Cruising

Back in November Matt and I started thinking about getting a Disney cruise for the girls (and us!) for Christmas.  We’d heard that the ships were booking at half capacity because of Covid, so we figured this was the time to go.  I had a friend who had just gotten back from one and said the covid protocols were kind of strict, but not too bad.  Anybody not vaccinated would just need to get tested 3 days before the cruise, and then everybody gets tested right before boarding the ship. If any of us tested positive, we’d be refused boarding and have to find something else to do with our week in Florida.  We figured it was kind of risky, but what were the chances that in the 2 years since covid started, that would be the week one of us got it?  Little did we know that would be the peak week of the latest variant.  So we booked it.  It was so hard to keep the cruise a secret from the girls for the next month. I was so excited to go and so excited for them.  In the meantime, we were buying swimsuits and flipflops and putting the girls in swim lessons and getting even more excited. We told the girls Christmas morning and they were super excited.  Over the next few weeks as we watched covid and omicron and almost canceled a few times, the girls would say every so often, ‘Thanks for taking us to the beach in a few weeks,’ and use their sweetest smiles. We just couldn’t break their hearts, so we pressed forward. As the cruise neared, we tried to find a testing site for the girls. The cruise started on a Monday, so they had to be tested between Friday and Monday morning, with results uploaded before Monday at noon.  But there were no tests to be had.  The rapid result and at home tests wouldn’t be accepted.  We tried to make appointments at various testing sites, but ran into so many problems. Everybody in Utah was getting tested that week. Literally, CVS and Walgreens had no appointments from Logan to St. George.  Matt even showed up to an appointment (that we had booked) on Friday morning at a testutah site and they turned him away.  We finally got an appointment at CVS Saturday morning (the only available tests in the state that I could find), but had no confidence that we’d get the results in time- they were saying the average result time was 3 days (so, Tuesday), but because of nationwide backlogs that week it was taking longer.  So we made an appointment with a private nursing company that came to our house and tested in the driveway Saturday afternoon.  It was expensive, but we got results two hours later, uploaded them, and were cleared for arrival by Disney by Saturday night.  Worth it.  Sidenote- we got the CVS results the following Sunday, over a week later, after we had gotten home.  What good would that have been to anybody?  Even if it wasn’t for travel, who needs to know that they were or weren’t sick over a week ago?  Anyway, it was a huge relief to know we had cleared that hurdle. But we still didn’t know if we were going on the cruise.  We still had to go through crowded airports and sit on a full plane for a day without catching anything and get tested before we could get on the ship. We flew out Sunday afternoon and got to Orlando way too late at night.  The next morning we got on a shuttle to Port Canaveral.  We were trying really hard not to get too excited.  We knew the chances of heartbreak were too real.  We had backup plans in place and Matt and I promised each other we’d be ok going to Disney parks if we couldn’t go on the cruise.  But we were hoping.  As we got to the port, we saw our ship come into view.  Our ship was the Disney Dream. So pretty. It looked so good.  It was huge, with Mickey ears on the pipes and a big waterslide going around the deck.  Still trying not to get excited.  The shuttle stopped first at the carnival terminal and most of the people got off.  There were just us and 2 other families left.  We all started talking about how nervous we were.  The other 2 were in a facebook group for our cruise.  Apparently, the ship has 4000 capacity, booked 2000, and at this point was down to 1300, with people canceling or getting positive tests before they came.  So if we got onto the ship, it was going to be awesome.  When we got to our ship, we all wished each other luck and got off the shuttle.  Immediately, the porters took our luggage (didn’t even have the option to take it with us to the testing tents) and we were herded into big testing tents.  Each family group got tested together.  We were able to test ourselves and the girls with nasal swabs.  Then we were moved into a different tent and told to wait for results for about an hour.  This tent had a tv screen with a whole bunch of reservation numbers.  As each group’s number came up, it would either say ‘proceed to terminal’ and the group would cheer, or ‘report to Disney consult tent’.  Each group also got a text as their results came in.  About 10% of the reservation numbers on the screen were told to report to consult tent.  I’m guessing they’re the ones that didn’t make it.  I should also say, as we pulled up to the port, there was one family sitting on a bench clearly not getting on a ship. I can only imagine they didn’t pass the test. So sad. Seeing the numbers was pretty stressful.  After about 25 minutes the girls declared they were bored and had to go to the bathroom.  I took them off in search of the toilet trailer.  When we got back, one of the families we had come with was gone and Matt said they had gotten their approval and were boarding the ship.  