hnthomps
Mouseketeer
- Joined
- Nov 19, 2015
Our first Disney Cruise!
Fantasy, Western Caribbean with Star Wars Day at Sea, March 19 - 26th 2016
We got off the Fantasy just over a week ago, and we are all still talking about it all the time. I want to write up the trip for my kids to help them remember, and since I read so many trip reports in preparation for the trip, I figured I might as well post a version here.
Two caveats though: first, while we ate a lot of excellent food, we did not take any pictures of food. Nor did we take any pictures of the restaurants. Sorry...managing the kids was enough without worrying about photos!
Second, we have a general family rule about not posting photos of our children's faces on public websites. Since, obviously, most of the photos we took featured our kids...there aren't a lot of great photos left. I'll include what I can (helpfully, my kids just loved leaning up against windows, showing only their backs!), but please excuse that this will be text heavy, and some photos will be blurry.
Oh, and additional caveat: I’m pretty verbose. This is…probably going to be long. But I took elaborate notes along the way, and it's almost all written already, so it will go up pretty quickly.
Pre-trip report and Cast of Characters
I’m in my mid 30s and I work in the Chicago theater scene. My husband, D, is an attorney, and we have two small children. We essentially only have positive associations with Disney, but we aren’t particularly knowledgeable and haven't taken the kids to any of the parks yet. Our only prior cruise experience was on our honeymoon, but the destinations were the point, the boat was completely secondary – basically just a mobile hotel. So we were going in pretty blind ... other than my obsessive research on this board.
We decided to take this cruise slightly over a year ago, when SWDAS was announced. It was the end of a brutal Chicago winter, we had no spring break plans, and we were going out of our minds trying to figure out what kind of vacation we could possibly take with small children that would actually feel like vacation. As we both love Star Wars, the announcement –which came the very day we had hit the breaking point and decided we HAD to book a warm-weather vacation for 2016 ASAP – seemed serendipitous. A friend had just returned from a cruise on the Magic, and her photos had made me pretty jealous. We did minimal research, found a travel agent who offered a good deal, and booked it. It felt both incredibly impulsive and ridiculously far out.
Our son, P, is 4 (he would tell you “four and three quarters”) and Star Wars obsessed as only a preschooler can be… which is to say, he hasn’t actually seen any of the movies. He has, however, watched a seemingly endless stream of videos of other people building Star Wars LEGO kits, and he has a fair collection of his own similar LEGOs, which he will happily discuss for ages. He has Star Wars books, asks to be read the Star Wars encyclopedia at bedtime, and can talk at length about who has what color lightsaber. But just to repeat, he’s never seen a Star Wars movie.
Our daughter, J, is 2. She is strong-willed, independent, and determined to have her way. If you were on the boat with us, you probably saw her running away from us / attempting to lie down on a staircase / trying to negotiate her swim-diapered-behind into the pools. You may even have heard her, um, thoughts about the injustices of the world at various points. I’m sorry about that. She’s… 2.
P’s favorite movie is Planes: Fire and Rescue, with Aladdin and Frozen a close second. The only movie J has seen is Frozen, and she would like to watch it again, please, now, right now. Both children love “Mickey Clubhouse” and can sing the theme song and do the hot dog dance with the best of them. J is also pretty into Sofia, but doesn’t get to watch it very often as her brother has no interest. Needless to say, they were PRETTY excited that they’d get to meet some of their favorite characters on board (I did break it to P that Dusty Crophopper wouldn’t be on board and he said, “of course not Mama, he lives in the Cars and Planes world, not our world. He’s not like MICKEY”)
Both of our children keep pretty strict schedules at home, and in the past have not reacted well to deviations from the routine. They’re usually in bed by 7:15pm and wake up between 6:30 and 7am. As you can imagine, this presents some challenges when traveling, and we really had no idea what to expect. We knew that at bare minimum, one parent would be stuck in the stateroom early every evening, and there would be no sleeping in (when first researching the cruise, we had desperately hoped there would be some sort of in-room babysitting option, or an easy way to leave the sleeping children while we went out, but we knew months in advance that this would not be the case).
Oh, and J still naps for 2+ hours every afternoon, and is not good company if her nap is shortened (spoiler alert: this will come up again). We agreed in advance that on vacation all rules about screen time and ice cream are on hold, but were worried about naps and bedtimes because our kids have consistently demonstrated that they are happier with routine.
I didn’t find a lot of trip reports from people with small children, which is the main reason I am posting this. I hope it is helpful!
If I can figure out how, I'll update with a table of contents as I go. For now, the story continues below!
