June 2023... Cruise sandwich

Hi Sounds like a great plan … Last night I dropped my 2 out of town guests off at MK and as I drove home towards the new Celebration Publix Grocery Store down World Drive
huge crack of lightning and thunder and pouring down rain
Not a drop in the MK all night long They were able to stay for the fireworks too.
So hopefully you will have good luck with the weekly weather forecast today.

Is the “Spinners” movie on the schedule for Friday night resort on property at the Grand Floridian ?
Let us know if they have opened the walkway . They announced it would , … Soon…
Plus I kinda would love to hear about the cruise . Is it a new ship ? I just watched a video for some new cruise ship that my family plans
to cruise the Mediterranean this summer Looks incredible .

Have a great vacation trip!

The night before we flew down, as we're rushing around trying to remember everything, and trying to guess at things we might need on the cruise...DW realizes she needs something from the CVS down the street. So, she ran down there, walked in, found the item and checked out at the self check out register. As she was leaving, she thought "wow, I didn't see a single person in there - very weird". She glanced over at the store times on the way out the door and realized they had closed 20 minutes ago! No wonder the lights were so dim! I guess they should have locked the doors!!

Anyway, we made it to Orlando with no issues, grabbed our bags and headed to the resort. We searched through our unorganized bags and found the sunscreen, ponchos and hats that we needed then checked those and walked over to Epcot. It was just after rope drop, and Ratatouille was only 30 mins so we rode that, then walked over to sunshine seasons and had some nice stir fry for lunch. Soarin' was just over 30 mins so we rode that one as well. So far, a good day - it's barely noon.

In no particular order, we rode spaceship earth, mission to mars, Living with the land, and watched the Disney and Pixar shorts. No matter what we did, it always seemed the next thing we wanted to do was on the other side of the wall. I'll sure be glad when that is gone!

We shopped a bit for a shirt for my mom, but no luck so far. Found a couple that we liked but they didn't have a large? All we saw was either S or M, or 2X. This has always been my problem shopping at Disney - no end to the selection, but difficult to find the size you need.

As we started walking back toward the resort, our room became available. It was almost exactly 4 o'clock. I had asked for an upper floor because I had heard those were already done with refurbishment, and my son likes the pull down beds in the living room, but we got 2nd floor. At least we have the inflatable in the owner's locker. The A/C in the room doesn't work very well - at the lowest setting, it will cool the room but then it decides it is satisfied and shuts off for a while. During that time, the humidity makes it feel very warm in here. Even with just a sheet over me at night, sometimes I was warm. I'd much rather sleep cold. When I called for our bags to be brought up, bell services said they showed someone else's name on our room number. But, when he looked up our name, it showed the room we were in (our magic bands opened the door). I also had an email saying to see the front desk for our reservation, so I walked back down there on sore feet to check and of course they were just as confused, but said we were in the right room. Luckily, no other family walked in on us during the night (or if they did they realized and retreated quietly).

After a pretty good dinner at Cape May, we headed back to the room and I was out early. Despite the A/C problems I slept well and long. I'll head down to the pool in a bit to see if someone cancelled a cabana at the last minute, and failing that to grab an umbrella table.

Continue to enjoy! I’d ask about the air conditioning, worst case at least they should give you a fan.

Sorry for not keeping up with this report, but we got on the ship Monday morning and ... well, the wifi just refused to work on my laptop. I could barely get it to do anything on the phone! We've been cut off from civilization for the whole week, except for work emails of course...those kept flowing.

Where was I? Oh yes...the pool @ BCV. No Cabanas of course - I think that's an 11 month rental kind of thing. But, we did get a table w/ umbrella. I got breakfast for everyone and headed back up to the room, then we all went down to the pool to hang out for the day. Hours in the lazy river, several drinks at Hurricane Hannas, and ending the day with a wonderful meal at Toppolino's Terrace made for a nice relaxing day.

Up fairly early on Monday to head to the port - I think the car picked us up at 10. We made it through the mass of people in line to board the boat, then through the mass of people in line for lunch to have a nice burger @ Guys burger joint. I think we did that once more during the week - they were pretty good!

We had an Ocean Suite room, but I wouldn't call it a "suite" myself - it was just the one room + bathroom. However, it was about 90 sq ft bigger than a normal balcony state room. Still felt cramped! Sitting on the balcony was great, though - I did that several times with beer (or water) in hand. Listening to that water noise is just wonderful. Beautiful weather for that first day, as well. We explored the boat a bit, and finally found our way to the Diamond Steakhouse for dinner the first night. It was pretty good (although not as good as Toppolino's...). The service, though, was a bit overwhelming - there were 2 servers for our one table, and they didn't let 5 minutes go by without asking if we needed something. Even with that, it took well over an hour for dinner. There was quite a pause between courses. Still, we enjoyed it.

