Trip Report 3rd time’s the charm?

Ok all. I’ve never done one of these before, and I didn’t plan to do one for this trip, so this may end up: a) unfinished, b) boring, c) text heavy-we don’t post pictures of the kids online

If you’ll bear with me, I’ll give this a shot and we’ll see what happens:

Preface (text heavy):

December 2018. That’s the last trip we took to actually be in Disney. 2018!! That wasn’t the plan, but that’s how things ended up. Like so many others our Disney plans were upended by Covid.

The original plans:

Sometime in spring 2019 my mother floated the idea of a Disney cruise to celebrate her 70th birthday. Naturally, we were all in! We scoured the planning sites and our calendars and decided on a July 2020 cruise to celebrate her birthday in September. Avoids school issues and fewer hurricanes. A 5-night double-dipper on the Dream. July 5-10. Since we would have to be in Florida ahead of the cruise, and that was July 4th weekend we decided to go in a few days early and spend July 1-5 at the Wilderness Lodge. I was so excited. We always stayed at Fort Wilderness when I was a kid. We drove down from NH lin our station wagon, towing our pop-up camper. We’d stay for two weeks and take things nice and slow. We hung out at river country, harassed the baby ducks, and cut our feet up on all those shells. It was a glorious way to be a Disney Kid.

Unfortunately, Covid mucked up all our plans. We sadly watched the parks close and cruise after cruise get canceled until ours was too. We were glad to have the Future Cruise Credit, but sad that all our awesome plans went to waste. We rescheduled our cruise to February school break 2021. And waited, fingers crossed, hoping that would work out. Spoiler: It didn’t. So we moved again to February 2022. We changed up our group a bit. My sister and I would both have new babies in 2021, and my niece and her daughter said they wouldn’t be able to go after all. We still had 17 people, just a different breakdown.

So when we looked at the February 2022 options, and how much FCC we had, we decided (my mom who paid for nearly everything decided) that we should go concierge. The FCC covered almost all of difference in the cost, and who wouldn’t enjoy concierge? Another spoiler: Concierge is amazing.

So the new plans were set. A couple nights at Boardwalk (you don’t want to plan to fly in the night before from the northeast in February and have your flights canceled and miss your cruise). Then head to the port for our cruise. Then a couple of nights at Kidani before heading home. It’s a lot to squeeze into one week of school break, especially when we decided to drive from MA instead of fly.

The crew:
Me
DW
DS9
DD4
DD8m

There’s a whole lot of other people too. A dozen more. Generally, if I need to refer to them, I’ll try to use their initials and age.

I promise at least one picture in the next post…

 

[Back!Elbow!Shoulders!]

View attachment 628113

I have found myself in need of this very picture many times. Image saved. Thank you Max!

 

[RememberWhen]

My LO is about the age of your youngest. I can only imagine how that car ride went.

I totally get a text heavy TR and no face pics of kiddos. My only (selfish) recommendation is to break up the text into more paragraphs to make it easier to read.

Will do! Thanks for the suggestion! I’m typing while nursing/laundry folding/dish washing/everything else so it gets a bit run-on. I’ll slow it down and proof read a bit more.

 

[MickeyCB]

I don’t know if you’ve ever had a sleeping baby in a carrier on your chest, a hot coffee in one hand and two bottles of apple juice in the other and tried to speed walk. It went medium.

I'm in and enjoying your report and love your descriptions, it makes it easy to visualize this!

 

[Loco_driver]

Following along. Nice to see a TR from you!

 

[RememberWhen]

I'm in and enjoying your report and love your descriptions, it makes it easy to visualize this!

Thanks! And welcome!

Following along. Nice to see a TR from you!

Really appreciate it!! Glad you’re here!

 

[RememberWhen]

Sunday, February 20 cont

So off to buzz we went! Once we tapped in, we made a FP LL to meet Mickey on our way out of the park.

DD4 rode with grandma, my sister and her daughter rode together, which left me with the baby. Definitely wasn’t my best score, but since the baby spent the whole time whipping us back and forth with the joystick I felt pretty ok with my score.

