I used to think of Disney in the same way that I thought of minivans: “I will never…” And I was serious. Just as I truly believed that I would never, ever drive a minivan, I truly believed that I would never, ever take a Disney vacation. Disney was off the table. To me it represented everything that I loathed about parenting mediocrity; using perfectly good vacation time and spending WAY too much money to do something that everyone else does, something that you are supposed to do. In my mind, kids would enjoy lots of vacations just as much as a trip to Disney but WE could never enjoy Disney. When the kids got older their aunts could take them there and we’d go to the beach. Then we were offered a free Disney cruise. A complete fluke, someone that we knew had overbooked a Disney cruise and four tickets were offered to us. We would be fools not to accept a free trip, especially given the economy and the fact that our kids had never been on an airplane or to the beach, much less a cruise ship.
I love to be proven wrong and boy was I wrong about Disney. Disney has got it DOWN. Everything on that ship went off without a hitch. Everything was perfectly on schedule. Everything was perfect. Ours was a 3-night cruise, it left from Cape Canaveral, Florida on a Thursday afternoon and arrived back at port on Sunday morning. A Disney cruise is the best possible all-around vacation that I can imagine because it is an excellent mix of family time and adult time. There are “clubs” for your kids, and you can check them in and out anytime from about 8am until 1:00 in the morning. It’s not babysitting either, it’s kid crack. There are slides, dress up chests, TVs, and activities the whole time that they are in there. They don’t want to leave the kids’ club. Ever.
Here is an example of our Friday:
9ish: Wake up after night of excellent sleep in the insanely comfortable bed, call room service to bring us a
pot of coffee (room service is free!)
10:00 Go to breakfast, which is basically gourmet, the kids get a plate of fresh fruit and pancakes, my husband gets an omelet, I get steel cut oats because I don’t want to gain the requisite 7 cruise pounds, but end up going back for waffles anyway.
10:45: Kids go swimming in the Mickey Mouse pool, which on the top deck, is shaped like Mickey Mouse, is no more than a foot deep anywhere and has a giant slide.
12:15: Drop kids off at the kids’ club for Ratatoullie Cooking School, where they make chocolate chip cookies (We at this point have the option of going to the all-adult pool, working out, reading in a lounge chair, or retiring to our stateroom)
2:15 Pick up the kids and go have lunch
3:00 Kids swim at the Goofy pool while watching a Disney movie on the gigantic 100-foot movie screen.
4:00 Drop the kids off at the kids club for Dancing lessons with Snow White. We disembark to catch a little of the local flavor in Nassau.
6:00 Pick up the kids and go to the production of Toy Story, which is basically as good as a Broadway show.
7:00 Take the kids for burgers/fries, then back to the room to dress them as pirates.
8:00 Drop the kids at the kids’ club for pirate night
8:15 Four course, four star meal. Seriously it was insane. Here’s the choice of first course: crab rockerfeller, tuna or homemade asparagus soup. That’s not even getting into the salad, main course or dessert. It was this every night, food as good as any food I’ve ever eaten. Plus, dinner without kids and no babysitter to pay–how often does that happen? It happens every night on the Disney boat!
10:00 Pick up our kids up from the kids club (we could have left them there until 1am) and go to the top deck for the pirate party. The pirate party is hard to put into words, the Disney people are up on stage leading this massive and crazy fun mayhem that absolutely everyone is loving, and ends with a full fireworks show.
Then a divine sleep in a bed that did not make my back hurt once (practically a miracle), with all feather pillows and super high-thread count sheets.
The trip was absolutely perfect and if you told me right now that a year from now we could take any trip that we wanted, I would take the exact same trip again, well, next time we’d do a 4 or 5 night cruise. God bless Disney.
Castaway Cay, Disney’s very own island in the Bahamas, where you get to spend a whole day of your cruise. That’s the boat in the background.
