Disney Fantasy Cruise – Western Caribbean
Day One
We (my partner and I, I’ll refer to her as “The Reader” because she spends most of her time reading on vacation) arrived at Orlando Int’l Airport just before 11:00 am and headed straight to the buses to catch our Disney Cruise Line transfer to Port Canaveral. During the transfer we watched a short video, a couple cartoons, and tried our best to answer Disney trivia questions like, “Who was the first voice of Mickey Mouse”. (The Answer is Walt Disney!, I had no idea.) Before we knew it, we were at the port.
The embarkation process was a breeze. We walked through security easily and headed straight to the check-in counter where we only waited in line for about 5 minutes. We were assigned boarding number 24 and by the time we finished checking in, they were already boarding #21. So again only a short wait before getting on the ship. We were onboard at 12:45 pm. Since our rooms weren’t ready until 1:30 pm, we were encouraged to go have lunch so we headed off to the Enchanted Garden restaurant. Then we headed up to our stateroom to change out of our cold weather gear into our vacation appropriate attire. We spent the next couple hours exploring the ship, getting our bearings.
We passed by our room at 3:00 pm and our bags were waiting outside our door. What a relief! Disney’s luggage service really works and works well. If you place your disney luggage tags on your checked bags before you check in for your flight at your home airport, the next time you see your bags will be at your stateroom onboard the ship. I’ve done this when staying at WDW, but not a cruise before and was a little nervous about the tags falling off or getting ripped of enroute. This is an amazing service and one of the many reasons Disney is so Magical! During check-in they asked if we wanted to take advantage of their onboard airline checkin for the return home. Of course! I’ll talk more about that later in our cruise when the time comes.
After the emergency evacuation drill at 4:00pm, we headed up to deck 11 for the sail away party with Mickey and Friends. Boy that Donald can really shake his tail feathers! Then we went to the Walt Disney Theatre for the first stage show called, “A Fantasy Come True: Welcome Show”. It was a very cute show with more singing and dancing with Mickey and Friends and an overview of the highlights of the ship by Cruise Director Ray (who, it turns out, was our Cruise Director on our last cruise to Alaska! We met him later in the evening in La Piazza and reminisced about the previous cruise.). We meandered through the shops briefly and then headed to towards the main lobby. We arrived just in time to see the lighting of the Christmas tree. Usually, I try to not think about Christmas until after Thanksgiving. They had selected one kid (we missed how they selected him), crowned him, Mickey gave him the magic trident, donned him with a beautiful velvet rope. After a brief countdown and some pixie dust, he lit the tree and the garland all around the lobby.
Next we grabbed a glass of wine from the lobby bar and headed to La Piazza where we relaxed and enjoyed the music of young woman pianist. When she finished her set, we headed to dinner at Enchanted Garden.
We had such a long day of travel I didn’t think I’d stay awake through dinner but I managed. As expected, the food was delicious and the service was exceptional.