TransAtlantic Disney Cruise – At Sea

August 23, 2007

Today is our second day at sea, we have one more port before starting the crossing part of our journey. I read trip reports in preparing for this trip where people encountered unexpected rough seas in the Mediterranean but we had 3 to 5 foot seas, not any different really from the Caribbean.

Last night we set our clock back for the first of 6 extra hours we’ll get on this voyage. We slept in until about 10 then went for breakfast.

We plan to spend most of today just sitting on deck chairs getting some sun, and we’ve found our perfect spot — Deck 10 above the Quiet Cove pool. There are always chairs available and even though it’s not adults only on Deck 10 it’s still relatively quite. We turned our chairs around to face the railing and it’s nice to have a view of the calm blue ocean, that you can’t see from down on Deck 9. It’s close to restrooms that are just inside the elevator lobby one floor down and it’s much easier to get to the soda station by walking Deck 10 to the back of the ship and taking those stairs rather than dodging the ping pong players on Deck 9. I’ve always wished they had a soda station in Quiet Cove.

One more thing Disney really does right is that they don’t charge for soda, most other cruise lines you can buy a soda package, but here you just go to the station and help yourself. If you order one from a bar though it’s canned soda and they do charge for that.

Just aft of this spot beside the forward stack is a staircase that goes down right behind the gazebo in the Goofy pool area, it’s great when the characters do appearances there you can walk right down those stairs to take pictures of them without wading through the crowd waiting to have their pictures taken by the Disney photographers.

Back on our first day in Barcelona we were talking to a lady who was waiting for the port bus with us, turns out she’s with the Dream Team, who are awarding dreams to people in the WDW parks everyday as part of the year of a million dreams. They have 4 families on this cruise who won this trip just by being in the right place at the right time. We’ve seen them around the ship quite a bit they have two dream team members with them, the lady we were talking to,(I never got her name) and a videographer. Today they are set up next to us doing interview with all of the winners.

Our weather has been gorgeous and we spent all of today doing mostly nothing, apparently, because I have very few notes. I did note that in the Captain’s noon public address he said we were sailing just 14 miles off the coast of Morocco, but there’s a low haze and we can’t see it.

Tonight we saw “The Art Of the Story” stage show. This is a show they put together just for the Med cruises, they needed extra shows since these cruises were all 10 & 11 day cruises and two that were 14 day trans Atlantic, instead of the usual 7 days they do in the Caribbean. I didn’t read one good review this show, none that were terrible just not anyone who loved it.

They attempt to explain show elements such as lighting and color using movie clips and live scenes from various stage shows. I expected to like it even after reading the reviews as short scenes are usually perfect for my short attention span. But I have to say the reviews were right. It was especially uninspiring for those of us who go to the parks a lot, as the live scenes were just recycled from the parks stage shows. Oh Well it was still better than a night of television at home .

Dinner tonight was in Lumiere’s and Belle and Beast came in for a visit.

That’s the end of my notes but I believe this is the night we discovered they have Port in Sessions. They rest of the bars on the ship have been out of Port The server in Sessions told us they had gotten 3 bottles in Cadiz. She says there are a lot of Port drinkers on this cruise.

Only 3 bottles?

Lynn