BLTOH
Earned my Ears Years ago just going for replacemen
- Joined
- Nov 4, 2006
- Messages
- 680
I will try this again as the first time I started this I did it online and my computer booted me before I hit send. This is the preliminary part.. you know getting there is half the battle right?? 
I am not good about writing trip reports but I will try my best. With me on this cruise was dh, dss 15, and dd 4. We had been planning this trip since August of 2006.
The main reason for the trip?? Well being a smart alec family we are I told my dd who had been refusing to potty train that if she would get potty trained completely then we would go on a big cruise ship and see Mickey and Minnie mouse. Two weeks after that comment
.dd was completely potty trained and asking if we could go on that cruise now to see Mickey and Minnie. 
So we book the cruise for May as that would put us one month after dd 4th birthday and we wanted to make sure she was old enough for the kids clubs.
Now for the trip down. We drove from Ohio to Florida. This is about a 17 hour drive for us and we were doing it in 2 days. The day we was to leave I had to work for 2 hrs.
I thought if I have to do 2 hrs I might as well do the 4 and pick up the extra 2 hrs overtime so I had planned on going in at 3am and working till 7am. We was to leave town around 11am - noonish since the 15 yr old had state testing that day as well. Well my first mistake was going in at 3am and having to get up at 2am as when I got off at 7am I was sooo tired I ended up taking a nap till 9am. Why is this a problem you ask? Well that left me approximately 2 hours to run around and finish everything that had to be done before we left. Which really wasnt too bad of an issue other then my dad decided to come down and chatted and held me up for about an hour of that 2 hrs. So in an hours time I did manage to get most of it done and all that was left was to cap the tank off with gas but decided we could do that on the road when we stopped to grab some lunch.
We get on the road around noon and stop 2 hours later to fill up and grab some McDonalds for on the road for lunch. Back on the road we go. Now before I continue I say this. My dh drinks a lot of coffee. About a pot a day. Needless to say about the time we was on the road and heading out the need to pee all the coffee from the system kicks in. So roughly every 2-3 hours we was stopping for a potty break. Now mind you we thought we would have more issues and the potty with dd but nope it was dh. Go figure. So other then the constant potty breaks the drive was kind of uneventful. Yes I said kind of. DD had not mentioned the cruise much at all till the drive there. In the back seat we here where is the big ship at? Are we close yet? . Now to get a 4 year old to understand the length of driving we had to do we told her that we had a very very very very very long drive ahead of us. That seemed to satisfy her for the time being. Eventually she falls asleep and takes a 3 hours nap. Not much we can do when a child starts napping in the van as you cant control how long they sleep. This was a mistake of letting her sleep for 3 hours and it was 4pm when she fell asleep to begin with. Too late for our taste. We stopped for the night right around 8pm at a hotel at the border of North and South Carolina. This was about the halfway point. We run dd around a bit to burn some energy off of her since she napped so late. By 10pm I was whipped and extremely tired. ( remember I had been up since 2am with only a 2 hours nap that morning) I very seldom sleep in the van unless I know we are on a stretch of road with no turns as I am the map navigator. So at 10pm I am telling them to quiet down its time to go to sleep. DD however, is saying she wants to snuggle with daddy. So there is daddy, dss, and dd all in one double bed and me alone in the other. The plan was that dd was to sleep with me and dh was going to sleep with dss. That plan didnt go over well at all as dh and dd was playing the musical beds ALL night long. Finally at 6am dd stays asleep and in one bed and then at 6:30am the alarm goes off. Ugh..
talk abut rude awakening.
I get up and get around. Once I get done with my shower I wake the rest of the crew up to get their showers. I wait till 7am to wake dd as she is NOT a morning person and with her up and down all night I knew she would be a bear this morning. We are all ready and loaded up in the van by 8am. Our time schedule was to be at the hotel in Florida by 3pm. We forego the continental breakfast at the hotel as it was only Danishes and coffee. We stopped around 9am for potty break, refill gas tank, and I scope out what there is to eat for breakfast. I spotted Crispy Cream donuts. Sold.. I grab dh his large coffee, a dozen donuts, 3 milks, and a bunch of extra napkins since we was eating on the road.
