sayhello
Have Camera, Will Travel
- Joined
- Oct 28, 2006
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Last Sea Day & Disembarkation Day in Barcelona
So this was the last day of the cruise! Hard to believe it was almost over!
This Sea Day started out in a very fun way, with Table 32's character breakfast! For those who don't know, on the longer Disney cruises, everyone gets assigned, by their dining rotation, to a specific morning's character breakfast. So we sat at Table 32 in Parrot Cay, and ordered fun stuff for breakfast. (Among other things, I ordered the Mickey waffles, just to give them a try, but they were really only "OK". I'd heard they're not as good as the ones at the Magic Kingdom. Guess I'll have to give those a try some time.)
Then, as we ate, several characters went from table to table so that we could get our pictures taken with them. So much fun! We had our normal servers with us, also, and they made fun headdresses for us out of our napkins and various tableware. It was quite a bit of silly fun! Here are several pics from breakfast:
Brian & Minnie & Jill.
Dale & Me.
Blake & Dale.
Me & the Mouse.
Brian appears to have not learned about not playing with his food. :-D
Goofy!
Jill, Chip & Sarah. (Yes, I had to look it up. I *always* forget. Chip's nose is the color of a chocolate chip, and Dale has the red nose...)
Table 32, ready to party! (As if that's anything new! ;-D ).
It was really a pretty kick-back, uneventful day. I did some reading, both on my balcony & out on deck, but it was a little chilly for me out in the wind.
The only plans I had for the rest of the day were the Adventures by Disney Farewell reception they were holding later in the afternoon.
Robin & Tina showed us a wonderful slideshow of some of the best shots they'd taken, and one of the couples from the group presented them with a couple of journals that they had organized to get signed by all of us on the trip. Both Robin & Tina seemed very touched by it!
Next we went to one of the most elaborate of the shows we saw, called "Disney Dreams". It was a very cute show about a young girl who dreams her way through several Disney stories.
After the show, we went back to our rooms to get ready for our last dinner.
I took this picture of a picture on the way back to my room.
Taken from my verandah.
My last towel animal...
While we were there, some of the Table 32 folks hauled out some of the booze they'd acquired during the trip, and we had a little party out at "Tina's bar". Um, as you can see, Tina's bar was our stateroom attendant, Tina's, cleaning cart. It had some clean glasses that were pressed into service for a farewell toast or two!
I think it was this night, but we had a few tears from the youngest of our Adventurers, who realized she would not be able to hang out with Robyn any more. I don't know how I've managed to not mention it, but Sydney became *extremely* attached to Robyn, and stuck by her during much of the tours. It was really pretty cute, and pretty sad when the separation became inevitable...
That night, as we finished up dinner, the "climax" of the night was the parade of baked Alaskas.
And that was when it happened... I was trying to get a shot of the parade as it went by (which included our servers carrying flags from their home countries).
Suddenly, my camera started flaking out. It froze up, it wouldn't take any pictures, it told me to turn itself off and back on, and then told me there were no pictures to show!!!!
I started quietly freaking out. I didn't want to spoil the party, but this had never happened to me before. I kept trying turning it off, turning it on, ejecting the memory card & reinserting it, etc, etc, but NOTHING helped. I finally broke down & told my tablemates. Somebody suggested I go to Shutters, and see if they could do anything with their computer system they use to download folks' pictures to CD. I went there, but it was no use. Their system didn't even recognize the memory card.
While I was there, starting to dispair, a pair of fellow DISers (I apologize if I get this wrong, but I *believe* it was moneyhappy and her hubby) heard what was going on, & said they'd had the same problem, and had downloaded some software that had recovered their pictures. So the hubby came with me to my cabin & tried to recover the pictures using his laptop. Unfortunately, despite his spending an *inordinate* amount of time VERY sweetly trying to help me, nothing was recovered. Now, by then I'd remembered that I'd been downloading my pictures to my iPad almost every day, and was able to verify that it was better than I thought, and that the only days that weren't backed up were the previous day (Monte Carlo & Eze) and this last Sea Day. So while it was sad (I thought I'd gotten some really cool shots in Eze, especially) it was not as tragic as if ALL my pictures were gone. And I held out a small bit of hope that maybe the Geek Squad, or someone else back home might be able to help me. I missed the Farewell show in the lobby, but was glad that I'd been helped so nicely by a fellow DISer. At that point, I just finished the last-minute packing, and went to bed.
[And just to break the suspense, I'll answer the obvious (since I *have* posted pictures from those two days) that when I got back home (and got over the stomach virus from hell) I went to Best Buy to see if the Geek Squad could help me. They couldn't read the memory card any better than I could (I'd tried on my PC at home, also). So they gave me 2 options. I could pay a large fee (no way to predict how much until after it was done) to have them send the card out & have it disassembled in a controlled environment, at which point they pretty much guarantee they can retrieve the photos. Or, I could go to SanDisk's website, and purchase a software utility they sold there to try & retrieve pictures from their memory cards. I figured I'd try SanDisk's software first. And it worked! In fact, it retrieved every single picture I'd taken on the trip, including the multitude of bad shots I'd deleted over the course of the cruise! The only downside was that it retrieved the videos as a series of still shots rather than as a video, so I had THOUSANDS and THOUSANDS of pictures to retrieve & sort through. But it was all worth it, because I got those 2 days of pictures back! Happy Ending!!!!]
