Cruising Along – Day 1

Hello and welcome to a brand new trip report series!! I always love writing about our travels and this trip was SO much fun, I cannot wait to tell you all about it. This time around we’re CRUISING on board the Disney Dream!! I mentioned this trip back when we booked it and then when we got back – so now it’s time to talk about everything in between 🙂

Our characters this time are myself, my husband Chris, my best friend Sarah, and her boyfriend Grant! I went on a cruise with my family previously but everybody else was a first time cruiser!!!!

That’s enough introductions – let’s jump right in!

DAY 1 – APRIL 23, 2018

We were up and ready to go on our embarkation day! We had chosen 12:30 for our boarding time so we had a little bit of time to sleep in that morning. Everybody was sooo excited to get going so we started our drive to Port Canaveral!

We arrived at the port and parked, dropped off our bags, and headed into the cruise terminal. There weren’t too many people there so checking in was a breeze!

We got our key to the world cards and were so excited!

Something so fun about Disney cruises is that everything is done through your key to the world card. There’s no need to carry around any money or credit cards because you just charge it back to your KTTW card! Here you can see a few things – obviously our sailing dates and the ship (Dream), my name and Castaway Club number, and then our dining info. We had the late seating (less kids!!), our table number was 44, and our rotation was Animator’s Palate, Enchanted Garden x2, and Royal Palace. The “D” was for our evacuation group location in case of emergencies. And I don’t know what the 25 was for haha

So we had our KTTW cards and before we even knew we were boarding!

When you first get on the ship they announce your arrival with your last name, but since there were 4 of us we just told them Sarah’s last name haha

Once on board our first stop was to take some photos!!

After that we had some housekeeping to take care of. First we headed to Guest Relations to ask a few questions about wifi, our bags, buttons (!!) and a few other things. Soon enough we realized we were starving so we decided to look for some food. The crew members told us they were serving lunch at Enchanted Garden so we headed there!

The restaurant is so cute. It’s themed (obviously) like a garden and it’s really beautiful! The lights are little flowers that open and close as the meal goes on, which is so cool.

Immediately we were obsessed even just with the napkins – it’s the kind of tiny detail that makes Disney Cruise Line so special, in my opinion!!

The menu looked amazing, and we were all so hungry:

We decided to get a bunch of things to split. This reminds me – an amazing thing about being on a cruise is that all the food is included, so you can order whatever you want!! There’s no risk in trying something really out there because if you hate it you can just order something else 🙂 Amazing!!!

After we ordered while we still had a little bit of wifi, we all turned our attention to our phones and turning off all the auto-updating features. We found this post very helpful in making the most of the on-board wifi! We also all downloaded the DCL app. This ended up being a great decision because the app was so useful to us the whole time we were on board. They had each day listed individually which then expanded to show a list of all the activities that were happening that day:

You can favorite whatever activities you think sound interesting and it will automatically remind you when they’re about to happen. It was really helpful in remembering all the cool things we wanted to do!! They also had a fun chat option which we found helpful on board as well. And they had super cute Disney emojis!!

We also used this time to look over our Personal Navigator, which basically served as a paper version of the app with everything listed out:

Before long our food arrived!

Some of the things we got – the muffuletta sandwich, mixed greens salad, roasted beef sirloin, beef empanada, pennette pasta, and cookies & cream cheesecake. We ended up taking the dessert to go because we wanted to get out exploring some more! By this time our room was ready also so we wandered up there to check it out.

Our room was on deck 8, room 8544! I edited this deck plan so you can see exactly where we were and what room we had:

This ended up being an amazing location! Deck 8 was about halfway between the top and bottom of the ship so we usually weren’t too far from where we needed to be. We were also DIRECTLY next to the elevator which was so convenient. Our room category was Deluxe Oceanview Stateroom with Verandah!

