travels, races, and other musings

Debarkation, Disney World, and Final Thoughts And just like that, it was time to get off the ship. We were a little later than we should have been leaving the room. Everyone was cranky and grumpy and discombobulated (as seems to be par for the course on disembarkation day) but we made it to breakfast and our serving team already had us a table ready. We finished breakfast and disembarked the ship, found our luggage and then waited on the bus to depart for 45 minutes. Sigh.  Beach Club was the second stop (first stop was Boardwalk) and we gave our bags to bell services (after a little bit of rearranging) and then walked over to Epcot. I’m not going to continue through the all the details of the Disney World trip (there are enough of those trip reports, but I’ll throw out a few tidbits from our time there). Pro tip: one family on our bus was slated for the very last of 5 stops. Instead of going through all the stops, they got off at the first stop (Boardwalk) with the plan to transfe...

 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 ou...

 Castaway Cay  Sea Day! The plan was to get up at 7:15, get breakfast at Cabanas at 7:30, go back to the room and regroup, and then be at Marge’s Barges for our Walking and Kayak Port Adventure at 9:00. As we anticipated, the weather had other plans and so ours changed too. I woke up at 7:15 and I could feel the ship rocking, and hear the rain pelting and the wind howling. I knew pretty much instantly we weren’t docking. So we sort of relaxed in bed for a little while before we got ourselves up to breakfast. On the way to breakfast a lady in the elevator said, “That was an insane storm last night wasn’t it?! Lightning and thunder and wind!” All three of us just sort of stared at her. We slept through the whole thing. We were wrapping up breakfast around 8:30 when Captain Jason came over the speakers and gave us the news that we wouldn’t be docking. I figured. But the people in their swimsuits at the table next to us looked absolutely dejected. I really felt badly for them. He ...

Embarkation We woke up at 6:30 AM (not that anyone wanted to) and got ready to go. We packed up and headed out the door with our luggage to make our way back to the Hospitality House. As we were walking to the bus stop a guy on a luggage type golf cart rolled up and said our name (well, he said it wrong, but he said it the way everyone always says it wrong and we knew what he meant). He said he was there to pick up our luggage. “Did you not get the letter?” Well, yes, but I ignored it because the automated phone thing that told us what to do. However, I guess I should have read it because the phone message didn’t tell us that. So he said he would take us up to the Hospitality House along with our bags, which was nice. We ate some breakfast and waited (because we had allocated a bunch of time to deal with buses and baggage). The DCL rep found us while we were finishing breakfast. Apparently our photos that we had uploaded at check-in are in her little app. She was super nice and just to...

Intro/Travel to Orlando It’s time again for a Disney vacation. We truly love vacationing with Disney and especially with Disney Cruise Line. So much so that we booked a cruise on the all-new Wish! It was to be on the third sailing (a 3-night) and we paired it with a WDW vacation afterwards, using some of our DVC points to stay after the cruise and hit the parks. And then, unfortunately, the Wish was delayed and the cruise was canceled. So we put together a Plan B. We rebooked with a 3-night on the Dream and I was able to move our hotel reservation to our new dates. Phew! We will have to wait until next year for the Wish.  We haven’t sailed the Dream since 2014. In fact, the Dream was our very first DCL cruise and we did a 3-night followed by WDW on that vacation as well! It’s funny, actually, that I finished up that trip report with a statement that amounted to “yah, cruising was fine, I guess, but we won’t do it that often.” Well, we haven’t missed a year since! This is DCL cruise...