We then had a bit of time before seeing Mickey so we checked wait times. Everything was bananas long, so we went to Mickey’s philharmagic. Going into the theater the CMs were asking people to please move all the way down. We climbed over the usual folks who sat in the middle of the row anyway (the temptation to “accidentally” step on their toes was high) and kept following the folks in front of us. Until they got to the end of our row and turned down the row in front of us so they could be closer to the middle. The poor CMs were so frustrated. They did call people out and ask them to stand up and move down the row. When called individually people did get up and move. The show was great and we enjoyed the new Coco addition.

By now we were getting tired and we were pretty much ready to go. The crowds were massive and we had gotten up early, so we made our way down Main Street and bopped into the shops on our way down to see Mickey. We parked the strollers and walked right in with our Lightning Lane.

OS4 loves “Mick” and was so happy to see him! DD4 was also happy. The baby was unimpressed.

After our “last thing” we needed a snack. I ran across the way to get a bucket and some popcorn. Just the regular one, nothing exciting. Honestly, the fancy popcorn buckets are so hard to eat out of and then you have to have it. At your house. The regular buckets double as great sand toys! So regular bucket, plus some sodas for the grown ups. I learned my lesson with the apple juice, so the kiddos had to go thirsty (they didn’t really. They still had apple juice leftover). We sat on the curb in the shade and had popcorn, soda and the kids had applesauce and granola bites.

Conveniently we saw several cavalcades roll by while we were resting, then the dapper dans came out on the train station platform. While we were watching, a family nearby said they bought too many Mickey bars, and did we want one! DD4 and OS4 were delighted and happily shared. Chocolate got everywhere. Everyone was happy.

DD4 was so excited to see the Fairy Godmother! She’s magic. I assume that’s how she stays up there without falling on her face.

Then Pooh and friends came out! We spent a bit of time waving and jumping up and down and shouting to them that they’re amazing and we love them! It was a nice way to bookend our MK day with Pooh.

We then trudged our way to the bus to get everyone back to the rooms before dinner.

I won’t bore you all with descriptions of dinner. We ate at Trattoria al Forno. There were 17 of us. It was chaotic and a bit of a mess. I took zero pictures as I was handling the kids at our first indoor meal in 2 years. They did fine, nothing outrageous. I think some people had pizza? And I had… something. It was fine, but not memorable. After dinner it was off to pack and do our Covid tests and time to get ready for our cruise!

 

[cgersic]

The photos are fabulous and I agree your writing style is most entertaining!

 

[RememberWhen]

Monday, February 21 - Cruise Day!!

We were all up bright and early, ready to get going on our cruise. As we were concierge, we didn’t need to pick a port arrival time, we could just arrive. But we wanted to get there early. So many fun things to do!

My family of 5 drove our van to the port, but the rest of my family had a rented mini-bus.

Odd side note: I had reached out to Mears back in October about the cost to rent a bus. They got back to me and sent a contract via email to arrange for a full size bus. I emailed back that I was looking at other options and would get back to them. But I forgot. I never signed the contract, but had given them locations and dates/timing to figure out pricing. They did not have any payment information.
So, come the day of the cruise my family strolls out to find a full size Mears bus waiting for them. They were confused because that wasn’t the right size bus, but the guy had my name so they started loading their luggage under the bus. Thank goodness the bus company we actually hired showed up and they connected the dots. It was weird though. No wonder Mears is leaving people waiting for rides to the airport. (Stay tuned…) They’re sending full size busses that haven’t really been reserved to take people to Port Canaveral…

Back to the Big Day.
We arrived at the port dropped our bags and did our tests. They were super organized and it was actually really easy. I tend to get stressed and flustered when I’m not sure what will happen, but it went fine.

We had to wait in our car for our test results, which was so annoying. We kept hearing cheers from the cars around us and watching people walk over to the terminal! Finally though, we were cleared!

We walked over to the terminal, but didn’t go in. We had decided as a family that if my mom couldn’t go, nobody would. She paid for the rooms. It was her delayed birthday trip. It only seemed fair.

 

[RememberWhen]

Monday, February 21 cont

So when the rest of the family was finally cleared, we all felt a huge wave of relief roll over us. We were really going!!

Some of these people are my family.