Also, a quick note about our little seahorse there – on Disney Cruises a lot of guests do have thing called “fish extenders”. It’s basically little bags or pockets you can put on the outside of your door and exchange gifts with other guests. They call them fish extenders because you hang it on the little fish (or seahorse, for us) outside your door. Since we booked this cruise so last minute we did not have time to sign up for a fish extender group, but we did get a lot of “pixie dusting” from other cabins which was so nice! I’ll post some pics of those on later days. On our next cruise to Alaska we plan to bring gifts for lots of other guests for our fish extenders!

So our room – it was so cute!

Since I’m a silver Castaway Club member, they had a cute little bag waiting there on the bed for me! Everyone else will get theirs next year 😎

Of course it was smaller than the normal hotel rooms we were used to, but we were expecting that!

It had one queen bed and a couch that turned into a bunk bed. We took turns sleeping on the bunk bed. Here’s Chris and Grant trying to figure out how to turn the couch into a bed:

We also had a split bathroom which was cool and fun:

One side had the shower/tub and a sink, and the other side had the toilet and another sink. This would prove to come in handy when multiple people were trying to get ready!

And of course we had a very beautiful verandah!!

Not the most beautiful view at the moment but it got better soon! On my first cruise we didn’t have a verandah, just a window, but we were able to get one this time and it was so amazing! It was so nice to be able to pop outside and be right there next to the ocean.

We were so excited, we explored pretty much everything in the room. Even the artwork was super cool!

We also found our excursion tickets:

We couldn’t spend too much time there though – we had some exploring to do around the rest of the ship! We had a few housekeeping things to take care of with dining reservations and we also wanted to check out the spa, so we headed out to do that. But first:

We stuck a key card in the door. In the DCL rooms, you put your stateroom key in a little slot right inside the door to keep the electricity and air on. I used my Aulani room key to keep our AC on 🙂

So we went downstairs, snapping a ton of photos along the way:

EVERYTHING was just so beautiful and amazing and wonderful!!!!!

We took a pic next to Snow White in honor of our best friend Ana, who we were missing so much already:

And Sarah was so excited to see her favorite, Mulan:

If you can’t tell, we were just so excited about everything.

At the spa we entered a raffle (which we did not win) and booked the Rainforest Room for my birthday! I’ll give you all the details about that in a future post.

We also walked around the top decks before we sailed away:

We went back to our room to kill some time before our safety drill and saw that some of our luggage had arrived, yay! We also used this time to put on our sea bands – since none of them had ever been on a cruise before we didn’t want to risk them ending up seasick, and the bands came in packs of 2 so I got some too, haha. We ended up not really needing them much, thankfully!

We sneaked in a quick nap and some unpacking before the safety drill, then headed down to our drill location which was – the theatre!

Basically the drill is just to let everyone on the ship know what to do and where to go in case of an emergency. On my last cruise our meeting spot was out on one of the decks and it was crowded and uncomfortable, but this time we were pleasantly sitting in the theatre – how convenient. The drill was quick and painless and soon we were back on our way to roam the ship. We headed up to the top decks to watch the sailing away show, but it turned out that it was moved indoors because it was raining! But we were on our way up already and hungry so we just decided to skip it haha

On deck 11 we set out in search of food. And we found it! The quick service locations by the pools all serve different things:

By the time we got our food it was really raining hard so we just went back to the room to eat instead of suffering on the pool deck lol

Back at our room we were pleasantly surprised to find some little birthday notes for me and Sarah!

We enjoyed our food and then Sarah and I set out on a very important mission…booking our NEXT cruise!!

So, as I’ve mentioned before, we’re cruising to Alaska next year. My parents have wanted to do the Alaska cruise basically since we did our first cruise 5 years ago, and Sarah really wanted to as well. And this turned into a big cruise with the rest of my family and Chris and of course Ana had to come too! So we realized that the best way for us to be able to afford this would be to book basically a bounceback offer. Some of the best discounts you can get for the cruises are if you book your next cruise on board another one… we could not resist the temptation and were hoping it would be quick and easy.