The next day we went to Nassau, but didn't stay long - we walked the length of the port area, but never actually went into town. We got back on the boat and explored some more, played Trivia for a while, and some shuttleboard. That night was elegant night, so we just went to the pizza spot. We aren't into dressing up on vacation (or pretty much ever, really...). I think this was the night we went to the show in the Venecian Palace theater, and it was great! One classic rock song after another, with dancing and some great costumes. We enjoyed it so much we went back for the 2nd show. I was very surprised at how few people were in the theater for either show!

The next day was the private island - Princess Cays. We had rented a bungalow there. DW wasn't feeling it - her knee was hurting pretty bad (she is scheduled for replacement in just over a week!), so she didn't want to walk around, and said she would be bored just sitting in the Bungalow. She went down and played Trivia again today. DS and I went to the bungalow and snorkled for an hour or so, seeing some interesting fish and brain coral. Then, the rain set in. Everyone on the island decided to leave at the same time - around 1:30 pm. So, about 2k people were standing in line...in the wind and rain, just trying to get on the shuttles. They had 4 shuttles running as fast as they could go to get everyone back to the boat, but it took almost 2 hours before we were on board again. That was the coldest I've been all week! The A/C in the boat wasn't much better than the A/C at our BCV room. And the humidity in the Bahamas was just overwhelming. When we got back to Port Canaveral, it was hot but we could breathe easily, and the air felt so much lighter than on those islands! Perhaps I won't complain so much about the humidity in FL or AL in the future.

We messed around on the ship until 6 which was the time I had signed up for the dining room on the ship, then we headed down. So this was night 3, but the first time we had been to the regular dining room. Somehow, they had signed us up for "your time" dining, which meant we had to check in and it would give us a wait time...which turned out to be 1 hour. I was not happy with that! But, nothing to be done so we went out to the lobby and listened to the band playing there for a bit, then I looked again and it had dropped to 10 mins. We didn't end up actually waiting for the full hour, so I guess that was good. We got back to go in and the person in front of use was also complaining about having to wait, so seems like they didn't handle the reservations right. Anyway we went in and had another pretty good dinner, although nothing to really write about. I think after that we went up and played mini golf and more shuffleboard (although that may have been before dinner).

The next day was at sea, so we slept late then headed down to breakfast (actually each day I woke up first and showered, then headed out to find coffee. I really didn't like having no coffee maker in the room -not that I had anywhere but the balcony to sit and drink it - then when I got back to the room, the others would be finishing up their morning routines and we'd all go back to the buffett area for breakfast). Maybe this is when we played the mini golf - I'm not sure. But at some point we played more trivia as well. We never won anything on trivia (they were giving out lanyards so not a big loss really). We saw some entertaining musicians playing in the lobby as well. Later that evening we went to the early comedy show, although I didn't really think it was very funny. Dinner again (we knew what to do this time so it went smoothly), and then played Bingo for a potential $5k win. However, to win the $5k jackpot you had to cover the card in the first 49 numbers called, and they only had 3 or 4 Bs called during that time so it kind of seemed rigged - no way anyone could have won. We didn't get close to winning anything anyway.

We watched the final night show which celebrated the countries the cast was from then had the performers sit on stools and sing love songs. It was entertaining, but not nearly as good as the other show. Then we had to get up super early for debarkation. This wasn't clear from what I had read online previous to the cruise - the only thing I found then was that you had to leave the room by 8:30. But, the letter they gave us the night before said if you wanted to take your own luggage off of the boat, you had to be downstairs by 6:45. This kind of screwed us up because I had told the car driver to be ready to pick us up at 9. And, with no phone or texting working, I had no way to let him know about that until the next morning. But, with last minute notice he was still able to get there by 8:15. This meant we sat on a concrete bench for about 45 mins waiting for him. Luckily he was there before the rest of the guests left the ship and we got away before it was mass chaos.

We made it to the Grand Floridian around 9:30 or so, and checked our bags then headed over to Gasparillas for breakfast, and rode the monorail to go to MK. All the wait times looked pretty short, but they were all lies. We jumped on the RR for the first time in 2 or 3 years and were very happy to get to ride it again! We hopped off at Fantasyland station and headed to Peter Pan which I think showed 45 mins at that time. I timed it - we were in line for 82 minutes before finally getting on the ride. This is why we never ride that...the wait is too long for the ride.

After that we headed over to Buzz Light year, but the sun was really beating on us and it was lunch time, and DW's knee was hurting, and the room was ready early... so we skipped out of that line and headed back to the hotel. We had a nice burger at The Grand Floridian Cafe for a late lunch, and decided to change our dinner from 5 to 8 because we were so late eating lunch. This means we'll miss the Spinners tonight, but that's ok - I'm done with walking through parks for this trip, I think. We made it to our room, which seems HUGE compared to where we've been living all week! The shower is 1/2 the size of our stateroom!! I fell asleep on the bed, and DW/DS went down to the pool.

Early flight home tomorrow, so after dinner tonight I'll probably be going to bed early. Then it's back to reality including yard work tomorrow. yoohoo!

All in All, we had a good week and really it was nice to be cut off from the world with no phone or texting working on the ship. I had minimal email interference, so I won't complain at all!