Cocoa Beach, Royal Caribbean Cruise and WDW vacation - Day 5 - CocoCay

CocoCay

Royal Caribbean’s private island of CocoCay certainly looked amazing when I woke up in the morning and went to have a look. Regrettably, our port side stateroom did not look out onto the island, but at the sea instead. I made my way to decks 12 and 13 to get a better look and snap some photos.



We got changed, ate breakfast in Windjammer and went ashore as soon as possible. In advance of our sailing, I had purchased all day waterpark passes for us to enjoy the waterpark. Let me pause here to talk about things that cost extra on Royal. There are some thing that are extra that I don’t mind paying extra for: specialty coffee, upcharge restaurants, bottled water, alcohol, and tickets to a water park that cost $250 million dollars to build. That said, I don’t want to be bombarded with these things and I do feel that I was. Before our sailing, I received emails nearly daily about adding on to our trip with these extras. Once onboard the ship, every time we entered Windjammer, someone was trying to sell us on dining in an upcharge venue that night. It was annoying and over the top. I also felt like the soda being extra is stupid. I’m not a huge soda drinker and I don’t drink it at all at home, but sometimes, having a few sips of coke mid-afternoon is a nice treat. It’s inexpensive sugar water, just include it already.

So we’re back at the water park and we decide to start with the body slides. At Devil’s Peak there are six different slides, the tallest one being the tallest water slide in North America. We started small with the two shortest slides. They were pretty ho hum. We weren’t interested in the next two, they were drop slides, where the floor drops out from underneath you. Been there, done that. That’s a NOPE. So we climbed all the way to the very top of the tower so the red slide. The tallest slide. There was already a long line forming and we waited about 20-30 minutes and I’m here to tell you that even though the floor doesn’t drop out from under you, that sucker is FAST. It was the fastest slide I’ve ever been on. It was terrifying at times and fun at times and long. I didn’t get a good photo of the slides, so here’s one courtesy of Royal Caribbean. The two tamest slides are the pink and green. Then there’s the blue plunge one in the middle (we didn’t do that one, it’s just a big drop that made everyone’s swim suit got up their butt at the end) and then there are the yellow and blue floor drop out slides in the middle and then the crazy long fast red one that goes all the way from the top.



We decided we were one and done with that slide so we wound our way over to the “Family Tower” where they had a variety of different tube slides. This is where we spent most of the day until the lines started getting long, then Emmaline wanted to hit up the Adventure Pool which had a foam lily pad obstacle course, a small (and extremely slippery) rock climbing wall and some little tiny rope swings that swung into the pool. We hung out for awhile and watched her play before we decided to seek out lunch.

We made our way out of the water park area and into another section of the island to their lunch buffer Skipper’s Grill. There were some other snack areas around, but they didn’t have any vegetarian options and were also not very extensive with their menus. The spread of food was huge and there were a lot of really amazing choices. I’ve always felt like the food at Castaway Cay (DCL’s island) was pretty meh and I will say the food at Skipper’s Grill was really tasty. I really enjoyed the taco bar as well as fresh salads and fruits. If they could just put that food somewhere on the ship for afternoon snacking, I’d be all set.

After lunch, Roger went back to the ship to rest and Emmaline and I made our way to the Oasis Lagoon pool. The pool was huge with lots of areas to swim and Emmaline and I swam and played together. After awhile, we decided to get out and check out the beach. So we hopped on a tram and made our way to one of the beach areas of the island. It’s not a huge island and in the end we could have walked, but it was nice to have a little ride. The beach was really beautiful but many areas of CocoCay are marred by the large number of smoking areas - 12 in all. There are so many smoking areas, that it was actually hard to avoid all of them and was really annoying. The other not as nice thing about CocoCay is that they didn’t do a good job separating the infrastructure of the island (crew lodgings, water treatment, storage, etc.) and all those buildings are just sort of right there next to all the public recreation areas. At Castaway Cay, behind the scenes is truly behind the scenes. There’s nothing in evidence as all that points to the inner workings of the island. Something I’ve always appreciated about Disney. I know it’s all an illusion, but it’s still nice to not have a bunch of ugly infrastructure staring at you while you lounge on a beautiful beach.




We didn’t spend much time at the beach, instead making our way back over to the pool, then eventually back over to the Skipper’s Grill for some snacks before they were set to close at 3 PM. After our snacks, we ventured back over to the Family Tower slides where the lines were starting to come down. We had a weird incident of getting stuck and almost flipping over in one of the family rafts that was actually sort of scary and was witnessed by a lifeguard who pulled us aside after and we spoke with him, then his boss, then her boss and her boss as well before it was all over. We avoided that slide the rest of the day. The lines were super short at the very end of the day so we kept sliding, but eventually we were exhausted and still needed to shower and start packing to disembark the following morning so we made our way back onboard.

After showering, I started getting us packed up, which was sort of tricky because I needed to pack stuff that Roger would be taking home when we split up the next day, but also pack in such a way that we could keep one carry on with us with the stuff we would need for overnight since we needed to put our luggage out in the hallway. I think I unpacked and repacked about three times, eventually getting everything more or less sorted out, but there would still need to be some sorting the following day.

The show that night was some kind of comedian or juggler, or juggling comedian, I don’t know, but it wasn’t until 10:15 and I wasn’t risking that again, not when we had to get up crazy early to be off the ship. Apparently others didn’t share my sentiments because after dinner when I went to guest services to adjust gratuities, the party people were starting to come out again and I was reminded of Roger commenting on the first day that he saw some people wearing “boozing and cruising” shirts. I think many, many of the travelers sailing with us were perhaps not really our crowd.

I have to say, though, CocoCay is really nice with really great food. The waterpark is super fun, assuming you go very early or very late in the day. As private islands go, I think I prefer CocoCay slightly to Castaway Cay in terms of things to do and food, but Castaway Cay is definitely more beautiful and has a more family friendly vibe to it.