We entered the terminal and were whisked through the check in and security. Concierge is no joke. They really take care of you. We had gold stickers so we could be identified by the CMs as concierge. Before we knew it we were upstairs (my apologies for the total lack of pictures here) and being escorted to the ship. We were announced and onboard! The welcome show was cute.

Mickey and Minnie were right there! Happy to see us! I definitely got emotional watching DD4 and OS4 dancing and excited.

Then we went to lunch. They were NOT prepared for a group of 17. And we really should have just split up by room, but the littles really wanted to sit together…

So we waited while they organized a giant table. And then we waited forever to order. And then forever for our food. It wasn’t really that long, but it felt long. My advice: if you’re traveling with a large group, do ONE big meal together. Otherwise split up. It takes so much longer to do anything when you’re more than 6-8 people.

After 2 HOURS we finished at lunch and were allowed to go about the ship! We went up to our rooms (I’m so sorry I didn’t take good pictures of the rooms. I definitely meant to). My family was in 12514. My whole family had 5 rooms lined up, so we had 12510, 12512, 12514 (us), 12516 and 12518. These were fantastic rooms. They were right across the hall from the concierge lounge and my mom and sister had the bump-out balconies. Of course, our stateroom host, Lawrence, was able to unlock the doors between the balconies, so we had one mega balcony. It was awesome.

We checked out the lounge and dropped our bags and then went to check out the kids club.

The kids enjoyed playing around in there. This seemed to be a bunch of buttons?

There were a lot of video screens with games and movies. The floor was cool. Maybe it does something when the grown ups aren’t there?

 

[RememberWhen]

Monday, February 21, cont.

Near the kid club is the sign up for the mid-ship detective agency. DS8 loved this. And the 4s also had fun with it, but maybe understood it a bit less.

While they signed up, the baby and I watched more people coming aboard.

Thank goodness we got there as early as we did. Since lunch took so long, it was coming up quickly on sail away time!

 

[RememberWhen]

Sorry all. Hectic week.

February 21 cont
We went back to our rooms. DD4, OS4, her dad JS and I went to the pools for a bit. I did not bring my phone, so I don’t have any pictures. At the time we were there the pools were limited in capacity. We waited for the Donald pool together. This is the deep one. I’m short, only 5’3”. No idea what that is in metric. It’s short. Nice work American educational system! At any rate, I can’t stand in the Donald pool. Kinda on tip-toe, but barely.
DD4 jumped right in with her puddle jumper on and swam around. OS4 carefully slid in, swam around, and started crying. I asked JS what was wrong and he said “she thought there was a water slide into this pool.” Now, I know this is frustrating that I don’t have a picture, but this pool is a square, maybe a rectangle. I didn’t measure. No side was hidden or out of sight. The line to wait, where we stood for 5+ minutes, was along one side of the pool. With a clear view of all the other sides of the pool. Which did not have any kind of water slide. 4 year olds are awesome. She did recover and we happily swam around this very small, but deep, square/rectangle pool for our allotted time.

We also swam in the Mickey pool, which is about 12” deep. That’s about 1/3 of a meter? Not sure. Americanly educated. Surely DCL could have a happy medium? Something I don’t have to crawl in, but also can stand in? The kiddos also did the little yellow slide. They are both tall enough for the aquaduck, but weren’t feeling sure about it, and we were running short on time. It was sail away time and some of us had nice dinner to go to!

Back to the room, quick showers for the grownups, and out to the mega balcony to say goodbye to Florida!

See ya Florida!

The faceless people…

DS9 insists he saw a shark. Do you see it? Everyone claimed they could see it too and he was super proud to have been the one to spot it.

 

[RememberWhen]

February 21, cont
So, even though I wasn’t there, I’m going to include a few pictures of my family headed to their dinner.

The 4s saw Donald!

And Rapunzel!

Meanwhile, my mom and dad plus me and my sisters were headed to Remy. My sisters and I wanted to treat them since they paid for all of our rooms. None of us would usually spend this much on a cruise, but it was definitely a bucket list kind of situation. My mom kept saying “I just want to make some memories” so that’s what we did.