The second day of driving is about the same as the first. Oh yeah did I mention it rained pretty much the entire drive on the first day and was the same the second day as well. Good way to start vacation. I told dh that it can rain all it wants for the drive down so it will be nice and sunny for the week of our trip. I know odd thinking but hey it works to keep myself in high spirits. Dd was in the same mode as the previous day with the very very very long car ride thing. She had a big meltdown when we told her it was going to be another day before we actually got to board the ship. Nice thing is she had her meltdown and then crashed for a nap. Early nap this time. We had rain till we hit the south part of Georgia and then it turned muggy hot and sunny the rest of the way down. yeah. We hit the Florida border and stop for lunch. We get to the hotel around 4pm. We get checked in and find our room. At this point we know we dont want a repeat from the night before so we take the kids to the pool. We swim for roughly an hour then we head over to Zacharys for supper. Good food but thought it was expensive. After supper we walk around and check things out and see what there was to see. We go to the room and decided to jump in the van and go down to the Ron Jon Surf Shop. We walk thru there and then take dd out to the beach. We let her walk in the water with her bare feet but got bowled over by a wave and ended up half wet. We wander back to the hotel and settle down for the night. By this time dd is running out of energy but managed to get a second wind in her all of a sudden so we play around with her to get that out of her system early. We go to bed roughly 9pm that night. Now my main complaint with the hotel (which by the way was the Radisson) was they advertise the sleep comfort beds. I was like so kewl made sure to check our numbers on our bed as we have one at home. Well no way to adjust the bed. Big disappointment.
I have to stop here as i am going to try and break down the cruise portions by day. I have not uploaded any pictures yet but when i do i will add them as well.
I am not good about writing trip reports but I will try my best. With me on this cruise was dh, dss 15, and dd 4. We had been planning this trip since August of 2006.
The main reason for the trip?? Well being a smart alec family we are I told my dd who had been refusing to potty train that if she would get potty trained completely then we would go on a big cruise ship and see Mickey and Minnie mouse. Two weeks after that comment
.dd was completely potty trained and asking if we could go on that cruise now to see Mickey and Minnie. So we book the cruise for May as that would put us one month after dd 4th birthday and we wanted to make sure she was old enough for the kids clubs. Now for the trip down. We drove from Ohio to Florida. This is about a 17 hour drive for us and we were doing it in 2 days. The day we was to leave I had to work for 2 hrs.
I thought if I have to do 2 hrs I might as well do the 4 and pick up the extra 2 hrs overtime so I had planned on going in at 3am and working till 7am. We was to leave town around 11am - noonish since the 15 yr old had state testing that day as well. Well my first mistake was going in at 3am and having to get up at 2am as when I got off at 7am I was sooo tired I ended up taking a nap till 9am. Why is this a problem you ask? Well that left me approximately 2 hours to run around and finish everything that had to be done before we left. Which really wasnt too bad of an issue other then my dad decided to come down and chatted and held me up for about an hour of that 2 hrs. So in an hours time I did manage to get most of it done and all that was left was to cap the tank off with gas but decided we could do that on the road when we stopped to grab some lunch. We get on the road around noon and stop 2 hours later to fill up and grab some McDonalds for on the road for lunch. Back on the road we go. Now before I continue I say this. My dh drinks a lot of coffee. About a pot a day. Needless to say about the time we was on the road and heading out the need to pee all the coffee from the system kicks in. So roughly every 2-3 hours we was stopping for a potty break. Now mind you we thought we would have more issues and the potty with dd but nope it was dh. Go figure. So other then the constant potty breaks the drive was kind of uneventful. Yes I said kind of. DD had not mentioned the cruise much at all till the drive there. In the back seat we here where is the big ship at? Are we close yet? . Now to get a 4 year old to understand the length of driving we had to do we told her that we had a very very very very very long drive ahead of us. That seemed to satisfy her for the time being. Eventually she falls asleep and takes a 3 hours nap. Not much we can do when a child starts napping in the van as you cant control how long they sleep. This was a mistake of letting her sleep for 3 hours and it was 4pm when she fell asleep to begin with. Too late for our taste. We stopped for the night right around 8pm at a hotel at the border of North and South Carolina. This was about the halfway point. We run dd around a bit to burn some energy off of her since she napped so late. By 10pm I was whipped and extremely tired. ( remember I had been up since 2am with only a 2 hours nap that morning) I very seldom sleep in the van unless I know we are on a stretch of road with no turns as I am the map navigator. So at 10pm I am telling them to quiet down its time to go to sleep. DD however, is saying she wants to snuggle with daddy. So there is daddy, dss, and dd all in one double bed and me alone in the other. The plan was that dd was to sleep with me and dh was going to sleep with dss. That plan didnt go over well at all as dh and dd was playing the musical beds ALL night long. Finally at 6am dd stays asleep and in one bed and then at 6:30am the alarm goes off. Ugh..
