Sunday, January 24, 2010

vacation - day 1.

The beautiful, delightful, wonderful vacation...is over.

Altogether, we spent 8 days away from home. I was thinking of just putting up one post for the whole trip...but there are far too many cool photos for that. I took about 1800 shots on this trip. Yeah. Crazy. And I have to pick just one for each day, for Project Life. That ought to be fun!

So anyway - this post documents some highlights of Day 1 (Thursday, January 14).

We got up at 3:30am because we had to be to the airport by 5:15. Our flight was filled with lots of teenaged cheerleaders/dance teams and they were noisy, especially at 5:30am. They were with us all the way to Orlando - thankfully we did not run into their group at Disney World.

Anyway, we got to Orlando and took the Disney Cruise Line motorcoach to Cape Canaveral, where we were to set sail.



Once we were checked in, we headed to the giant Mickey ears, which led the way to the ship. The Disney employees were all really nice about taking photos of us whenever we asked. That's a nice change from our normal NYC vacation spot.

We crossed the gangway and welcomed to the Disney Wonder by the cruise staff in the main atrium. We were given directions to our room, and we headed there first thing.


We had a Navigator's Verandah in our room - this photo is of our first view of the ocean from our stateroom. We didn't hang around the room long - we were hungry, so we went upstairs to the Beach Blanket Buffet.
After the meal, we wandered the ship a little and eventually ended up on the 10th deck to watch the Sailing Away party. The Entertainment host was a guy alled Pikey (from Australia) and he was definitely filled with energy!! The whole Disney gang came out during the party to help us on our way. The theme for the cruise was "Adventures Away" - and they sang us a song by that name at least twice a day.


We wandered around the ship a little bit after the party was done and we were officially on our way. I was snapping constant pictures, enjoying the new Nikon D3000. Here's Goofy's Pool, which has a super cool water slide. We never quite got to any of the 3 swimming pools onboard...too many other things to do. But they look cool!

We headed up to the front of the ship so we could get a photo as we sailed off into the distance.

Here's Andrew, as we sailed away.
Disney had some great entertainment on the ship. Each night there was a different show in the Walt Disney Theatre. The first night, we saw The Golden Mickeys, an award-show style compilation of lots of favorite Disney moments - Tarzan, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Cruella, Sleeping Beauty, Pocahontas, Toy Story, The Lion King (featured here), and more.

Finale pose. I was suprised at the great quality photos I got with no flash!!

Each night, our stateroom hostess left us some chocolate and a cute little towel animal. Fun!

Here's a view of the main lobby from above (the 5th floor, I think). Notice Captain Mickey having a Meet-and-Greet session with some kids at the bottom of the staircase!
We had dinner at Triton's - a French-style restaurant. We were not thrilled with the food - if you know us at all, you know how picky we are! Andrew had Lobster Macaroni & Cheese. I had some sort of chicken, which was unmemorable. By this time, though, I was starting to feel a little seasick. First time on a ship...I hadn't know what to expect. I was pretty miserable by the end of dinner, even after taking some complimentary seasickness medicine that Guest Services gave me. Since I wasn't feeling great, after dinner we just went back to the stateroom, where I pretty much crashed. Thankfully by the next morning, I was feeling just fine. Overall...the first day was long and busy, but very fun. But the adventures had just begun!

More soon!

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