I do not have any idea of what the foods are that we ate. I didn’t take a picture of the menu. I did not plan well for trip reporting. But it was all delicious. Except some of the cheeses. Some of those were gross. But everything else was awesome.

Here’s what I got:

This was a tiny box/cube of soup. I’ve got three kids. I don’t go out for fancy dinners, but people. This was a tiny box of soup!! Tomato soup. It was awesome.

I feel like this was semi solid. Like jello, but that sounds gross and it was delicious.

This was delicious salmon. And a tube with stuff inside. And some green stuff which was also delicious. I should write food descriptions.

This was lamb. Pretty sure. Was awesome.

There was also beets. But I seem to have not taken a picture of them. They were super delicious.

Cheese plate. If you start at 12 o’clock and go clockwise, it starts ok and gets… to be not my taste as you go further. The first two were good. I tried the third. Didn’t go further than that, but my sister ate them. So no waste!

 

[RememberWhen]

February 21 cont

Don’t we look happy?! Ok. We didn’t have masks on, but see how I made the faces into Mickey? This is the Gusteau Room. Back when we made our requests, because Concierge gets to do that super early, we requested the Gusteau Room at Remy. We never heard if we got it, but we did! See, the tables in Remy have a max of 6. And the Gusteau Room has a minimum of 8. We are a group of 7… But it worked out! Again, the concierge team was amazing, making everything work out so easily.

So, exhausted and full we made our way back to our rooms. It was an amazing first day on the ship!

 

[amjt660]

Great reporting
Mickey shape face covers are a nice touch
Glad you got into the room you wanted
Still following


Max

 

[erstwo]

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The kids enjoyed playing around in there. This seemed to be a bunch of buttons?

Add in a few more monitors and it Looks like training for future NASA Mission Control leadership to me! (But it’s probably Star Wars themed??)

So sorry you had such a rough time dining as a big group. We were lucky enough to cruise as an extended family of 19 and we never had any issue. Getting kids to sit for 2 hours at that age would be tricky!! But our big group cruises were many/ several years ago. My mother in law had a stroke in 2016 and we haven’t been since. I wonder if all the COVID protocols meant that they just hadn’t practiced serving with large groups in a while???

Enjoying the report!

 

[RememberWhen]

Add in a few more monitors and it Looks like training for future NASA Mission Control leadership to me! (But it’s probably Star Wars themed??)

So sorry you had such a rough time dining as a big group. We were lucky enough to cruise as an extended family of 19 and we never had any issue. Getting kids to sit for 2 hours at that age would be tricky!! But our big group cruises were many/ several years ago. My mother in law had a stroke in 2016 and we haven’t been since. I wonder if all the COVID protocols meant that they just hadn’t practiced serving with large groups in a while???

Enjoying the report!

The server did say that we were the biggest group they had had since restarting.
We also just didn’t love our server. He was nice, but his style didn’t really fit my family.
The service was painfully slow at our table, but other tables seemed to move along just fine. And I’m sure if we had been a smaller group it would have been fine.

 

[RememberWhen]

Sorry again all. DW had surgery a couple weeks ago and I’m behind on everything. She’s doing great, so back to the memories:

Tuesday , February 22
SS1’s First birthday!!

We woke up early. Who could sleep when we had such a beautiful day at sea to enjoy?

Coffee = sanity

Luckily we had room service and concierge snacks were right across the hall. Honestly, the concierge snacks didn’t quite do it for me. Espresso drinks aren’t my thing. I like coffee. American drip coffee. A latte is nice, but not what I’m looking for. And the snacks were fine, and definitely conveniently located, but nothing better than what was at cabanas. But we had our snacks and headed out to enjoy our day.

Snow White was fun to talk with. She was kind and there weren’t really lines so the kiddos got to chat for a bit.

After lunch (my apologies, but I don’t remember what we did for lunch. Probably cabanas?) the fours had an appointment to be princessified! DD4 had been talking about it for weeks, and she was so so excited!! They both picked Cinderella.

OS4 and DD4 had super sparkly nails. They give the kids the bottle of nail polish, which we have used extensively since then.

The fairy-godmothers were lovely. And the kiddos were delighted with their new looks.

 

[RememberWhen]

Tuesday , February 22 cont.

