3-night Cruise on the Disney Dream & WDW - Day 4 - Sea Day, or perhaps we can try Castaway Cay?
Sea Day, or perhaps we can try Castaway Cay?
I woke up at 6:15 AM, made my way to the bathroom and changed into my running costume. I quietly snuck out of the room and made my way to deck 4 where I ran the track as the sun rose. What a beautiful morning! I watched a crew member emerge from a door, throw her arms wide and exclaim “Ah, SUN!!!” I stopped and returned her grin and enjoyment of the beautiful morning. I finished up a little after 7 and made my way up to deck 11 for a snack before waking up Emmaline and Roger at 7:45.
I couldn’t figure out what was going on. It was an amazing sunny day and the water looked great. Not too much wind. I had a good feeling. But our approach was incredibly slow and I saw CC, but it was far far in the distance. By 8:00, I was starting to wonder what the plan was. The day before, our all ashore time was 8:30 and I knew we needed to already be there if we were going to do that. But as we ate breakfast, we could see we were slowly making our way. Finally, while we were finishing breakfast, at around 8:45 we started backing in and once we were in, everyone outside at Cabana’s cheered. We made it!
For the first time ever, we had booked an excursion at CC. Of course, it had been automatically canceled the day before and I wasn’t sure what was going to happen with it now that we were able to dock. We were supposed to do the walking and kayak tour of the island from 9-12. The ship wasn’t even cleared and it was coming up on 9:00. Finally, at 9:30 the ship was cleared to go ashore and we were told we would have an extra hour there (5:30 all aboard time, vs. 4:30). I chatted the Port Adventures team in the app to see if they could tell us what was up. They said that we would have to check in once on the island. That sounded super up in the air and we weren’t sure what to do. Roger suggested maybe we rent some bikes instead. That sounded good to all of us!
We took our time getting ready and went ashore around 10:15, making it to the bike rental kiosk around 10:30. There was a lot of standing water on the island and lots of palm fronds were down. People were cleaning up and still working on getting things sorted out from the storm. As we walked toward the tram stop, we saw a sign that said all the excursions were canceled. I imagine they just couldn’t get all the excursion operators over from Abaco on a Sunday when they had all been prepared to work on a Saturday instead.
Bike rental was for an hour “island time” so they didn’t actually care when we returned them (in fact, nobody actually paid attention to who we were when we returned them). But an hour was really enough to leisurely tool around and see everything. The bike course basically makes almost the same path as the 5k route (with a little extra thrown in) so we did that route, which Roger and I had both done in the CC5k (he’s done it two or three times and I’ve done it once). We all had a lot of fun riding bikes and we were all definitely glad we chose to do that.
We went to “Cookies, Too” for lunch, which was meh. We all lamented how good the food was at Coco Cay (Royal Caribbean’s private island) and wished DCL could step up that game. The cookies are good, though, and the soft serve on the island is somehow superior to the soft serve on the ship. I’ve heard one theory that it’s because it sits in the machines for longer before serving up so it’s nice and cold and solid.
After lunch, we went back to the nearly empty ship where we changed into our swimwear and went up to the pool deck where we looped the Aquaduck a few times before swimming and watching “Ralph Breaks the Internet” on the funnel vision. When we had our fill of sun, we went back to the room and showed and began to pack up. By 3:30 it was time for a coffee and snack break and the ship was starting to fill up with people again. After our snack, we went back to the room and finished packing up everything else we wouldn’t need for the rest of the evening so we could set out our luggage. 3-night cruises just fly by!
The show for the last night was “Believe” which we had seen before, but not since being on the Dream 8 years ago, so it was nice to see it again. It’s a good show in line with “Disney Dreams” but it was nice to see something different. After the show, before dinner, they decided that they were going to show fireworks since we missed them the day before. At 8 PM. When it was still light out.
This…didn’t work. And the whole pirate part of the show felt sort of weird and truncated. They tried, they really did, but it just didn’t work, and fireworks during the day are pretty lackluster. Emmaline was particularly put off by the brown smoke left behind from each firework. “The smoke is BROWN!? I never knew that! It looks awful!” Yeah, it was not great. Ah well. It was beyond anyone’s control.
After that, it was time for dinner. Dinner our final night was in Animator’s Palate which is cute, but I much prefer the version on the Classics. There’s just something about watching those animation drawings come to life and when Mickey comes in and the room lights up, it’s just so magical. The menu is the same so of course I had to get two helpings of the black truffle pasta purseittes. Yum! And the vegetarian meal was actually better than I remembered it being so that was nice.
After dinner, we (finally) finished our game of Midship Detective Agency and then went back to the room and finished getting everything ready for the next morning. We had to get up early. Even though we had second seating, we had to make arrangements to go to the first seating breakfast because they told us we needed to be off the ship at 8:15 AM for a 9:00 AM departure on our bus to go to our WDW resort. So we set the alarm for extra early.
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