Some non-related vacation news before we get started: Lucas made the cut for one of the representational teams for spring/summer soccer! I'm not exactly sure what percentage of kids didn't make it, but we're proud of him nonetheless. They don't have competitive at his age, but as I understand it, representational is somewhere between competitive and recreational. The part I really like is that representational teams use on-staff coaches as opposed to volunteers. Lucas's volunteer coach last year (in a different league) didn't have the best attendance so this is a big plus. Preseason practices start this weekend so expect pictures from that over the next couple of weeks.
Back to vacation! One of the nifty things about the Disney cruise is that they do rotational dining. What this means is that over the seven nights of the cruise, you rotate between the three main dining rooms: Royal Palace, Animator's Palette, and Enchanted Garden. Your servers rotate with you so you really get to know them and vice versa. I can't speak for everyone on the cruise, but our servers were fantastic, and in my opinion, they were one of the top highlights.
I didn't take the camera with me on the first night's dinner (Royal Palace), but you'll see more of that in later blog posts. I did, however, remember to bring it for night 2, which was at the aptly named Animator's Palette. I focused on family and friends that night, but once again, you'll see more pictures of the decor in a later post. So here's the entirety of my Day 2 photos. First off, group shot of everyone! (except me)
Those big screens you see in the background are fully animated, and on our first night, the "surfer dude" turtle from Finding Nemo was onscreen, interacting with the audience. It was pretty amazing since he asked one of the kids from another table where they were from, and when they said Ontario, he incorporated that into the conversation. At first, I thought maybe there was someone behind the scenes doing the voiceover, but considering there were different conversations on other screens, it's apparent that it was just really cool voice recognition.
Lucas and Jayden show off the "hats" our servers created for them.
And finally, a group shot of the adults after we dropped the kids off at the Kids Club.
Day 3 was another day at sea, and we spent most of the day playing around on the top decks. First up, Jayden and Lucas played around in the AquaLab (actually, this was after some basketball, but I didn't get pictures of that). As you can see in the first picture, it's similar to a splash pad. As the kids soon realizes, one of the big advantages over a splash pad is that you can also use the floor as an makeshift slip and slide.
They also had to take a few more runs on the kid's water slide.
And finally, the granddaddy of all the water fun: the AquaDuck! Possibly the coolest recreational feature of the Disney Fantasy, the AquaDuck is a massive enclosed water slide that runs above the top decks. Suffice to say that this was one of the most popular activities with the lines to show for it. However, if you went at night or while the ship was at port, the wait time was much shorter. I only got to go once since my knee was messed up, but here are a few pictures of that. I went with Jayden since Lucas didn't want to go at the time (he made up for that later).
While sitting by one of the pools, we saw this guy who reminded us of my dad so Marilu snapped a quick picture. We saw him without the sunglasses and hat later and there was no resemblance, but the mustache definitely matches!
Finally, a couple of photos from inside the ship. The first one gives you an idea of just how incredibly long the ship is. We were all the way at the forward end, and a lot of the fun destinations were aft so we burnt a few calories trudging back and forth. (I just looked it up and found that the ship is 340 meters long, meaning each end to end trip was like walking over 3 football fields!)
We'll wrap it up with Lucas and Jayden posing by the elevators.
Next up: St Maarten!
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