And it really was! We just had to put down a deposit for a “placeholder” cruise, and then we could come back on land and discuss it with everybody and figure out all the details. And since we booked on board, we get all kinds of fun bonuses too like stateroom credit for next time and a discount on our total cost. Long story short – we are going to Alaska and we were (are) SO excited!!!

But that’s a future trip to talk about! Coming off the high of booking our next cruise, we got back to the room to see that the rest of the bags had arrived so we took some time to get settled. We had a bit of time before the evening show in the theatre so we hung out on the verandah and decorated our door:

You may remember my DIY post about making these! They turned out so cute!

We took advantage of the weather clearing up a bit for some photos:

And then we walked around some more. We wanted to explore every inch of the ship in the short 4 days we had on board!

Of course we also found and took some photos in the princess chair:

And then finally it was time for the show. The performance this evening was a show called Disney’s Believe, which I had actually seen on my last cruise. I kind of had hoped I would get to see something different, but it had been long enough that it didn’t really matter. The show was what I consider to be a typical DCL show – they basically have a very loosely-followed plot and just use any and every excuse to cram as many Disney characters as possible on stage and sing a bunch of songs. And I’m not mad about it tbh. The show was great, a little cheesy maybe but that’s to be expected. The performers were all wonderful and we especially loved the Pocahontas and Tiana scenes!

It was also at this point that we realized how shaky the boat was, because they were really booking it out of Port Canaveral to get away from the bad weather we had been experiencing earlier. It was the only time that we were all thankful to have our sea bands – it was SO shaky that we could have literally fallen over at any time lol and I know Chris and Grant were both struggling for a bit! But nevertheless we enjoyed our show and soon it was time to start thinking about dinner! We still had a bit of time, and we like to live life on the edge – so we decided to check out the shops and bars on the ship, despite the fact that we were literally falling all over the place from the shaky waters. It’s fine.

Our first stop ended up being our favorite, and one of our favorite places on the ship overall, but this should come as no surprise because this bar was literally called PINK:

You guys. This place was MADE for me. It’s a champagne and wine bar (my jam) and it’s all themed after the pink elephants from Dumbo, so the whole place was literally pink and sparkly. I could not THINK of a more Kaela-themed place if I tried. Sarah and I loved it so much that we immediately planned to come back for a photoshoots on future days.

I’m obsessed. It’s just such a cute little place! We decided to look at the menu and stay for a bit.

Chris & Grant making fun of us haha

We ended up getting some drinks!

I got a glass of wine, a moscato d’asti which is my favorite!! Every time I drink it now it reminds me of the cruise <3

Oh also – in case this place still wasn’t “Kaela” enough – there was a pianist in there playing songs from Broadway shows. We heard Les Mis, Phantom, West Side Story, Cats…!! It just literally could not be more perfect for me!! I could have sat there all night. But…we didn’t because soon it was time for dinner!!

We had intended to go to all the bars just to check out the offerings, but of course we loved Pink so much that we ended up spending all our time there before dinner. For our first rotational dining meal we were headed to my favorite, Animator’s Palate!

I’m pretty sure I’ve talked about rotational dining before, but in case you don’t know: on DCL they have three main sit-down restaurants for dinner, and guests rotate through them through the cruise. On my KTTW card at the top of the post you can see our dining rotation (AEER). The restaurants on the Dream are almost exactly the same as the ones on the Fantasy (the first ship I went on), so I was already familiar with it.

As you may have guessed, the whole restaurant is themed after animation!

Here’s what was on the menu:

The menu was actually very similar to what I remembered from my last time cruising on the Fantasy. In particular I saw some of the dishes that I LOVED last time so I was super excited to be able to get them again!! And of course – the best part about cruising is that you can order as much as you want! We actually had looked at the menu on our handy DCL app before heading to dinner (a feature that we ended up loving) so we already knew what we were going to be sharing and splitting.

I don’t remember who exactly got each dish but here’s everything we got!

