Trip Report ***COMPLETED*** Girls Just Wanna Have Sun ☀️

Hello friends, and welcome to my second trip report! I enjoyed writing my Disneyland TR so much that I’m back again to report on my next adventure! Let’s hop right into it!

What: A Disney CRUISE! 🙌🏼 I haven’t been on a cruise since 2004 (I was 13!), and I haven’t been on a Disney Cruise since my family cruised on the Wonder wayyyy back in 2002 (the Wonder was the newest ship back then!). Followed by one night at WDW.

When: Leaving GA the afternoon of 2/13, boarding the Dream for 3 nights on 2/14, in WDW 2/17-2/18.

Where: Nassau, Castaway Cay, and Port Orleans French Quarter (my favorite Moderate and one of my very favorite resorts!)

Who: You may already know me - Katie. I’m a Georgia Peach, WDW AP, and wife to my best friend and Disney adventure partner, Jason.

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Joining me are my mom (we’ll call her...Mom), baby sister A, and sister-in-law M (married to my brother D). I couldn’t find a pic of all four of us together, so here are a few pics with a mix of us in them.

A, M, and I on Thanksgiving a couple years ago
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A, Mom, and I at the Biltmore Estate this past summer...we’re definitely related 😂
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My brother D, M, J, and I on our way to MNSSHP 2018...J doesn’t do costumes 🙄
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Mom and I in Central Park this past April
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Fun fact: M and I are sorority sisters (for those of you who are familiarized with the whole sorority family tree thing...she is my Grand-Little). She and I met at a sorority event a couple years after I had graduated, when she was a freshman and my brother D was a sophomore. We figured out that she and D were in the same Lit class, and she said she was going to introduce herself to him the next class...3 years later, they got married. You’re welcome, D!

This will be my second Disney Cruise, Mom’s fourth, and M and A’s first. A was a baby when we went on our first Disney Cruise back in 2002, so she stayed with our grandparents.
 
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k8einwdw

Well-Known Member
Original Poster
Not going on this trip? J. 😭 Since this is a girls trip, he was not invited for the cruise portion of the trip (to be fair...Mom said he and D could get their own stateroom, but J refuses to get on a cruise). I tried to convince J to drive down on 2/18 to meet me in WDW to extend our trip together, but he didn’t want to make the 7-hour drive by himself. This trip (5 nights) will be the longest we’ve been apart in our 6 years of marriage. 😭 We spent the first couple years of our relationship long-ish distance while I was finishing college, and often went weeks at a time without seeing each other. Since we’ve been married, the longest we’ve spent apart was 4 nights while Mom and I were in NY in April.

We planned this trip for a couple reasons. 1) Mom has been wanting to do a girls’ trip for a while, but wanted to wait until A was old enough to access the adults-only areas on the ship/Castaway Cay. A just turned 18 in December, and has a break from school for Presidents Day, so here we are! 2) A is graduating from high school in May, so this is also in celebration of that. She’ll be moving away to college 😭 so there’s no telling when the next opportunity for a girls’ trip will be.

Now, for a run-down of our plans. Mom and M are off work on Thursday 2/13, and I am taking a half day, so I’ll be off at noon and have time to go home, wash my hair in the non-Florida water, and finish up some packing before heading to my parents’ house in time to meet the gang to leave when A gets home from school. We’ll be driving as far Valdosta (a stone’s throw from the Florida line) that night, and driving the rest of the way to Port Canaveral the morning of 2/14. We hope to board the Dream around 1:00 - Mom is the seasoned Disney Cruise veteran, and said it’s best not to board *too* early since you can’t get to your stateroom yet and there are tons of people puttering around waiting for their rooms to be ready.

Speaking of staterooms, we are staying in a Category 04B Deluxe Family Oceanview Stateroom w/ Verandah. This particular category has 4 beds - the queen, the couch bed, the pull-down bunk above the couch, and a pull-down by the door to the verandah. So everyone gets their own bed! 🙌🏼 Now, four girls sharing one bathroom for 5 nights will be the real challenge. 😂

Our cruise will stop at Nassau on 2/15, where none of us have plans to disembark. We’d all rather enjoy an empty ship! We have passes for the Rainforest Room that day, and we’re hoping to score a Palo Brunch reservation 🤞🏼. On 2/16, we’ll be in Castaway Cay, enjoying the adults-only beach! On 2/17, we’ll disembark and head to WDW for one night. J and I haven’t been in WDW since September, so I’m excited to have even just one night there! We’ll be staying at POFQ, having Afternoon Tea at the Grand Floridian, spending some time in Disney Springs, and having dinner at ‘Ohana! I’m also planning to sneak over to Epcot to get my AP magnet for Festival of the Arts, and I may have made a couple FastPasses for while I’m there. 🤫

We started planning this trip AGES ago, but it’s hard to believe we’ll be on the ship two weeks from now! I’ve been so busy with a new position at work and planning our Disneyland trip that it really feels like this trip snuck up on me. I haven’t started packing yet, but I do have a packing pile started in the corner of our bedroom, so that’s a start! I’m so excited to be going on this trip, and I’m excited to take you all with me!
 

k8einwdw

Well-Known Member
Original Poster
One week from now, we’ll be on our way to Port Canaveral!



Our door magnet came in the mail on Monday! It’s already stashed with some other cruise stuff, so I’ll share a screenshot of the Etsy listing - I thought this was perfect for a girls’ cruise!

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It has been a super stressful month at work, so I am SO ready to sail away from my troubles!
 

DimpledDevil18

Well-Known Member
Hope that you enjoy your trip! A girls only cruise sounds amazing, but I don't think my Dad would make it being away from my Mom for longer than a night lol! I've never cruised before and my Mom is dead set against it so I guess I'll just live vicariously through you.

I can't believe you got all that snow in GA! I'm in NY and knock on wood it has been a very mild winter snow wise. We haven't gotten more than two or three inches if that.
 

k8einwdw

Well-Known Member
Original Poster
And Woody and I unexpectedly got caught in it!

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Yikes! Beautiful to look at, but I’m not a fan of driving in it!
Ha, don’t even need a fridge!
I'd like to be clear about the "like" I gave your post, it was for the beer not the snow. I'm a little sick of snow here in Wisconsin. ;):)
Snow is a rare treat here, I don’t think we got any last winter! Thankfully it was all starting to melt away by the afternoon. I couldn’t live in the Midwest - one snow a year is enough for me!
 

k8einwdw

Well-Known Member
Original Poster
Hope that you enjoy your trip! A girls only cruise sounds amazing, but I don't think my Dad would make it being away from my Mom for longer than a night lol! I've never cruised before and my Mom is dead set against it so I guess I'll just live vicariously through you.

I can't believe you got all that snow in GA! I'm in NY and knock on wood it has been a very mild winter snow wise. We haven't gotten more than two or three inches if that.
Ha! Mom and I both travel for work, so our husbands are used to making it without us. We’ll see how my brother does without M. I think we ended up getting 3-ish inches of snow? It all started melting by the afternoon, thankfully - love looking at the snow, don’t love driving in it!
 

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