I’ve now been home from my two week Disney vacation for a week now, and still haven’t gotten back to normal life.
I still have empty suitcases laying around that I just haven’t put away yet. I still have laundry I need to do. I still have mail to go through and bills to pay. I just have no motivation to do any of them.
The vacation was wonderful though. Not perfect, by any means, but still wonderful. I learned a valuable lesson though. There really is too much of a good thing. As great as being on vacation is, after about a week and a half, I was very much ready to come home and get back to work.
I’m gonna focus mostly on the cruise in this entry as I’ve been to the theme parks countless times and there really wasn’t anything new or noteworthy. But seeing as how this was my first Disney Cruise (and first cruise in general), it was a completely new experience for me.
We had rough seas for most of the trip, which I actually found I preferred. I enjoyed the rocking and swaying of the open seas. What’s the point in being out on the water if you aren’t going to experience the movement and motion of the water. If I’m on a ship, I wanna know it. Nothing violent, mind you, but some good sized waves made for some fun maneuvering on the ship, which added to the overall fun of the entire experience for me.
One thing that was kind of depressing was the other guests on the ship. One of the great things about a Disney Cruise is that they really do get guests in every age demographic. There were infants, children, teens, adults and seniors. The only issue with that is that the number of adults in my general age range was very minimal. Most guests were either below the age of 20, or at least 10 years older than me. I couldn’t probably count on two hands the number of people I saw that were between the ages of 25-30. So, meeting new people and getting to know them was a bit harder as there weren’t many people in my age range to hang out with.
That didn’t completely ruin the trip for me though, but it will be something I take into consideration before my next Disney Cruise.
The ports of call were interesting.
First was St. Maarten. I was really anticipating this to be a beautiful island. Partially owned by both the French and the Dutch, it was bound to be gorgeous, right? Wrong!
This island was a shithole. The only thing that was remotely attractive about it was all the butterflies. Other than that, I have no desire to ever visit again. The only shopping you can do on St. Maarten is for booze or jewelry. Neither of which I have any interest in whatsoever. But I did get a nice panoramic image of the island from the aft deck of the ship before I said goodbye to the hell hole.
After St. Maarten, I was starting to get worried that all of the islands we were set to visit would be as much of a disappointment as that one had been. But St. Thomas was quite beautiful.
About five minutes into an island tour I took, we were snaking our way up those winding mountain-esque roads that have no edge. Just a plunge to your death. As if that wasn’t frightening enough, while we were trekking up the road, we witnessed a head-on collision and one vehicle started spinning out of control and almost flew off the edge. Welcome to St. Thomas!
I also took a skyway ride up to Paradise Point and got a gorgeous view from up there. While up there, three gentlemen from the Mariner of the Sea (which was in port with us that day) adopted me as their husband and we had a little photo shoot up there and hung out for a bit. Finally people my age. Too bad they were on a completely different cruise ship.
Here’s a picture of the harbor I took from the top of Paradise Point.
That’s the Disney Magic in the front, followed by the Explorer of the Sea and the Mariner of the Sea. There’s a Norwegian Cruise Line ship in the middle of the harbor, and up and to the left of that, in the distance, is two other ships along the other shoreline. It was a crowded day in St. Thomas.
During the tour, I managed to get this panorama shot as well.
Our next stop was to be Castaway Cay, Disney’s private island in the Bahamas, and arguable one of the main reasons to even go on a Disney Cruise. I was really looking forward to this port of call for obvious reasons. I had also planned to do all of my beach time at this one. I had reserved some snorkeling time as well as some time to feed and swim with the stingrays.
Hurricane Noel had other plans in mind.
Unfortunately, do to the hurricane’s path and timing, we were unable to go to Castaway Cay. I was pretty bummed out. But they found an alternate place for us to go, so it wasn’t a complete loss.
We ended up heading to Nassau instead. I got to visit Atlantis and tour the grounds, which was nice, but the highlight of visiting Nassau had nothing to do with Nassau at all.
By complete coincidence, the Disney Wonder (Disney’s other cruise ship) was scheduled to be in Nassau the same day. This is a very rare occurrence for the two Disney ships, and you could tell by the reactions of the crew that this was a pretty big deal. We were told that it had been years since both ships had been docked together, making it quite the photo op. The crews of each ship spent the entire day running back and forth from ship to ship visiting friends and coworkers they hadn’t seen in a long time. The ships kept blowing their horns (they play the first seven notes of When You Wish Upon A Star) to each other as they pulled in and out of port. For any big Disney fan, it was quite a big deal.
And yes, as if you hadn’t already guessed, I managed to take a panorama shot of both ships docked together.
The photography company onboard (Shutters) also took some pictures to commemorate the rare event, and I’m gonna share some of theirs with you as well.
There were about 2500 hundred pictures taken between myself and Tyler, who went with me. But I just don’t have the energy to sift through and post them all. Once I get some albums made on Flickr, you can see them there.
But for now, it’s back to adjusting to being back in real life and back to work. And back to planning my next vacation, which begins on January 9 when I go back down to Walt Disney World to run the Marathon (my second), for which I have severely slacked off in training.
That’s my mission for the next two months.
Train my ass off.
Oh, and Thanksgiving and Christmas too. I suppose those are important.