Continued below
So this was the last day of the cruise! Hard to believe it was almost over!
This Sea Day started out in a very fun way, with Table 32's character breakfast! For those who don't know, on the longer Disney cruises, everyone gets assigned, by their dining rotation, to a specific morning's character breakfast. So we sat at Table 32 in Parrot Cay, and ordered fun stuff for breakfast. (Among other things, I ordered the Mickey waffles, just to give them a try, but they were really only "OK". I'd heard they're not as good as the ones at the Magic Kingdom. Guess I'll have to give those a try some time.)
Then, as we ate, several characters went from table to table so that we could get our pictures taken with them. So much fun! We had our normal servers with us, also, and they made fun headdresses for us out of our napkins and various tableware. It was quite a bit of silly fun! Here are several pics from breakfast:
Brian & Minnie & Jill.
Dale & Me.
Blake & Dale.
Me & the Mouse.
Brian appears to have not learned about not playing with his food. :-D
Goofy!
Jill, Chip & Sarah. (Yes, I had to look it up. I *always* forget. Chip's nose is the color of a chocolate chip, and Dale has the red nose...)
Table 32, ready to party! (As if that's anything new! ;-D ).
It was really a pretty kick-back, uneventful day. I did some reading, both on my balcony & out on deck, but it was a little chilly for me out in the wind.
The only plans I had for the rest of the day were the Adventures by Disney Farewell reception they were holding later in the afternoon.
Robin & Tina showed us a wonderful slideshow of some of the best shots they'd taken, and one of the couples from the group presented them with a couple of journals that they had organized to get signed by all of us on the trip. Both Robin & Tina seemed very touched by it!
Next we went to one of the most elaborate of the shows we saw, called "Disney Dreams". It was a very cute show about a young girl who dreams her way through several Disney stories.
After the show, we went back to our rooms to get ready for our last dinner.
I took this picture of a picture on the way back to my room.
Taken from my verandah.
My last towel animal...
While we were there, some of the Table 32 folks hauled out some of the booze they'd acquired during the trip, and we had a little party out at "Tina's bar". Um, as you can see, Tina's bar was our stateroom attendant, Tina's, cleaning cart. It had some clean glasses that were pressed into service for a farewell toast or two!
I think it was this night, but we had a few tears from the youngest of our Adventurers, who realized she would not be able to hang out with Robyn any more. I don't know how I've managed to not mention it, but Sydney became *extremely* attached to Robyn, and stuck by her during much of the tours. It was really pretty cute, and pretty sad when the separation became inevitable...
That night, as we finished up dinner, the "climax" of the night was the parade of baked Alaskas.
And that was when it happened... I was trying to get a shot of the parade as it went by (which included our servers carrying flags from their home countries).
Suddenly, my camera started flaking out. It froze up, it wouldn't take any pictures, it told me to turn itself off and back on, and then told me there were no pictures to show!!!!
I started quietly freaking out. I didn't want to spoil the party, but this had never happened to me before. I kept trying turning it off, turning it on, ejecting the memory card & reinserting it, etc, etc, but NOTHING helped. I finally broke down & told my tablemates. Somebody suggested I go to Shutters, and see if they could do anything with their computer system they use to download folks' pictures to CD. I went there, but it was no use. Their system didn't even recognize the memory card.
While I was there, starting to dispair, a pair of fellow DISers (I apologize if I get this wrong, but I *believe* it was moneyhappy and her hubby) heard what was going on, & said they'd had the same problem, and had downloaded some software that had recovered their pictures. So the hubby came with me to my cabin & tried to recover the pictures using his laptop. Unfortunately, despite his spending an *inordinate* amount of time VERY sweetly trying to help me, nothing was recovered. Now, by then I'd remembered that I'd been downloading my pictures to my iPad almost every day, and was able to verify that it was better than I thought, and that the only days that weren't backed up were the previous day (Monte Carlo & Eze) and this last Sea Day. So while it was sad (I thought I'd gotten some really cool shots in Eze, especially) it was not as tragic as if ALL my pictures were gone. And I held out a small bit of hope that maybe the Geek Squad, or someone else back home might be able to help me. I missed the Farewell show in the lobby, but was glad that I'd been helped so nicely by a fellow DISer. At that point, I just finished the last-minute packing, and went to bed.
[And just to break the suspense, I'll answer the obvious (since I *have* posted pictures from those two days) that when I got back home (and got over the stomach virus from hell) I went to Best Buy to see if the Geek Squad could help me. They couldn't read the memory card any better than I could (I'd tried on my PC at home, also). So they gave me 2 options. I could pay a large fee (no way to predict how much until after it was done) to have them send the card out & have it disassembled in a controlled environment, at which point they pretty much guarantee they can retrieve the photos. Or, I could go to SanDisk's website, and purchase a software utility they sold there to try & retrieve pictures from their memory cards. I figured I'd try SanDisk's software first. And it worked! In fact, it retrieved every single picture I'd taken on the trip, including the multitude of bad shots I'd deleted over the course of the cruise! The only downside was that it retrieved the videos as a series of still shots rather than as a video, so I had THOUSANDS and THOUSANDS of pictures to retrieve & sort through. But it was all worth it, because I got those 2 days of pictures back! Happy Ending!!!!]
Continued below
This was my first European ABD. It was a really good experience. Except for the flights there & back, I'd do another one any time! 
Report over means trip is really over! Table 32 was THE BEST!
