Amy wrote:..So do you just walk through the design room at Test Track if you want to skip it?
Basically, yes...
Mayhem on the High Seas!!! The Mousekecouple take a cruise, Part 2.
Well, finally the big day arrived! The morning dawned cloudy, dreary, and a little chilly but we were undaunted. After all, in just a few hours we would be on a ship headed to the Bahamas! Woo hoo!
So we hurriedly grabbed a quick breakfast, loaded up our suitcases, and hit the road! We weren’t sure how long it would take to get there, so we wanted an early start because we had heard that the earlier you arrive at the port the better your chances of getting on the ship early… stands to reason. Someone had told us it would take an hour and a half to get there, but Soarin’ said it would only take an hour, so we just weren’t sure what to expect (turns out it took only 50 minutes… and yes, I obeyed the speed limits… for the most part….
).
The drive to Port Canaveral was pleasant. There was a lot of pretty scenery, and traffic was light. As we got closer, we could feel our excitement building. Suddenly we came over a small hill and caught a glimpse of something through the trees that made our heart skip a beat (do you see it?):
Soon after, we caught an even better look:
Then suddenly… there was the sign we had been looking for:
Pulling into the port!
Isn’t she just gorgeous?
So we got parked in the garage, right in the first space adjacent to the skywalk across to the terminal. Score! Front Row parking! We had to wait a little while before they would let us cross the skywalk and go into the terminal, but the cool part is that there weren’t many people coming in through the parking garage yet, so we were in the first batch who would be allowed into the terminal. Finally they let us cross over. Can you tell Mouseoholic is getting excited?
When we got into the terminal, the first order of business was to get checked in and get our “boarding group” number. We were in group 8. Mouseoholic expressed a little surprise that we were “so far down the list” when we had been among the first to arrive, but the woman at the counter just gave her a blank stare for a minute…. until she realized that we were newbies. So she said “well, there are 44 boarding groups, so group 8 is actually pretty good.” Oh.
Okay (shuffling away in chagrin…
). Having finished all our paperwork, there was nothing left to do but wait till boarding started. So we took a bunch of pictures. Mickey and Minnie showed up and joined the fun, too.
Finally they started calling numbers for boarding groups. Sure enough, it didn’t take long at all (about 10 or 15 minutes max.) to call group 8. As we crossed the gangway to enter the ship, we were amazed by the sheer size of this beauty:
Welcome aboard!!!!!!!
We were now on a mission. We had heard that you need to book anything special you want to do right away before too many people come aboard if you want to get the times and days you want, so our plan was to go up to the Spa and make our reservations for our special Spa treatment package. Then we would see about making some adjustments to our meal schedule (it was already set, but we wanted to change one or two things). So we started making our way up to the level where the Spa was, pausing to take a few pics along the way.
Disney did a great job of making room for both families, and adults who preferred not to be surrounded by kids everywhere they went. There were special areas for kids, families, teens, and then areas set aside for strictly adults. We appreciated that very much. It’s not that we don’t like kids… would we be Disney freaks and go on a Disney cruise if kids were a problem for us? Heck no! But there were definitely going to be times when we would want some peace and serenity (insert ominous tone here… mayhem later occurred involving that subject… to be explained later
).
Jacuzzi in the adults-only area:
Adults-only pool:
We got to the Spa, made our reservation for the “couple’s choice” package (a very special package lasting almost 4 hours and involving exclusive use of a private “villa” with full balcony, Jacuzzi, etc. as well as a full hour of full body massages, etc. Oh, yeah….
), and then took a tour of the complete facility. We signed up for a deal that would allow us unlimited access to the “Rainforest” area… a luxury spa with three different types of saunas, semi-private Jacuzzis, scented showers, heated stone chaise lounges, etc…. awesome! It was hard to believe that all this was on a ship!
Heated chaise lounges:
The scented “rubs” that we get as part of our treatment package:
We were really anticipating using all these facilities! Turns out that we sure did…. A lot….
We now headed down to the main level to make the adjustments to our meal schedule. We were amazed that this ship had a “mall” and two full-size movie theaters!
When we met with the restaurant manager we explained that we wanted to do a couple of the special “upgrade” dinners at Remy and Palo, and would therefore miss a chance to see all of the other main restaurants unless we made a switch on one of the nights where we were scheduled to see one that we would already be seeing for lunch anyway on a different day (too complicated to explain here… just bear with me). He then told us that our entire meal rotation schedule was already set as printed on our “meal ticket” (a coded voucher that had all our meal assignments listed), and we couldn’t alter one dinner in the system without changing the whole rotation (had to do with the automated way they assigned tables, and servers who would be our “assigned servers” for the whole trip). But he put a hand-written note on the back of our vouchers and signed it, and told us that we could just do a “walk-up” to the restaurant of our choice on whichever night was the one we needed to change by just showing that to the host when we arrived. So we went away happy, thinking that everything was going to be just fine (teaser: notice another ominous wording hint here as well? Keep that in mind. It shows up with another bout of unpleasant mayhem later).
All of our missions now complete, we decided to go check out our stateroom. We knew the luggage wasn’t there yet, but we wanted to see the room anyway. It was fantastic! We had seen pictures of it on the internet, but weren’t sure whether they did it justice… they didn’t! It was even better than we had hoped! I’ll just leave it here for now, though, because I don’t have any more pictures uploaded yet.
Stay tuned for another update as soon as I can get to it!
