Vacation Day 5

Day 5

Our cruise day (we hope!)

Ok this is what confounded me on this trip. Our original itinerary was to leave the hotel at 11:45 (or 12:45 if you leave from Animal Kingdom) onboard the Disney Cruise bus (a separate bus from the buses that take you to the parks or to the airport) and get to Port Canaveral around 2 pm or so. Buuuuuut since we had to go to Port Everglades, they decide to have the bus leave at 2 pm! What’s up with that? We have to go farther so we leave later?

We went to Animal Kingdom, which is basically the zoo (it smelled like crap). We didn’t have a chance to explore everything due to time limits and it only really has 2 good rides.

1.It’s tough to be a Bug (Bug’s life, and it’s also available in California Adventure)
2. Dinosaur- a semi rollercoaster like ride where you’re in a time machine and trying to get a dinosaur out of the past before the asteroid hits.

It’s cool at the McDonald’s in the park, they have special happy meals only available there. The happy meal has Animal Kingdom stuff on it and has a postcard you can mail to people saying you were at Animal Kingdom.

We barely finished those two rides at 1:20 and were like CRAP, we have to get back to the hotel still! So we got back to the buses and waited for almost 30 minutes for the Port Orleans bus (which we also found out that they change drivers at the Animal Kingdom so we had to wait even longer). So I was really afraid we were gonna miss our bus so I even called the hotel to have them hold the bus for us. They weren’t sure if they could but they put in the notice to the cruise people. We didn’t get back to the hotel till 2:05 so we were racing to see if we missed the bus. For those of you wondering why we just didn’t take the Animal Kingdom bus (since I said earlier they pick up there), it’s because Susan had left one of her bags with the bellman at the hotel so we had to go back to get it. We saw there was a line of people when we got to the cruise desk so I knew we didn’t miss it. They told us, “Oh we called everyone to tell them that the bus wouldn’t be here till 2:45!”

Fuckers! I never got that call and I left my cell number so I knew they didn’t call. And why would they bother calling my room since they called after check out time so I wouldn’t be in there anyways! We finally got on board the bus and took the trip of forever to get to Fort Lauderdale.

We had to go to one more hotel (the Disney Swan, which is pretty nice looking) and got going around 3:15. We had to stop at around 5 for a “required pit stop” (apparently it’s state law a charter bus like this has to stop every two hours, but I think that the pit stop place we went to pays the cruise companies to do that for more business ha ha). The pit stop was 45 minutes and then we were on our way again. We got into the port around 7:40 and got all checked in so I’m sure that was a big mess for all of the people who had early seating (for those who haven’t been on a cruise before, cruise ships are huge, but they’re still not big enough to house everyone for dinner at the same time, so there are usually 2 dining rooms and 2 seating times). Luckily we had late seating at 8:30 so we dropped our bags, explored the ship some and went to eat.

The Disney Cruise boat is like walking into a cartoon. There are Disney characters or paintings or pictures everywhere. When you first walk into the atrium, there is an entrance to one of the restaurants (more on that later) that has a life size (or close to it) statue of Ariel from the Little Mermaid. The atrium was a bit small I thought considering the ship is pretty new.

There is literally Disney coursing through the entire ships veins. I don’t think you can look at anything on the ship without seeing some kind of Disney reference. Look at my pictures I’ve posted and you’ll understand.

The dining on the boat is really cool. There are 3 restaurants on the boat (and a premium one where you have to pay more to go to) as well as the buffet and food stations. Each night of your cruise, you dine in a different dining room. On a cruise you have a personal waiter and assistant waiter who serves your table. On the Disney cruise, they follow you from restaurant to restaurant. Each restaurant is different. Parrocat Cay (our first night) is Caribbean themed and is a more casual place. Triton’s was on our second night and is the formal dining. Animator’s Palette was by far the coolest and I’m glad we had that on the last night. The entire restaurant is black and white. Throughout dinner, it starts gaining color (the pictures will turn to color and lights will internally illuminate things that were formally black and white). It’s really cool and something any kid will love (like me). I took pictures.

In Parrocat Cay, it was Caribbean themed (remember that part and think of a recent Disney movie). When I’m on a cruise boat, it’s steak every night! Since I paid for everything already, why bother getting the cheap or vegetarian stuff right? We had a 6 seater table but we only had 2 table mates. It was 2 japanese ladies (too bad Leo wasn’t there ha ha). When I listened to them talk, it was like watching an anime movie (they’re eyes just weren’t big). We discovered they did speak English but they mostly just talked to each other so Susan and I didn’t say a whole lot to them. We missed the first night of entertainment due to all of the hectic moving around and transport to the boat (we got to the boat 2.5 hours after it was originally supposed to leave so that really screwed up the schedule).

There are lots of cool pictures so check them out.
photos.yahoo.com/ninja421