Saturday, May 29, 2010

Disney Cruise - Day One: Welcome Aboard!

We started our cruise by winding our way through the line in the terminal and having our paperwork and identification thoroughly checked. Caleb did pretty well waiting in line, and to Disney's credit, the line moved fairly quickly .

We also had our first Mickey and Minnie Mouse sighting in the terminal. Caleb was excited to see them from a distance, terrified to get up close, and then ecstatic to shout, "I LOVE YOU, MICKEY!" as we walked away. His enthusiasm and fear turned out to be a pattern for pretty much the whole cruise.


As we arrived to the terminal, porters took our luggage for us. Disney had mailed us luggage tags a couple of weeks before with our room numbers on them, so the bags were magically whisked away while we got on board. We weren't able to go to our rooms yet because they were still being prepared, so we went up to the 9th deck to grab some lunch from the Topsider Buffet. Then we got to exploring the 9th and 10th decks, which were where the pools were.


We were able to get to our rooms before too long and drop off our backpacks. For the rest of the cruise, I carried around my camera bag which included a tube of lip gloss and my Key to the World Card, which is the card that counts as cash and gets you on and off the ship while on the cruise. I really didn't need anything else on board!

We checked out our room, which was a deluxe stateroom with verandah on the seventh deck. It was nice! It really did become our home for the next eleven days. Although I'm happy to be back in my own bed, I sure to miss the views from the verandah in Room 7594!




Our luggage hadn't arrived to the room yet, but it was time for our mandatory emergency evacuation drill! So we donned our life vests and headed down to Deck 4 where the life boats were to get a briefing on what to do in case of an emergency. Caleb wasn't excited about his big, boxy vest, and it was hard to hug and console him in my own big, boxy vest, but he survived (which, I guess is the point of a life vest, so hooray!)
That afternoon, they had a deck party at the Goofy Pool on Deck 9. The cruise entertainment staff and a bunch of Disney characters showed up to welcome us aboard. It was super fun. I'm totally a kid about this kind of stuff, and I had a blast dancing along and screaming for Mickey.




See the guy in the front? That's Dave. He pretty much has my dream job.
Dave is the Get-the-Party-Started Guy. For years, I've been saying my dream job would be to go to people's wedding receptions just to get the party started. I don't want to be the DJ. I want to be the person on the dance floor pulling everyone else out, the one who isn't afraid to do the funky chicken and even the sprinkler if necessary, the one who requests Dancing Queen and the last one off the dance floor. That's pretty much what this guy did. He was everywhere on the ship! I saw him in the Rockin' Bar D - a dumb name for a bar (I don't get it?) - but they had cool comedians and magicians and bands perform there every night. He was usually the emcee there as well.

The excitement of the day was a bit much for Caleb at this point, who fell asleep on Tommy's shoulders during the deck party. At the end of the deck party, they sounded the ship's horn to signal the start of the cruise. The horn sounded like the first eight notes of "When You Wish Upon A Star." It was pretty awesome to hear that coming so loud from the ship's horn, and the whole boat pretty much went crazy when it sounded.

For dinner that night, we ate at The Animator's Palate. On board the Disney Magic, you eat on a dining rotation. There were three main restaurants - The Animator's Palate, which was kind of general dining; Parrot Cay, which focused on Caribbean-inspired food; and Lumiere's which featured fine dining with French influences.

All of them were amazing! Each night we ate at a different restaurant (on a scheduled rotation), and our serving staff came with us. By the end of the trip, Kendall and Walter knew what types of foods we liked, who were the experimental diners, and what drinks to bring without even asking. It was awesome.

We discovered our friends from base were sitting two tables away from us the first night. Caleb was very happy to see his friend Tehlaia, who is only two months older than him. Our servers noticed we were spending a fair amount of time at each others tables that first night and offered to let us move to their table permanently. It was nice to see familiar faces at the end of the days!

After dinner, we attended a live theater show in the Walt Disney Theater on Deck 4, which seats about 600 people. The show was called "Welcome Aboard; Let the Magic Begin." It featured a lot of the characters and really captured the excitement of our first day on board! The Walt Disney Theater was gorgeous! They had some sort of live performance, whether it was a play, a comedy act, a magician, or a talent show every night either before or after dinner (depending on your dining schedule.)

We were pretty wiped after that so we went back to our room to unpack and get settled in. We had only been on board since about 2 or 3 pm, but it was a full and long day, so we slept pretty well that night! We knew the next day would be a day at sea as we cruised down to our first port, so we were going to have plenty of time to explore the ship!

1 comment:

  1. I think from now on I will say "child person" instead of kid. Thank you for the odd wording, Senor Life Vest. Love the pic of Caleb asleep on Tom's shoulders!

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