Table of Contents
1. Travel to Orlando, Embarkation, and the first afternoon
2. Muster, Sail Away, first night
3. Sunday, at Sea
4. Monday, Cozumel and Characters
5. Tuesday, Grand Cayman
6. Wednesday, STAR WARS DAY AT SEA
7. Thursday, At Sea
8. Friday, Castaway Cay
9. Debarkation
10. Final Thoughts
Fantasy, Western Caribbean with Star Wars Day at Sea, March 19 - 26th 2016
We got off the Fantasy just over a week ago, and we are all still talking about it all the time. I want to write up the trip for my kids to help them remember, and since I read so many trip reports in preparation for the trip, I figured I might as well post a version here.
Two caveats though: first, while we ate a lot of excellent food, we did not take any pictures of food. Nor did we take any pictures of the restaurants. Sorry...managing the kids was enough without worrying about photos!
Second, we have a general family rule about not posting photos of our children's faces on public websites. Since, obviously, most of the photos we took featured our kids...there aren't a lot of great photos left. I'll include what I can (helpfully, my kids just loved leaning up against windows, showing only their backs!), but please excuse that this will be text heavy, and some photos will be blurry.
Oh, and additional caveat: I’m pretty verbose. This is…probably going to be long. But I took elaborate notes along the way, and it's almost all written already, so it will go up pretty quickly.
Pre-trip report and Cast of Characters
I’m in my mid 30s and I work in the Chicago theater scene. My husband, D, is an attorney, and we have two small children. We essentially only have positive associations with Disney, but we aren’t particularly knowledgeable and haven't taken the kids to any of the parks yet. Our only prior cruise experience was on our honeymoon, but the destinations were the point, the boat was completely secondary – basically just a mobile hotel. So we were going in pretty blind ... other than my obsessive research on this board.
We decided to take this cruise slightly over a year ago, when SWDAS was announced. It was the end of a brutal Chicago winter, we had no spring break plans, and we were going out of our minds trying to figure out what kind of vacation we could possibly take with small children that would actually feel like vacation. As we both love Star Wars, the announcement –which came the very day we had hit the breaking point and decided we HAD to book a warm-weather vacation for 2016 ASAP – seemed serendipitous. A friend had just returned from a cruise on the Magic, and her photos had made me pretty jealous. We did minimal research, found a travel agent who offered a good deal, and booked it. It felt both incredibly impulsive and ridiculously far out.
Our son, P, is 4 (he would tell you “four and three quarters”) and Star Wars obsessed as only a preschooler can be… which is to say, he hasn’t actually seen any of the movies. He has, however, watched a seemingly endless stream of videos of other people building Star Wars LEGO kits, and he has a fair collection of his own similar LEGOs, which he will happily discuss for ages. He has Star Wars books, asks to be read the Star Wars encyclopedia at bedtime, and can talk at length about who has what color lightsaber. But just to repeat, he’s never seen a Star Wars movie.
Our daughter, J, is 2. She is strong-willed, independent, and determined to have her way. If you were on the boat with us, you probably saw her running away from us / attempting to lie down on a staircase / trying to negotiate her swim-diapered-behind into the pools. You may even have heard her, um, thoughts about the injustices of the world at various points. I’m sorry about that. She’s… 2.
P’s favorite movie is Planes: Fire and Rescue, with Aladdin and Frozen a close second. The only movie J has seen is Frozen, and she would like to watch it again, please, now, right now. Both children love “Mickey Clubhouse” and can sing the theme song and do the hot dog dance with the best of them. J is also pretty into Sofia, but doesn’t get to watch it very often as her brother has no interest. Needless to say, they were PRETTY excited that they’d get to meet some of their favorite characters on board (I did break it to P that Dusty Crophopper wouldn’t be on board and he said, “of course not Mama, he lives in the Cars and Planes world, not our world. He’s not like MICKEY”)
Both of our children keep pretty strict schedules at home, and in the past have not reacted well to deviations from the routine. They’re usually in bed by 7:15pm and wake up between 6:30 and 7am. As you can imagine, this presents some challenges when traveling, and we really had no idea what to expect. We knew that at bare minimum, one parent would be stuck in the stateroom early every evening, and there would be no sleeping in (when first researching the cruise, we had desperately hoped there would be some sort of in-room babysitting option, or an easy way to leave the sleeping children while we went out, but we knew months in advance that this would not be the case).
Oh, and J still naps for 2+ hours every afternoon, and is not good company if her nap is shortened (spoiler alert: this will come up again). We agreed in advance that on vacation all rules about screen time and ice cream are on hold, but were worried about naps and bedtimes because our kids have consistently demonstrated that they are happier with routine.
I didn’t find a lot of trip reports from people with small children, which is the main reason I am posting this. I hope it is helpful!
If I can figure out how, I'll update with a table of contents as I go. For now, the story continues below!
Table of Contents
1. Travel to Orlando, Embarkation, and the first afternoon
2. Muster, Sail Away, first night
3. Sunday, at Sea
4. Monday, Cozumel and Characters
5. Tuesday, Grand Cayman
6. Wednesday, STAR WARS DAY AT SEA
7. Thursday, At Sea
8. Friday, Castaway Cay
9. Debarkation
10. Final Thoughts
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