Missy and I for the first time since Sarah was born got to eat at Palo. A special bonus was sitting in the Palo room with 12 other DISers.
Yay! That's awesome!
I really can't say enough about the great group, the incredible FE gifts, ToT, treasure hunt on Nachi and on and on. Thank you to all that participated.
I can say without a doubt this was the best cruise we have ever been on.
We second that. What an amazing and wonderful group of folks on this thread- YOU are what made this cruise so very special to us!!! It was delight cruising with you all!
I, for one, was very disappointed with the service compared with the last cruise we were on. Pirate night was not representative of the true Disney Show. Sound problems through the show! I talked to many folks that agreed! Did you know that right before the cruise they took 30% of the staff off and replaced them with brand new crew! It really showed. We took some guests that had cruise on other lines, their comments were something to the fact that Disney was inferior. Our family was disappointed!
Hi Scott, I'm sorry to hear you had a rough go of it. Yes, we too did see many folks "Earning their Ears", and know that many of the experienced staff has moved on to train for the Dream (and others that will go soon).
I hope you received your lanyards, I did not have your stateroom number and had to leave them at Guest Services with your name. They assured me they would deliver them to you, so I hope they did follow through on that!
All in all, this was by far the BEST Cruise we've ever been on, and a lot of it has to do with THIS group!! You have all brought so much Extra Magic to the Magic, I don't know if any other cruise can live up to it!!
And *YOU* are a huge reason this cruise was so much fun for all of us. THANK YOU SO MUCH Judy for your tireless work making Magic for us to enjoy!
Hope everyone returns home safely. Thanks so much to everyone who worked hard on this cruise meet. We didn't do FE or get in on the Nachi excursions but we were happy to see so many around the ship with their wonderful orange lanyards! Thanks Nenner for those!!
You're so welcome, it was quite a hoot so see everyone in their lanyards and T shirts on embarkation day and all of the great door decorations and FE's..I have truly never seen so many festive doors! Loved it!!!
Have to give a huge shout to Nicole for helping me the first day passing the lanyards out.
Home! A very long day of traveling. A bumpy flight back to NY and two kids who got car sick just as we were getting home from JFK. I was so worried about seasickness, which never happened, and then they both get ill pulling into our very own driveway.
Overall, it was a wonderful cruise. I am so happy that I joined this thread and got to do so many things with all of you. The highlights were definitely our time at Nachi, the FE exchange and the DIS Trick or Treat.
Agreed- Nachi was wonderful and the Treasure Hunt was really a huge highlight for Savannah- and to think I wasn't even sure she would want to do it! It looked like such fun!
I'm so glad everyone was able to enjoy the ToT- a few did tell me it was better than Disney's LOL (that was my goal!). It was a bit difficult to plan something like that from home and I do send my apologies to those who had trouble with their station or with me getting back to release them promptly. Thank you, so, so so, SO much for your work volunteers! You all did an amazing job and YOU are what made it a huge success!!!
One annoying thing happened tho. Twice we were charged for things that weren't ours. Both times we had never presented out KTTW cards, so I have no idea how they were able to charge us. One of them we got drinks in promenade, but the server charged us for ours and then ran another charge for someone else's. The weird thing is... is ours were charged on schimj's card, which we presented, but the other person's were charged on MINE, which the server never had. We spoke to guest services TWICE but they said food and beverage would have to look at it and take it out since we couldn't prove it. How in the heck would I prove this?!?!? Very aggravated about this and it makes me worry about charges next time and how I am going to have to watch it like a hawk. Did anyone else have issues like this?
Glad you guys had a great time- sorry we never got the opportunity to meet!
I did have one thing- it wasn't an issue but since you bring up the charging problems I'll mention. Ron and I were in Treasure Ketch and he left briefly with the cards-I was ready to check out and they told me no problem, that I didn't need a card, just tell them my room number. I immediately thought Geez- I could tell them any room number for all they knew.
Sorry you had to go through that- ridiculous. Did they eventually refund those charges?
What an amazing, amazing time! Our first
Disney cruise was surely something to write home about!