A couple minutes later the other family jumped up and started celebrating.  Right then, Matt waved his phone at me and smiled.  He had gotten the good news text.  All the stress of weeks melted off.  It was an amazing feeling.  The other family took our picture in front of the terminal and we took theirs and we all headed off to board the ship.  It was kind of like going through security at an airport.  We showed them our IDs and put our bags (we just had our carryon with us) through and everything, and then went through the terminal.  The terminal was basically empty, other than one or two other families.  One of the workers said it’s usually packed when cruises are boarding.  I knew that was a good sign of things to come for our week.  Another worker told us since the porters had taken most of our luggage when we first arrived, it was a good thing we made it.  People who failed the test had to wait 4-6 hours to get their luggage back before they could leave.  That hadn’t even occurred to me, but what a nightmare. As we boarded the ship, they’d let 7-8 families through the door at a time, announce us as we came through the door, then have us stand on a specific spot in the main entrance room, and then Minnie and Mickey came and welcomed us and had a quick dance party. Then they gave each family a designated area where we met a couple of employees. The employees helped us set up the Disney cruise app, which helped us navigate all the onboard activities, dining, etc for the week, and then we set off in search of our room. We had a room with a verandah, which was awesome.  It was nice to be able to go outside and take in the views.  And since Disney is made for families, the bathroom was actually a good size.  There was one small room with a toilet and sink and another with a full size bathtub and a sink.  Way better than other cruises.  Our room had a living room area with a couch that turned into a bunk bed and faced the tv, and a queen bed. It was great. We wandered the ship for a little bit, and eventually realized the ship was moving. We didn’t even feel it moving. We just saw the dock getting farther away. As we left port, the ship horn played, ‘When you wish upon a star’. All week, Disney music was piped through the hallways and we’d always see if we could tell which movie it was from.  Once a day the captain would come on a loudspeaker to make announcements about our location, weather, etc. Before he came on, the ship’s horn would play a few measures from various Disney songs again.  We heard Let It Go, When You Wish Upon a Star (again) and a few others. We had second seating at dinner, at 8:05.  This made for some very long days with the girls, and most nights they were dragging, sometimes even putting their heads on the tables, but our waiters were great.  Each night we would rotate to a new restaurant, and our waiters went with us.  The first night we were in the Enchanted Garden.  It was modeled after the gardens at Versailles. It looked like a garden tea party.  Our waiters were Surya from Indonesia and Jose from Peru.  Surya did magic tricks for the girls and Jose made origami frogs and flowers.  It was so fun.  By the end of the first dinner Tille was doing magic tricks for them also.  Partway through dinner Mickey, Minnie, and Goofy showed up and sang and danced and said hi to everybody. It was really fun. Matt and I both had really great dinners, but about halfway through, Surya brought out another full dinner (Chilean sea bass on risotto) and said we had to try it because it was the best.  We were dumbfounded.  We were already stuffed and now had another dinner to eat.  But he was right.  It was amazing. Then he brought an extra dessert.  So good.  Most nights he brought an extra dinner or dessert and we just went with it because he knew what was good.  The second and third nights we were in the Royal Palace, modeled after where Belle and the Beast had their fancy dinner. It had fancy chandeliers and portraits of all the princesses and a pianist playing Disney songs in the middle. That night the princesses came through and waved at everybody. The third night was pirate night on the ship. All the waiters were dressed as pirates and a pirate came and sang and danced and extra performers came and danced and caused a scene throughout the restaurant and we all got bandanas to tie on our heads. The last night we were in the Animators Palette restaurant.  It was decorated with illustrations from a bunch of Disney movies, and the columns holding up the ceiling were huge paintbrushes.  The coolest thing is that there were big computer screens on the walls where Crush the sea tortoise from Finding Nemo would come talk to the people at the nearby tables.  He asked Tille her name, how old she was, where she was from, etc., and he interacted with all her answers.  It was super cool.  The second night, Surya asked if either girl had a magic trick for him, and Tille said she did, and from that he knew she was Tille. I was amazed. From then on, he could tell them apart. Our waiters were so good! And they always knew what the girls would want and if Matt and I would be ok with them having it. Seriously great service! When we got back to our room after dinner, the couch had been turned into a bunk bed and we had a towel teddy bear on our bed.  The girls watched a movie for a little bit and then fell asleep and slept great all night.  When we woke up in the morning, we could see Nassau not too far off.  