mango and guava juices, which I was very excited about.

My plate of bacon, eggs, roasted potatoes, an egg bake, cheese, and pineapple. I wasn't a fan of the eggs or the egg bake, but I loved the potatoes, and the fruit was super fresh. I also grabbed an omelet, which was delicious, but it was huge, I couldn't finish it. After breakfast, we grabbed an Uber to take us to Old San Juan, it wasn't too long of a ride, about 10 minutes. What were we doing in Old San Juan, we were doing a food tour! We arranged a tour through Spoon Food Tours, and we were super excited. We've done a couple of other food tours in the past and loved them, it's not only the food, but also a great way to learn about the culture and history.

We arrived a little early, our tour was supposed to start at 10:00 and we arrived about 9:30. We decided to walk around the area while we were waiting.


We came across Castillo San Felipe del Morro and the cemetery. We made a mental note to possibly go visit after our tour. We visited Castillo De San Cristobal in 2019 and had a great time, this area looked really neat. Sadly, we didn't get back to explore, maybe another time. At 10:00, we headed to our meeting place, the Totem Pole in Plaza Del Quinto Centenario.

The plaza area was pretty empty; we kept looking to see if there was anyone else waiting to do our tour, but it didn't look like it. We saw our guide coming so went to meet her and found out that we were the only ones on our tour, so we were getting a private tour! Our Spoon guide was Gia and she was phenomenal! Gia started our tour giving us the history of San Juan, about Columbus and Ponce de Leon, about the forts on the island and even a little history about Hurricane Maria that hit the island in 2017. The picture of the Totem pole doesn't show it well, but it's actually created with a bunch of pottery fragments, the hurricane took a lot of the fragments off, but the Totem pole still stands.

It was then time to head to our first food stop

With every stop, we were treated to a beverage and some type of food. At Don Ruiz, we of course had some coffee

DH doesn't drink coffee, but they were nice and made him a "iced" chocolate, you can see a little of it in the background. We were also served a Mallorca, which was a ham and cheese pastry, topped with powdered sugar

This was delicious! It was the perfect blend of sweet/savory, and it was a fairly large portion! Gia talked to us about how Mallorca is a popular pastry in San Juan and she also gave us history on Don Ruiz coffee as well. We then made our way to our next stop with Gia stopping on occasion to tell us some more history or about a different restaurant/food/beverage. We walked by a bar that is in the top 10 beer bars in the US, Gia told us about all the different beers on tap and all the specialty drinks they make with beer. We then made it to our second stop

This was such a cute little place, we grabbed a table and were served our next dish

We were served Arroz Mamposteado, this was a pork and rice dish and oh my goodness, this was so good! A lot of pork is consumed in San Juan and there are so many different ways to serve it. The pork was crispy, and the rice had so much flavor. Everything we had on our tour was great, but this was my favorite dish served!

Along with our pork and rice, we were served a Sangria, but since we were in Puerto Rico where rum is king, our Sangria also had rum in it. It was fantastic, I love Sangria normally, but I never thought about adding rum to it, it actually made the Sangria a little lighter and so refreshing on this super-hot day!

I've reached my photo limit, post to continue...

 

[Kari0180]

Happy New Year everyone! I hope that everyone had a nice celebration! We kept things pretty simple this year, made crab and shrimp for NYE, drank some wine. Yesterday, we saw the new Avatar movie in 3D (the movie was okay, but sooo long). We might go check out the Ice Castles this weekend, but not sure yet. I hope everyone has a great weekend! But now, back to the report...

Day 2, Food Porn continues...

Our next stop was the Hotel El Convento, their restaurant was this beautiful open-air patio, I could've spent all day here, it was beautiful. Once we were seated, we were served a Mahi Mahi Ceviche

This was served with taro chips. There was a ton of fish in this ceviche, and it was so good! It was perfect for this incredibly hot day! I'm usually not a huge fan of anything with taro, but these chips were really good, and they didn't fall apart when scooping up the ceviche.

The beverage served with this was a watermelon mojito and this was the most amazing cocktail! The fresh watermelon chunks with the mint really made the drink. While we were enjoying our ceviche and mojito, Gia took the time to talk to us about rum. Of course, everyone knows about Bacardi, but she let us know that the locals aren't fans and most locals won't drink it

These are the two rums that the locals drink and use in their drinks in San Juan. Gia let us know that Don Q also had a rum tour that was far superior to Bacardi. We looked into doing the tour later that day, but unfortunately, the English-speaking tour was happening during our food tour. But something for us to think about if we get back to San Juan.

It was time to head to our next stop, along the way, we walked past the Governor's residence

It's the white building at the very end of the street. This is also what was also known as the umbrella street years ago. They don't do the umbrellas anymore which made me sad, I was hoping to see them again. The street is now behind a barricade with police everywhere. They now have some lights up, but it's not the same. I asked Gia why they didn't have the umbrellas anymore and she said it was in response to the protests that happened in 2019. We were in San Juan October 2019, and they still had the umbrellas up, but they weren't the colorful ones, they were for the children's hospital.

I managed to find the photo we took; you can see the barricade (and a police officer) in the background. I remember we were wondering what was with the barricades and the officers and now we know. We continued walking toward our next restaurant and as we were walking, we saw a lot of people in the streets talking and it was a little off. Gia then informed us that the power had gone out, a lot of places have generators, but some don't and those were the people hanging out in the streets.