talk abut rude awakening. I get up and get around. Once I get done with my shower I wake the rest of the crew up to get their showers. I wait till 7am to wake dd as she is NOT a morning person and with her up and down all night I knew she would be a bear this morning. We are all ready and loaded up in the van by 8am. Our time schedule was to be at the hotel in Florida by 3pm. We forego the continental breakfast at the hotel as it was only Danishes and coffee. We stopped around 9am for potty break, refill gas tank, and I scope out what there is to eat for breakfast. I spotted Crispy Cream donuts. Sold.. I grab dh his large coffee, a dozen donuts, 3 milks, and a bunch of extra napkins since we was eating on the road.
The second day of driving is about the same as the first. Oh yeah did I mention it rained pretty much the entire drive on the first day and was the same the second day as well. Good way to start vacation. I told dh that it can rain all it wants for the drive down so it will be nice and sunny for the week of our trip. I know odd thinking but hey it works to keep myself in high spirits. Dd was in the same mode as the previous day with the very very very long car ride thing. She had a big meltdown when we told her it was going to be another day before we actually got to board the ship. Nice thing is she had her meltdown and then crashed for a nap. Early nap this time. We had rain till we hit the south part of Georgia and then it turned muggy hot and sunny the rest of the way down. yeah. We hit the Florida border and stop for lunch. We get to the hotel around 4pm. We get checked in and find our room. At this point we know we dont want a repeat from the night before so we take the kids to the pool. We swim for roughly an hour then we head over to Zacharys for supper. Good food but thought it was expensive. After supper we walk around and check things out and see what there was to see. We go to the room and decided to jump in the van and go down to the Ron Jon Surf Shop. We walk thru there and then take dd out to the beach. We let her walk in the water with her bare feet but got bowled over by a wave and ended up half wet. We wander back to the hotel and settle down for the night. By this time dd is running out of energy but managed to get a second wind in her all of a sudden so we play around with her to get that out of her system early. We go to bed roughly 9pm that night. Now my main complaint with the hotel (which by the way was the Radisson) was they advertise the sleep comfort beds. I was like so kewl made sure to check our numbers on our bed as we have one at home. Well no way to adjust the bed. Big disappointment.
I have to stop here as i am going to try and break down the cruise portions by day. I have not uploaded any pictures yet but when i do i will add them as well.
but Instead I took her for a walk around the pool and killed some time. We had like almost 2 hours worth of time to kill at this point. DH went to get the van and pulled it around to unload our luggage in the lobby and park the van. As we are waiting I am noticing more and more people sarting to come out of the woodwork. Most dont seem as anxious. Hmm wonder if they partied the night before. 
We chit chat while waiting around and as I am meeting people I learn that Sherrie happened to be at the hotel in the pool at the same time as us and neither of us even realized it. And I dont recall who but one of the others was only a few doors down from us in the hotel. How odd is that? Anyways the kids all start chit chatting as well so it helps kill some time. We have boarding pass number 3 so as we was awaiting the calling we had Ryan ( MickeyDs son) bartering to switch numbers with us or to adopt him so he could get on sooner. I think even at one time he suggested we swap him for our dss. What things a teen will do to get on a Disney ship sooner. Lol. So our number gets called and we collect kids and carry-ons and head to the line. In the second line next to us was Madisonznana and crew so we joke around with them on whos going to get on board first. We go thru get pictures taken and then we step onto the ship. Both me and dh stop and look at dd to see her reaction. They announce our family name and dd was just standing there saying mommy look, wow, this is so pretty and wow, are we on the big boat yet? hey they just said ouw name mommy!! it was so priceless. They move us along and we head up to eat lunch at topsiders. Another side-note : for those of you wanting to carry-on water. We had a small suitcase on wheels full of bottled water plus another carry-on bag full of bottled pepsi. These did go thru security no problem but I tell ya what they are heavy and a pain to carry around till you can go to your stateroom so if you do this be prepared to find yourself a parking place so you dont have to lug it around for very long. Ok. Anyways we eat lunch out on the deck at topsiders and had roughly 30mins to kill before we could go to our stateroom. We decide to do a slow tour heading towards are deck and check things out along the way. Well along the way we passed the spa. We walked in just to see what was changed and managed to turn ourselves around and ended up taking the tour of the spa in the process unintentionally. 