Post makeover there was some detective work to be done. This really is a fun little game.

Here’s sweet SS1! Since my sister lives on the west coast this was the first time we got to meet her. And the first time they met DD8mo. It was nice to finally see her. And the kids had so much fun together. My sister decided to come back east for thanksgiving, even though plane tickets are always crazy. We’re so excited we’ll get to see them again soon(ish)!

Next up was some relaxing time in the rainforest room! This is my terrible picture of the hot tubs. Does anyone know what’s up with the weird bottoms of the hot tubs? Is this a spa thing? I’m unfamiliar with spas and wavy floored hot tubs. The rainforest room really was lovely. Our timing wasn’t fantastic as we had to get to dinner after, but I highly recommend it. The showers were interesting. The saunas were hot and had a view! And the hot tubs were great, and directly below our rooms. It was definitely worth the price, though now that I’m thinking about it I don’t think my sisters ever paid their shares… guess they won’t be getting holiday gifts next year.

Quick shower and I had time to dart across the hall for a beverage to bring to dinner. I don’t know what this is, but it was delicious. I asked for “a fruity cocktail” a couple times and was never disappointed. I’m not a big drinker, and DW doesn’t drink at all, so it was really nice not to have to know anything and have something lovely appear.

Dinner was uneventful, except for the cake! SS1 was ready to dig in with that spoon! But we sang happy birthday and she got a piece just like everyone else. We sat the babies across from each other and they would babble at one another in the cutest way.

We said a quick goodnight to Daisy on the way back to the room for bed. And that’s a day. Somehow we did nothing and the day still zipped by way too fast!

 

[RememberWhen]

Wednesday, February 23
Nassau, Bahamas

Some of my family scheduled an excursion to a beach on the island for the day. Theoretically it included lunch. Two of my sisters are vegetarian, and they didn’t really have any food for them. I think they had some corn and hot dog buns…

But we were docked next to the Magic! That was pretty cool. I didn’t get off the ship, but one of my family people took this picture of the ships together.

The beach people had a good time. They got a bit sun burnt and sandy.

BP2 was soooo sandy.

While they were enjoying the sun and water, my family stayed onboard. DW and DD4 went to see Daisy while DS9 went to the kids club again. He loved it there. I think he spent a lot of time on iPads playing games, so he was happy.

We also had some time at the virtual sports activity. We went up to find it. It’s at the back of the ship, all the way up. We also did the mini golf, but I didn’t take any pictures of that. I did take a picture of the Magic.

I was surprised how much higher we were than the top of that ship.

DD8M fell asleep, so I skipped virtual sporting and headed back to the room. I sat on the balcony while she napped and just enjoyed the sunshine.

 

[RememberWhen]

Wednesday, February 23 cont.

We had scheduled the 4s for BBB, and I asked DS9 if he thought he would like to do it. Originally he said no. But he changed his mind. I couldn’t get the same time as the littles, so his was scheduled for today.

He looked awesome. And he had a really great time. He’s getting so big and I know he’s not going to be up for these dress-up sort of things soon. I’m really glad we made sure to find him a time.

Everyone came back in time to get ready for dinner. It was pirate night! We had bought very adorable shirts for the kids to wear, but DD4 really wanted to be a princess. Oh well.

DS9 could see I was a little disappointed, so he insisted on swapping his knight shirt for his pirate shirt. It was really sweet of him. You can’t see that DD8mo is wearing the same shirt because she has her bib on.

Side note: We bought these disposable bibs for the trip, and they were awesome. I don’t usually like to have a bunch of disposable stuff, but when on vacation it was great. My sisters kept asking if I had an extra because they forgot theirs back in the room. It was so much easier than washing bibs in the sink in the room. Highly recommend.

I think this is the night we watched the Beauty and the Beast show. It was really great. We had awesome seats and the 4s were amazed. It’s the first live show they’ve ever seen. DD8mo was tired and I didn’t want her to disrupt the people around us so I went and stood at the back. She fell asleep and I was able to watch from there.

There were fireworks after dinner and the kids were so excited and totally exhausted.

We watched from our balcony so the kids could be in their pjs and head to bed after.

It was a pretty great end to a really long and awesome day.