Our first Disney cruise: Part 2

Sunday, November 4th, 2012

Due to the time change Saturday night/early Sunday morning I woke up earlier than I would have, mostly because my stomach thought it was still time to eat LOL! But considering the lack of sleep we had the night/day before the extra hour due to daylight savings was wonderful! I let the hubby sleep a while longer while I went down to the food court and got some breakfast and picked up our package from the front desk. When I came back he was up and then he went and got himself breakfast while I packed up what little stuff we had used.

We had to check out of Pop at 11am but the bus to take us to Port Canaveral wasn't scheduled to pick us up at 12:30. I wanted to walk over to Art of Animation the new resort across the lake from Pop Century but the hubby didn't feel like it. So I left him with our stuff at the pool where he could sunbathe  and soak and I walked over to AoA. The resort is beautiful and the theming is really fun. There are four themed areas, Finding Nemo, Cars, The Lion King and The Little Mermaid. If we ever do a trip with others I think we need to stay here since there are family suites available in three of the four sections (The Little Mermaid has standard hotel rooms).

I was able to walk over and do a quick tour of all the sections in AoA in about an hour, although if I had more time I could have spent hours there checking it out. But we did have a bus to catch so I went back to Pop, collected the hubby and our stuff and soon we were boarding the bus to Port Canaveral.

There she is!

The line for security was a bit long but it kept moving which was good. We were one of the last groups of people to get dropped off at the port so we were able to board right away after checking in and getting our keys to the world. There was a wait in the lobby for the elevators (the elevators where a point of annoyance for me but I'll get more into that later) but we eventually got to deck 7 (the lobby is on deck 3) and found our room.

Duffy made himself right at home

Not long after we received our luggage so while I unpacked, Chauncey started on assembling our door decoration.

We had to stop and attend the safety drill which thankfully went fairly quickly. After the drill we went back to our room and worked on the door some more. But then it was time for dinner. If you aren't familiar with how dining works on DCL, each ship as multiple themed dining rooms. The Dream has Animators Pallet, Enchanted Garden and Royal Palace. Each night of your cruise you'll eat dinner at one of these restaurants. The thing is even though you change restaurants each night, your waiter and your table mates stay the same. As we were part of the WDW Radio group we were sitting with fellow group members and everyone at the tables around us were in the same group too (we ended up with 450-500 people in our group!) The first night was extra special for two reasons: our table mates were also from Indiana (what are the odds!) and the table right next to us had Lou Mongello with his family and also RICHARD SHERMAN! When Lou walked in with his family and Mr. Sherman and his family I honestly teared up. I couldn't believe that we were on a Disney cruise let alone with a Disney legend.

Since we knew we'd be seeing Mr. Sherman the next day at an official event we kept to our group and made sure not to bother him. Of course once the food arrived we had other things to keep our attention. Now I'll admit, I'm a picky eater and looking at the menus before hand made me a bit nervous. However once on board I found that I had nothing to worry about, the food was FANTASTIC (I've got almost an extra 10 pounds I gained on board to prove it). And you can order however you want. If you want to have two appetizers and desert for your meal, you can! If you want to try more than one entree, you can! And it's all included!

Animator's Palate Dinner-Black Truffle Pasta Purseittes

Animator's Palate Dinner-Baked Potato and Cheddar Cheese Soup

Animator's Palate Dinner-Lemon-Thyme Marinated Organic Chicken Breast

Animator's Palate Dinner-Grilled Pacific Black Cod

Animator's Palate Dinner-Sweet Temptations

Animator's Palate Dinner-Cookies and Cream Sundae

After dinner we went and picked up our tags that we'd need to wear to attend any of the official WDW Radio events while on the ship. Then we went and saw the first show in the Walt Disney Theatre, The Golden Mickeys!

We were in the balcony off to the side. Made us feel like Statler and Waldorf

After the show we returned to our room and passed out our fish extender gifts. Now what is a fish extender you might ask? All of the staterooms have this metal fish next to their door. Someone at sometime got the idea to hang what is now known as a fish extender, it's usually made of fabric and has pockets.

Not our room, another fellow cruiser. But see that red thing hanging off the starfish next to the door? That's a fish extender.

So what we and the rest of our group did was come up with some sort of gift to pass out to our fellow cruisers. You could do whatever you want, and your only asked to come up with 1 gift per room (but some did more like 1 gift per person in each room). Since our group was so large we had been broken up into smaller groups so we only had about 30 rooms to deliver gifts to.

Our gifts; candy, glow sticks, stickers and "pirate gold"

Thankfully I had the foresight to arrange the list of staterooms in numerical order so we were able to just go deck by deck and we soon had all the gifts delivered.

Sunday night football on the giant screen on the funnel on deck 11

We then went back to our room and finished our door and then went to bed.

Our door, appropriate to us right?