By this time it was 12:45pm and we had to be on the other side of Key West by 1pm. I tell my dh to go to the hotel that was next to the museum and stand off to the edge with the kids as I was calling one to the hotel and I was standing in the middle of the street to get it. While waiting I called the charter company to let them know we would be a few minutes late as we was having problems getting a taxi. Well just as our taxi came around the corner someone thought they was going to take it from us and I yelled come on dear heres the taxi I called for and the people backed off. 
We get into the taxi and it was only a 15 minute ride to the other side of key west. During this 15 minute ride though dd decided to take a cat nap. We tried to have a little bit of chit chat with the driver of the taxi but he didnt even say one word to us except for when we had to pay him. We end up only being 10 minutes late but once we get to the charter place our captain meets us and says well lets get going. We all jump in the boat and off we go. Our captain was Captain Alan Parrott AKA The Real "Capt. Jack Sparrow" (this was taken from the charters website. I will post a picture of him when I get to the picture end of things) We head out of the harbor and along the way we see our ship docked at the pier. He takes us out towards the ship and goes out from there. As we are cruising along dh and I are sitting in the front just watching both kids in the front seat holding the rails sitting side by side and watching things pass by. To us that was a wonderful site to see. All of a sudden the captain does an abrupt stop of the boat and we are all looking around trying to figure out why. We look to the captain and he asks us if we want to see some dolphins. We are like yeah sure. So he turns the boat a bit and right at the front of the boat along side of us is 5 dolphins. 4 adults and one baby.
She was giggling away while doing so and the captain caught on to this and cranked it up and went even faster. This got dd really laughing and excited. Allan got a good chuckle out of it too. Once we get to the fishing area we are all more relaxed and we get to talking to the captain. He was so awesome as he was telling us about the area, the waters, the history, the lifestyle, and anything we wanted to know. We fished off of a reef area and caught many different kinds of fish. The bait we used was shrimp. I told the captain I dont mind fishing but I dont do the shrimp thing. he giggled and said no problem and set me up. I dont think I had my pole in the water more then 5 minutes and I had already caught the first fish. The boys however had been fishing for a good 10-15 minutes already and hadnt gotten nothing. Lol.. Overall we caught 10 fish and all were of different kinds. (Snappers, barracudas, jacks, groupers,, and a few others I cant remember ) On this excursion we had the option of snorkeling and swimming as well but we decided to just fish the entire time as we could snorkel and swim at other times on the trip. About halfway thru the trip I had felt like I was getting warm on the arm and just started watching the boys fish so I could stay out of the sun as I knew then I was burnt. I had put lotion on dd and parts of my legs but I didnt get enough on my arms soon enough and ended up burning my shoulders. We fished in 2-3 different areas and had a blast. As our captain headed back to the port to end our trip he saw our ship and went straight into it. He even let DSS drive the boat a bit which was kewl. I was standing up chatting with the captain when all of a sudden I heard OH NO. the captain slowed the boat down big time to find out what happened. Well here the wind had caught DSSs KTTW card holder just right and whipped the card right out of it into the ocean. Now at this point we knew as soon as we got back on land we would have to head to the ship instead of walking around checking out the sites. The captain said he would drop us off at a dock that was within a few blocks of walking back to our ship so we wouldnt have to deal with a taxi if we wanted. We took him up on the offer and then just paid him the $20 bucks we would have had to spend for the taxi cab ride back.
Note to all: the passports really helped and I recommend you carry them at all times when going off the ship. 
DH says lets go back ashore real quick and check out the stores on the pier and see if they have the pins and such we need to get. ok so that is what we did. We had about roughly 1 hour to do this and with no kids tagging along I knew we could cover a lot of ground. So off we went. We covered about 5-6 stores and got what we wanted and headed back to the ship. We picked dd up from the club to get ready for dinner. Now remember my sunburn?? Well by this time I was hurting pretty bad. I took a shower hoping to get some of the sting out. It helped a very tad. So good thing for aloe gel. I put a ton of it on and found myself getting chills from the burn. Not good. I ended up wearing a really light weight shirt to dinner ( semi tank top) and wore a light weight coat as well.
I am sure I looked pretty funny wearing warmer clothes when it was so hot out. Anyways, we go to dinner and had to weight for Fritz to seat us. We was told we would have different servers this night since they didnt have a table available with our regular servers. We said no problem. Our substitute servers were great. They was right on with everything. We was really liking them better then our regular ones at that time. Although, our regular server kept coming over to check on us so that was good. We told him they have some competition now.