We went to breakfast in the Royal Palace and had a slow morning.  We couldn’t take the girls off the ship because they aren’t vaccinated, so we had the ship to ourselves.  We hung out in the pool with the other little kids that couldn’t leave.  There was a water slide that went all around the top of the ship. There was a movie screen in front of the swimming pools so we could hang out in the pool all day and watch movies.  They only allowed 12 people in the pool at a time, for 10 minutes at a time, but it wasn’t a problem.  With the ship at 1/3 capacity, and most of the ship gone to Nassau for the day, we’d play in the pool for 10 minutes, then play in the splashpad for a while (nice heated water), then back to the pool, and so on.  In the afternoon the girls went to the kids’ club for a couple hours.  They loved it.  We just dropped them off and they played games, did crafts, and we don’t know what else.  We never got good answers from them.  But they had a blast.  Matt and I went to a movie theater and watched Shang Chi. Afterwards, we picked up the girls, grabbed some ice cream cones and fruit bowls, watched a bit of the movie by the pool, then back to our room for a quick rest.  That night before dinner we went to see a live performance of Beauty and the Beast.  It would be the girls’ first chance to see a live play, and we figured it’d be pretty good.  It was AMAZING!  The set was so cool, the costumes were great, the props were incredible, the songs were the same as the broadway play. So good!  I kind of wonder if the puppets they used for the candlestick, clock, and teapot might have been used in the live action movie.  They were so cool.  They actually looked alive.  Seriously so good.  After the show we had just enough time to go take pictures with some princesses before dinner.  We got to meet princesses every night before dinner and they were always great.  They never even acknowledged Matt or me.  They were completely focused on the girls, and were completely in character. They weren’t actors on a cruise ship.  They were princesses in a magic land talking to two little princesses.  It was so cool how they could draw Hattie and Tille out of their shyness and into conversation. The third day when we woke up we could see Castaway Cay off in the distance.  This is an island in the Bahamas that Disney has leased for 100 years.  Since it’s all Disney, we could go ashore here.  We ate breakfast, packed our beach bag, and went to the beach!  It was so nice!  The girls wanted to go to the kids club again (they had one on the beach, with a splashpad and other outside activities), so we dropped them off for a couple of hours and Matt and I rented some bikes and rode around some trails.  The island isn’t huge, but the trails just went along one side of the island.  One end of the trail took us to a lookout tower.  It went up about two stories so we could see over the whole island, and there wasn’t much there.  Other than some semi-permanent shacks that Disney has built for lunch and bathrooms, there was nothing on the whole island.  Just a few trees and a lot of island plants.  The other end of the trail took us to a shady little viewpoint looking out on the ocean.  We rode up to the 18 and older beach, and then back to the family beach.  I think if the ship was at full capacity, the beach would be packed, but as it was, it was great.  We found an area with lots of empty beach chairs and set up camp.  They had a rack of lifejackets for anybody to use and there was a playground offshore a little ways for kids to play on- too big for our kids, but other kids were having a blast.  And life guards all over.  It was such a great set up.  Half way through the day we could smell lunch wafting through the island, and we went and got chicken, burgers, hot dogs, salad, cookies, fruit, etc., all included as part of the ship’s food.  That night our waiters asked if we had seen them, but we hadn’t.  They hadn’t seen us either, but we were all at the same place (there were a few lunch places scattered around the beaches, but they said they were at the same one as us).  During lunch one of the workers came and talked to us for a while.  He has twin boys at home and was telling us some of the cool things he’s noticed about twins.  It was fun to be in such a laid back environment where everybody was free to chat about whatever.  The rest of the day we just played in the water and soaked in the sun.  The water was perfectly clear.  It was a little too cold to just plunge in, but good for wading, but to be at a beach in January was fantastic.  There were fish swimming all around us, swarms of tiny baby fish and every so often a big fish would come right up to us.  And there were tons of really cool sea shells in all shapes and colors.  Before we left on the cruise we had watched some online videos about Disney cruises and the girls saw that on Castaway Cay they could buy frozen drinks in souvenir Olaf cups.  That’s what they were most looking forward to.  So we had to do that before we left.  We found the Olaf shack on our way back to the ship and bought 2 smoothies in souvenir cups.  We walked a little ways down the sidewalk to a bench to drink them and not too long later one of the cups had spilled all over the sidewalk.  Before we knew it, the guy who had made the drinks was right in front of us taking the cup back and saying he’d make a new one.  That’s an example of how amazing the service was!  They saw every need and filled it without us even thinking to ask.  