kids & the club

[rsjj]

has any of you ever left your children in the club while you go off the ship for excursion? if so, was everything ok? (silly question, i know!) do we have to be on a dcl excursion, in order to do this? the reason i'm asking is because we're thinking of doing that, but wasn't sure if we should. and just wanted to get a general idea of what others did, and to see if it's a good idea, or that we should just scratch the idea! any input is greatly appreciated! thank you!

 

[Stinasmom]

We thought about doing this too but the excursion we were interested in met and left the ship around 7:30am...I don't think the clubs open this early...?
I guess you would have to pick a later excursion and decide how you feel about the kids not being able to page you. Depends on the kid and age...
If you don't get lots of responses...try
http://www.disboards.com/showthread.php?t=726039
It is a good question!

 

[ChrisnSteph]

We have done this without a problem. It doesn't have to be a Disney excursion. You can leave your kids in the club anytime, but it's good to let the club staff know that you will be on an excursion in case they try to reach you and the pager doesn't work. The pager works for a small distance away from the ship, but I'm not sure how far. They take the kids to lunch too, so you don't have to worry about taking them out for that. Have fun!

 

[poohssmum]

We did this on our cruise last November. We didn't do any excursions, but we did leave the kids (9, 8, 7 and 5) in the club/lab while we wandered around the ports by ourselves for a few hours. We just let the CM's know we were leaving the ship and approximately when we'd be back. The kids didn't even miss us

 

[pdarrah]

We did this even though we hadn't planned to before we went! On our Western cruise, our DS5 instantly fell in love with the club - as we were making plans to walk around Key West (Sunday - 1st full day) he chimed in with "Can't I go to the club while you do that? I don't want to walk around!"

DH and I had an instant conference and decided since DS5 was fine with the idea (obviously - it was his!) that we would ALL probably enjoy our day more if he stayed on board. We made certain that he understood that we couldn't be paged once we were on shore ("That's OK Mom - I want to go to the club!") We also told the counselors at the club our plans and when we expected to be back. I think we went ashore for about 3 hours.

It was fine - he had a great time and we were able to go see and enjoy a "secret garden" that we really wanted to see. When we got back to the ship, he seemed surprised to see us back but then decided to take a break from the club to go to the Mickey Pool! He definitely was not at all bothered that we were off the ship.

Pdarrah

 

[scrapperjill]

We left our kids (dd11 & dd6) in the clubs one night when we were at port in Pureto Rico....the pagers worked fine to let us know it was kid club closing time...and we needed to come get all the kids. (all the kids...because we were with a group of other cruisers who also left their children in the clubs)

 

[American Scrapper]

Yes, I can vouche for the pagers working while being off the ship. We were one of the couples with scrapperjill and it was pretty funny. The club will start paging about a half hour before they close as a reminder. All of ours were going off one after another!

 

[Hollyster2]

So what time do the kid's clubs open on port days?