9-night Southern Caribbean Cruise on the Disney Fantasy Day 11 - Disembarkation and Orlando

Saturday July 30 - Disembarkation and Orlando

The theme for the morning ended up being “hurry up and wait.” The Fantasy pulled into Port Canaveral around 6:30 AM and the ship was cleared at around 7:30. We got ourselves up and dressed and finished packing the last of our things before one last meal with our wonderful servers. 

We said goodbye and made a final bathroom break before heading for the gangway. We tapped our cards one last time, moved into the gangway and stopped. And waited. And waited. Then we saw someone being taken off in a stretcher from the medical center on deck 1 into a waiting ambulance. I hope they are okay. It seems that they had halted everyone until that was sorted out. They were probably trying to avoid any type of congestion outside the port until the ambulance was away. It was about a 20 minute wait (there was a surprising lack of urgency so that makes me hopeful that it wasn’t too terribly serious).

Finally we were moving again and retrieved our luggage and waited in a very long customs line. It moved at a fairly okay pace, but it was still a lot of waiting. Then we got outside and found the place where the rental car shuttle was going to pick up and there was a line and that meant more waiting. And waiting. And waiting. And finally the group in front of us decided to get on the Disney bus to the airport because they were only renting a car to drive directly to the airport which seemed like not the best option to me. Then the people in front of them decided to take a Lyft to the rental car place because it was taking too long so we started looking into a Lyft, but the app kept saying there really weren’t any cars and I kept waiting for it to match up and then the rental car bus arrived. 

We barely got onto the rental shuttle and then we arrived at the car rental building and there was, you guessed it, a big line! So I went inside to wait while Roger and Emmaline waited outside. I went inside and it was hotter inside than out. Their A/C was out and the thermostat literally said it was 97 degrees inside (it was cooler than that outside). The people behind me were practically crawling up my backside and I made sure my KN95 was fitted properly and thought to myself, “this right here is where I catch Covid.” 

We finally got a rental car and were on the road around 11:15 which was much later than we anticipated. We drove to Orlando and found some lunch and then went to the outlets to try to check out the Character Warehouse (said to be full of heavily discounted Disney merch). It was MOBBED. There were people and cars everywhere. Parking was non-existent and we knew that even if we could find a spot, the whole place would be teeming with people and we just weren’t feeling like we wanted to be around that many people so we skipped. 

From there we drove about another hour out to Lakeland, Florida to visit the Florida Air Museum which houses the Air Show Hall of Fame. My father’s former squadron, the Red Baron Stearman Squadron, was inducted some years back. There is a Red Baron Stearman biplane hanging from the ceiling and my dad’s flight suit and helmet are on display alongside a photo and little blurb about him. There’s also a video that plays on a little screen in the exhibit. We spent some time looking around and chatted with a nice volunteer docent there. I told him about my dad’s book and he sounded excited to check it out. It was really cool to see, especially the fight suit, for some reason. I felt very emotional. But it felt like a really nice bookend to the recent celebration of life honoring my father.

We left there and made our way back to Orlando and checked into Bay Lake Tower. We sort of regrouped, unpacked what we would need and repacked things that we sort of hastily packed as a result of the way the cruise luggage system works. 

Then we went over to the Contemporary for dinner at Steakhouse 71. Roger and Emmaline enjoyed steaks and I loved the plant-based vegetable Wellington. We were all stuffed so we decided to forgo dessert and went back to the room to regroup before trying to go up to the Top of the World to watch the fireworks over at Magic Kingdom. The system there is new and I wasn’t clear on how the whole thing works and we didn’t do it correctly so they wouldn’t let us up. We ended up watching them from the walkway between Contemporary and BLT, which actually wasn’t bad at all. They piped the music over and everything. (And “Happily Ever After” is still better. I said what I said.) 

We went back to the room and got ready for bed while we waited for the Electrical Water Pageant to come by. (We had a Lake View room.) Roger agreed with Emmaline and my assessment that it’s cheesy but nostalgic. We finished packing for our flight home in the morning and then went to bed. 

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