We arrived at our next restaurant, and it looked like it was a victim of the power failure, it was closed, nobody inside, doors were locked. Gia was trying to keep her cool, but you could tell she was a little freaked out about what to do next. She asked us if she could have 10 minutes to find out another place for us to go. We said of course and to take her time. She walked us over to a little park, known as Pigeon Park to explore while she made a couple of phone calls.



If you're not a fan of pigeons, you probably won't like this park. We enjoyed walking through the small area and looking at all the Pigeons. There was a booth where you could pay to buy some food for them, but it wasn't open yet. After a few minutes, Gia found us and let us know she had found another place for us, it was going to involve a little bit of walking, but that it would be worth it. But first, we would be stopping at what was supposed to be our last stop.

We would be getting our dessert first. They had such a selection of Paleta's, it was really difficult to choose. DH picked his immediately, but I really had a tough time, in the end, I made my decision

I went with a strawberry mojito and DH went with a strawberry/mango. They were so good! Since it was really hot, these really hit the spot, but we had to eat them fast because they were melting very fast! Once we got our Paleta's, we started our walk to our final spot.

 

[Kari0180]

Day 2, part 3-The food porn is coming to a close

We finally made it to our final destination

Remember that beer bar that I mentioned at the beginning of our tour? Since we seemed so excited about it, Gia contacted them to see if we could do our final stop with them and they said yes. We headed in and took a seat while Gia arranged grabbed our food and drink

Man, I love me a good Cuban, and this didn't disappoint. Since this was a beer bar, the mustard in the sandwich was a beer mustard. The bread was a little sweeter, but it really fit with the other flavors in the sandwich.

Our drink was a Passion Fruit Beermosa, made with their passion fruit beer, we both really enjoyed this drink, it balanced well with the sandwich. As this was our final stop, our tour was over, and we had to say goodbye to Gia.

Our thoughts on our Spoon Food Tour...it was phenomenal! We were the only 2 people on this tour and we've had tours before where if there aren't enough people, they cancel the tour. We were so thankful that they still did our tour. As for Gia, she was amazing, she provided so much information about the city, the history and of course the food and drink. Gia knew everyone, at one point, she let us know that her nickname was the "mayor of San Juan" because she knew everyone and everyone knew her. I would highly recommend this tour (and Gia, if you're lucky enough to get her). They offer other tours too and if I ever get back to San Juan, I hope to check another one out.

After we parted ways with Gia, we decided to head back into La Teberna Lupulo for a couple more drinks. We were pretty full, but decided to split a couple more cocktails because they sounded so interesting

We started with a couple of margaritas; the frozen margarita was made with Dwayne Johnson's tequila.

Since we were in San Juan, we had to get a Pina Colada. I had a lot of these during our trip, but this is actually the only one I took a photo of. I liked the flavor of this, but I would've preferred it frozen over on the rocks. During our time at La Teberna Lupulo, we met a couple from Nashville, they were just wrapping up a 1 month stay in San Juan, they told us about all the places they went and the things they had done. We told them about heading out on The Magic the next day. At this point, we were full, both of food and beverage, and as I mentioned a couple of times, we were hot! We called for an Uber and headed back to our hotel. Once we arrived, we went through the few shops, then we noticed a little garden area, so we went to explore the area. There was a little fishpond with turtles and ducks swimming and there were so many iguanas wandering around


As we walked to our room, we noticed the hospitality desk at the hotel was open and there was a very large line. We were wondering why there were so many people in line (more on that later) but headed to our room. We took some time relaxing and then decided to hit up the pool area. We spent a lot of time in the pool and then headed into the ocean, the water felt really nice and we had a great time. We had plans this evening, so we decided to grab dinner again from the pool bar. DH stayed behind to get our food, and I headed up to the room to shower and change. It was pretty good timing, I was finishing getting ready, DH had returned with our food.

I was still pretty full from our food tour, so I wasn't that hungry. I went with the nachos, the photo doesn't do this justice, this was a huge portion! I really enjoyed these, I only wish there was an option to add a protein, I would've enjoyed them more with some meat. Even still, I couldn't finish these, they were a very large portion.

DH went with the fish tacos, it came with 3 tacos and some chips and salsa. He really enjoyed these; the fish was cooked well and was a large portion for each taco. It was almost time for us to head to our next activity, but I realized that we hadn't received our letter about our pickup time and what to do about our luggage. It was our first time using DCL transportation not at Disney, so I just assumed it would be the same procedure. I went back to my email and read that we were supposed to stop by the hospitality desk to get our letter...oops. Thankfully, the desk was still open, and we were able to grab our letter. Unfortunately, it was a first come, first time situation, we were on the 12:45 bus, our port arrival time was 12:30, so we wouldn't even leave the hotel until after our port arrival time, kind of a bummer, but oh well. A note to future Kari, read your email and don't assume things will be like taking the bus from Disney World . I went to the front desk and asked if it was possible to get a late checkout, we were able to get a 1pm checkout which really helped us the next day

Our final activity for the evening was that someone from our Facebook group arranged a meet and greet at our hotel bar. There was a decent turnout, and we enjoyed all of the conversations that we had. M & M were also there, and we wound up being the last groups at the meet and greet, we had a great time talking with them! We headed up to bed because next up was Embarkation Day!

 

[Kari0180]

Our vlog of Day 2