Thank you all! The FE gifts were so great, it was so much fun to come "home" and find gifts waiting for us. Unfortunately, someone stole one of our magnets. Morgan is less than pleased, so whoever gave us the set of 3 magnets with the clear pebbles - if you have an extra of the Mickey pirate, I'd gladly pay to have it mailed to us.
Our servers were fabulous! So good to Morgan and very very helpful.
Glad you all had such a wonderful time!
Thanks so much for being our photographer in Key West!
The only issue we had was the "sewer" smell. They really worked hard on it, but it kept coming and going throughout the cruise.
We smelled it briefly on occasion too- most notably on embarkation day near the aft elevators (ooooh the aft elevators, that's another can of worms altogether). We did have a mild tinge of an odor occasionally in both of our bathrooms. The kids' inside room seemed to have it more noticeably than ours. It wasn't bad enough to warrant a complaint or even a mention. It was just something we noticed from time to time.
And, I was rather disappointed there was no special menu for Halloween.
I was really looking forward to the pumpkin chocolate cake.
Oh, what a bummer! I'm sorry you did not get to experience those, we would have been disappointed too!
We had such a fantastic time. Once again we had superb service- only our main dining room server was only "Very Good" and not absolutely unequivocally OUTSTANDING. Our Stateroom Host was amazing- towel animals TWICE A DAY in both rooms!!! Our Assistant Server was awesome- always had Sarah's drinks and area all set up for her before we arrived. He was spot on with refills- sometimes brought two drinks at once if we were drinking a lot, or he anticipated being tied up with other tables a while. Just fantastic. And I can't say enough about our Head Server Godwin- a name I had recognized from these boards from when he used to be a server. He was hands down the best Head Server we've ever had, and I suspect everything a Head Server is supposed to be and then some. He even took Sarah for a walk around the dining room one evening so we had an opportunity to finish our dinner. Our main server was very good too, just not over the top out of the park amazing! We had all the little perks too, the origami, magic tricks, and napkin hats. Needless to say we went way over budget in the tip department, and it was well deserved.
In general I was happy with the state of the ship. I was expecting way worse from the accounts after dry dock. Not to say there weren't issues that should have been attended to, especially during dry dock- like the theater (Sarah accidentally kicked an armrest that fell into the aisle), the dust on the chandelier, the rust in various places like our verandah and especially the Goofy Pool, a broken and hanging flag decoration near Signals Bar in the Quiet Cove pool. Things like those- details that in the past you would expect to be fixed immediately-recent dry dock notwithstanding.
Entertainment was great- Alfred and Seymour, John Charles and Jason Bishop were all wonderful (loved Jason Bishop's shout out to the Disboards and how we critique everything here). The stage shows were as wonderful as ever. It was our first time seeing Twice Charmed which was terrific and although Villains Tonight moved a bit slow (did every single Villain need such a long cameo?) it was overall still a great show. The Nancy Grace one liner still has me chuckling.
The Ports were great. Key West was hot as all get out and the occasional shower seemed to catch us at inopportune times but it was fun seeing all of our new friends riding the Old Town Trolley (sorry I got reprimanded for talking!
). We didn't get to do half of what we had planned and still did not make it back in time for the onboard Halloween stuff but it was still a fun port. Grand Cayman, again Captain Marvins was fun- not quite so easy with Sarah however. We had fun in Margaritaville too with Jonathan and Amy and Adam!
Nachi Cocom in Cozumel was so great, made all the better by all of our new friends with us!!
Castaway Cay, could we not have been luckier with the storm passing right over us!!?!?! Nothing was going to rain on our parade! Love the new additions there, what fun! Could not believe the culture shock coming back to a chilly Port Canaveral. It seemed like it was still summer when we left and we came back to full on Winter!
The kids had such a wonderful time, and I'm so glad they both have great new friends hopefully for a long time to come. If I keep typing any more I won't have to bother with a trip report but I just wanted to give a little overview of our wonderful cruise!!
No, we didn't get any.
I saw Brent afterwards and was going to tell him that they shot me 
those!