So so good.   Oh, one last detail about the island- when we went to rent the bikes, there were two people working the rental shack: a girl from Connecticut and a guy (Boston) from the UK.  Matt gave the guy a really hard time about Brittains, teasing him about their food and the revolutionary war and everything else.  It was all in good fun and the guy was really funny. Back on the ship, we gave the girls a bath and did their hair in anticipation of their being exhausted by the time we got back from dinner. Then we all relaxed for a while.  That night before dinner there was a dance party on the pool deck and then a fireworks show.  I think it was the girls’ first fireworks show, because they’re always in bed by the time fireworks start at home.  It was pretty cool to see fireworks over the ocean.  Then there was some more dancing led by the entertainment crew (one of whom was Boston from the bike rental).  It was so much fun. Then we hurried off to dinner and crashed for the night.  Super fun day. The next day we had a relaxing pool day. It was our last day on the ship and we wanted to let the girls rest a little.  We played in the pool and splashpad for a while, and then had lunch on the deck overlooking the ocean.  Then it was time to get cleaned up so the girls could go to their last kids club.  While they were there, Matt and I found a quiet sunny spot on one of the decks and baked for a while.  While we were sitting there, Boston and another entertainer walked by.  Matt yelled out, ‘oy, gov’nah!’, and they stopped and chatted for a while.  The other guy was also from the UK. We asked them all kinds of questions, like what’s it like to work on a cruise, what’s their schedule like, etc., and they were super honest. It was pretty interesting.  The other guy (I don’t remember his name) asked us if we minded him shaking our dinner table the night before.  I asked what he was talking about, and he said he was dressed as a pirate during the pirate dinner party and he had come by and grabbed and shook our table really hard.  I was super impressed that he recognized us from the hundreds of people he must have seen (specially since we didn’t have the girls with us when he was talking to us).  Again, great service levels.  I didn’t remember, but Matt said he did. After we picked up the girls, we got some ice cream cones, then bought special treats in Venelope’s treat shop (looked like Candy Rush from Wreck It Ralph), and then went to our room to chill for a while.  One last bath and movie in our room, and then another live musical play.  This one was called Believe, and had songs from a bunch of different Disney movies.  It also heavily featured the Genie from Aladdin, and he was great.  It was a lot of fun, and the girls loved it.  A couple times, I looked over and Tille was dancing along in her chair. After the show we hurried to meet some more princesses and then went to dinner.  Then back to our room for one last exhausted night.  The next morning we had to kind of hurry out of our room.  We went to breakfast and then had to leave.  I was really sad to leave the ship.  It was such a great time, the people were all so nice and attentive, and the weather was perfect.  I definitely wasn’t ready to go back to winterland.  Luckily, we still had one last day in Florida.  We rented a car and went back to Orlando.  Before we had flown out to Florida we were looking at back-up plans in case we didn’t make it onto the ship, and Matt found tickets to Sea World that included a dining option.  So we got a hotel across the street from Sea World and went there.  The weather couldn’t have been better for the day.  It was about 70 degrees and sunny.  Even though the hotel was just across the street, it was a busy street and the entrance to the park was actually about a mile away, so we had to take a shuttle (the girls were super low on energy and we didn’t want to waste any on unnecessary walking).  The shuttle ended up being exactly one hour late. We stood outside our hotel waiting and waiting.  There was another family waiting with us and we got talking to them.  They were pretty cool. They were visiting from Miami and the dad was a police but interested in real estate.  He ended up exchanging numbers with Matt and said we should move to Florida and stay in touch. We finally made it to Sea World and had fun.  We saw flamingoes, dolphins, penguins, stingrays, cow face rays, manatees, sea turtles, and lots more.  I really wanted to see the orca and dolphin shows, but they were early in the day or late in the afternoon and they didn’t work out for our timing.  So we spent most of our time in Sesame Street land.  It’s a corner of Sea World designed to look just like Sesame Street, complete with the laundromat, Hooper’s Store, Gonger and Cookie Monster’s food truck, and Oscar’s trash can.  And it had a bunch of little kid rides that the girls loved.  We went on each of them a few times, and they were actually pretty good.  I think we would have had just as good a day hanging out in the pool at the hotel, but it was still fun to go to Sea World.  The next day we had to face reality and fly back to the cold.  By my second day back at work, I was sliding on icy roads all the way.  And I spent that whole day trying not to book another cruise.  We had such a great time.  And we are seriously considering going on another Disney cruise in a few years.  Disney really knows how to make a great time for all ages.  It was amazing.