Off the appetizer menu, sliced serrano ham with manchego cheese and olive tapenade:

Baked potato and cheddar cheese soup – one of my FAVORITE dishes of any meal on our entire cruise!! So amazing!!

I love soup so I also ordered this corn chowder off the kids’ menu:

This is the tomato tarte:

Another favorite from any meal we had – these are black truffle pasta purseittes, little pasta purses filled with cheese with a champagne sauce on top. They were so amazing! Sarah and I both got this and loved it so much!

This is the herb crusted pork chop:

The grilled tuna steak:

This one is a ginger-teriyaki beef tenderloin:

And a pasta dish to finish it off – pennete bolognese:

Everything was so amazingly good, as expected!

About halfway through the meal, the restaurant lighting changed colors to look like we were underwater:

And a little show started with Crush from Finding Nemo swimming all around the restaurant! It was like Turtle Talk with Crush in Epcot and super cute and fun. Our server encouraged us to swim along haha

Speaking of which – this meal was also our first time meeting our fantastic server team. One of my favorite things about cruising is how your server rotates with you! We had the amazing Steph from Wales as our lead server and Alejandro from Mexico was our assistant server, and we loved both of them. They were so attentive and personable with us and even though our cruise was only 4 nights, by the end of it we were so sad to leave them!

Anyway, back to the meal! During this first meal the ship was SO shaky and rocking so much that we were surprised our food didn’t topple over haha… I don’t know how the servers didn’t fall over with all the heavy trays they were carrying! It was seriously so wild, we could have fallen at any time. But that didn’t keep us from ordering dessert:

Steph let us order our desserts and then made a huge special presentation of Sarah’s for her birthday!

Here’s what we all got – starting with Sarah’s special birthday one, a chocolate mousse:

We also got the vanilla cheesecake with a chocolate fudge base:

A dark chocolate walnut mousse with raspberry sauce:

And a lemon cheesecake too!

Everything was so good and we were completely stuffed by the end of the meal! Alejandro played some brainteasers with us at the end that were so silly and fun:

Once we gathered enough strength to get up and walk again, we said bye to our team and headed back to the room!

Back at the room we were greeted by our first towel animal and turndown service!!

They had also prepared the bunk beds for us:

Once we settled a little bit (or at least our stomachs did) we headed out to explore the ship a bit more before bed.

We found some more food outside the bars area and somehow ate more despite having finished dinner just an hour ago:

Some of the munchings we found: empanadas, crudites, ham and cheese rolls, chicken satay, duck truffle mousse canapes, rice krispie treats, peanut butter cookies… I’m getting hungry again!

We also popped into another bar that we were interested in, called Skyline. This one is SO cool – it rotates every fifteen minutes through another famous city skyline, and the themed menu has drinks for each of them. It was awesome!

The cities featured were New York, Chicago, Rio, Paris, and Hong Kong:

We got a few drinks:

Regrettably I do not remember which drink this second one is lol but they were both good:

We just walked around the area for a while after we enjoyed our drinks, checking out all the cool details everywhere.

Even the bathroom:

Of course any late night wandering would not be complete without some stunning atrium photos!

The ship was SO quiet and peaceful without all the kids running around!

Finally, to round out our night we decided to start playing the cool detective game they have on board – it’s called Midship Detective Agency, and it’s basically a scavenger hunt. You go around looking for various clues until you can eventually solve the mystery. It’s clearly meant for kids but obviously we did it anyway:

And once we realized how tired we were, we finally headed back to our room!

We were SO pooped from our day of activities and it was only day 1! We were so excited to be on the ship and looking forward to so much we wanted to do on board. I think we had a really full day and got a good amount of exploring done, but the ship is so big that there was still so much to do…luckily we still had 3 days left 🙂

This series is obviously going to be shorter than normal because our cruise was only 4 nights, but as you can see by this post we still took plenty of photos!! I hope you enjoyed this post and will return for the rest of this series, and the rest of my trip reports in the future <3 xo!