I was surprised how excellent Palo was.
I was equally surprised to be underwhelmed by the main dining room food. My first reaction was that it seemed like banquet food. Fancy banquet food, but banquet food nonetheless. Then I thought about feeding a couple of thousand people per night, and realized that banquet food is exactly what it is, and what it has to be.
This is where expectations are so important. I went in expecting low grade wedding food in the MDR's. When it turned out to be higher grade wedding food, I was pleasantly surprised.
On our EBTA last Sept. we found that only 200 kids were on the Magic. Talk about hardly seeing/hearing any rugrats, wow! They had to really scrounge to find them for some of the stage shows at night.
For our upcoming cruise in Feb 2018, we again have the aft cabin, but have already been in touch with a BUNCH of other people on social media who are on the cruise with us. There are lots of plans for outings, and meets and all of those things that can make a cruise fun, including "BAR WARS" a Star Wars Day at Sea themed pub crawl through all the drinking establishments on the Fantasy.
Tell me more of this Bar Wars!!! It sounds interesting! We are on the Fantasy in March of 2018, I'm totally curious.
I found the navigators to be overwhelming with information overload the first time that I saw them - I am a meticulous planner and I love information and when I saw them I got nervous because I felt like I didn't understand how to read them and I got all paranoid that I was "missing out" on things because I didn't have time to read the navigators. Now obviously I think they are easy to read and I get them but I always give advice to first timers to try and get a copy of those so they don't overwhelm.
Before our first cruise, I didn't know about these boards, so we just went with the flow and we had a great time! Things I didn't know about on that first cruise:
- Didn't know that room service was "free"
- Didn't know that you could order multiple entrees at dinner or make special requests for things not shown on the menu (like Mickey bars, caprese salad, or desserts from a different restaurant)
- Didn't know you could have dress shirts (for formal night) pressed at a reasonable price
- Didn't know about the pirate buffet
- Didn't know about the benefits of booking a future cruise while still onboard
- Didn't know that I wouldn't need nearly as many clothes as I had packed.
- I didn't know that desserts at Cove Cafe and late night snacks by the clubs were free for the taking.
Yeah, that happend...We weren't prepared for how much time our kids would want to spend in the kids club. My wife and I would have each brought another book to read if we'd known how much down time we would have had.