After saying a tearful goodbye to our beautiful room at the Polynesian, we headed up to the Main House to eat breakfast at Kona Cafe. I love this place for breakfast. They have Tonga Toast (banana stuffed french toast), Macadamia nut pancakes, Lilikoi juice and Kona Pressed Pot coffee. SO delicious. Here is Amanda, mom and Bells after our sugar rush of a breakfast.
Then we headed out to meet our bus to go to the port and our ship!
Isabella fell asleep on the bus. We hadn't taken a nap the day before and a full day at the parks is a loooong day for a 3 year old.
I have been on a lot of different cruise lines, but never upon entering the ship have they asked my party's name, and introduced us to the entire ship as 'Welcoming now the Trent party!'. What a nice way to start! They then hand you off to a person who tells you where your room is and tells you when it will be ready and what is available while you are waiting for your room to be ready. SUCH great service.
They told us where to find food and let us know that Donald was up on the balcony if we wanted to meet him. Isabella was SO excited, so off we went.
The rooms were really nice compared to others I have seen. Cruise rooms are small in general, but these were definitely bigger than the Royal Caribbean balcony room we had the year before, and there was a curtain that closed the bedroom part off completely from the couch/tv area.
Once again with the towel animals. Love it!
I had told Isabella that they let you order milk and cookies from room service before bed, so we had to do that!
Our first day we stopped at Nassau. That is where Jason and I went for our honeymoon and we only had four days so I didn't want to get off the ship. But we had a pretty sweet view of the Atlantis from our balcony!
Isabella claimed the top bunk the first night. We were a little hesitant to let her have it, but she LOVED it and had no problems falling off or anything.
One of the great things about the Disney cruises, is that there are characters everywhere all the time. So your kids aren't waiting in line for an hour to meet one princess like they would in the park. They have dance parties with characters, meet and greet times all day, and Isabella met several characters not scheduled to be out, they were just walking around talking to people.
Isabella went crazy over Minnie. I honestly didn't even realize she was such a fan. But she would just hug on her and would not let go. It was so sweet! I may have teared up a bit...
And who says just the kids want to meet Minnie?
Isabella has been obsessed with Peter Pan for a long time. Out of all the Disney movies, this is the one we act out at home the most. I am Peter and she is Wendy and all sorts of craziness ensues. So when she saw Peter just standing around, I think she was starstruck. She didn't say a word and just stared. I think he thought she didn't know who he was - Peter Pan isn't exactly Ariel - so he sat down with her and asked if she knew who he was. Her eyes were so big and she just nodded. I wanted to say 'if you only knew!' So I love this picture.
The princess on her throne...
This is the restaurant we ate at the second night, the Enchanted Garden. The first night was Animator's Palette but I didn't get any pictures of it which is a shame! That was my favorite.
We came back to the room to find Little Dog already asleep. She must have been exhausted.
The next day was Castaway Cay, Disney's private island. There is so much to do there. We had been to Royal Caribbean's island the summer before and I thought that was pretty cool, but this one blew theirs away. It was so nice, had so much more on it and was just more developed. There were all kinds of fun things to do in the water like this play area.
And the Pelican Plunge water slides.
There is a great long beach and we had no problem getting chairs.
One of the many bars on the island.
The view of the ship. Ain't she a beaut?
They have a barbecue lunch with great options. I remember there being couscous and stuff like that. Not your regular barbecue fare! Oh, and the cookies here and on the ship were SO good. There is self serve ice cream and people were making ice cream sandwiches with them. I would highly recommend that.
Amanda with the gang...
There is a pirate night on every Disney sailing where you are encouraged to wear pirate regalia or at least tropical themed clothes. I wish we had gone full pirate because we were basically in the minority in our 'tropical' clothes. They had a cute show up on deck and they do fireworks. Until recently they were the only cruise line to do fireworks at sea. Now the new Norwegian Breakaway will have them too.
Isabella is also really in to pirates so she loved this night.
The next morning we had brunch reservations at Palo. I think it was a $15 surcharge to eat here and you need reservations. This was our view from our booth. The food was excellent and it was a HUGE spread. It is an Italian restaurant so they had a bunch of pizzas and pastas you could order on top of the regular brunch fare.
We went on this cruise as part of a group. The way I found the company that I work for was by listening to a couple of podcasts that they sponsor. One of them is WDW Radio hosted by Lou Mongello. He is pretty much a super star in the Disney community and my company helped sponsor Lou's Cruise. There was a door decorating contest so we made a Texas wreath to show our roots!
The last couple days of the cruise, my mom unfortunately was really sick. She didn't even leave the room and Isabella got a touch of it the last day too. So Amanda and I would just kind of check on them and then explore the ship on our own. They have a fun Midship Detective Agency thing where you go all over the boat exploring and finding clues to solve a mystery.
There are so many things to do on this ship that we didn't even have time for. They have a movie theater showing regular and 3D movies. While we were on they had Brave, Wreck It Ralph (that had literally come out the day after we sailed), The Avengers. I wish I had had time to do that. There are also many adult only areas, probably more than on regular cruise ships. So if you don't want to be surrounded by the characters and kids all the time you don't have to be.
They had the Oceaneers Club for Isabella's age and we would drop her off there for a couple of hours at a time. When we went to pick her up she always had on a different costume (Minnie, Ariel, Belle) and would ask to stay longer. They had story times, craft times, computers for them to play on, reading rooms, these huge interactive floors that they would walk around on and play games. It was amazing. And she had a wrist band on to get in and out so they always knew where she was. I would go to pick her up and they would say 'oh she is in the Nemo room'. And you have to have a password to be able to pick them up, so I felt really safe with her in there.
Our last day came too soon and we had a very long wait at the airport. Isabella and Amanda killed time taking silly photos of themselves. Bella took the pics of Amanda so they were a little (lot) blurry...
It was an absolutely magical vacation and I can't wait to go again!
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