This is second post in my series about our cruise on the Disney Dream in April 2018! If you haven’t already, make sure you read day 1 first 
DAY 2 – APRIL 24, 2018
After our first jam-packed day on board the Disney Dream, we woke up after a refreshing sleep to enjoy day 2! And this was going to be an especially exciting day because it was my 25th birthday!!!
There were a lot of exciting things on the agenda today to celebrate my birthday so we were up early and ready to go! We were docking at Nassau today for our first stop of the cruise.
We started our day by doing our makeup outside on the verandah!
We didn’t want to mess up our towel penguin from the night before so he sat in the chair and worked on our Muppets mystery while we got ready.
Then it was time for breakfast at Cabanas!
It’s the main buffet dining area that’s open pretty much all day. We ate breakfast there most days since it was quick and easy and we always had lots of fun plans we wanted to go to!
They have a huge variety of food and everything was pretty fresh since there were always so many guests eating there!
My favorite is that hot syrup container – it seems silly but at almost every Disney buffet I’ve been to on land they just have a giant vat of syrup instead that you have to ladle out on to your food, and it just gets everywhere and is so messy. This is so much more intuitive!!! We need this at Walt Disney World buffets!
Our spread was pretty good:
All week I enjoyed the most delicious juice at breakfast! It’s the same passionfruit, orange, and guava juice they have at Walt Disney World and Aulani, also known as POG juice or jungle juice. It’s my favorite!!!
Once we finished eating we headed downstairs to go ashore!
Once we were on land we took a few photos of the absolutely stunning Disney Dream and set out to walk around Nassau. To be honest, we had a clear destination in mind which was… Starbucks. None of us really cared to spend that much time in Nassau and we all agreed we would rather spend most of the day on the ship. We decided it wouldn’t hurt to get out and walk around a little bit just to say we did, and also to pop into the Starbucks for some wifi so we could post a few photos and such!
If you’re wondering, the Starbucks is past the main dock area. Once you get into town you’ll turn right and see that sign above. It’s very close.
Once inside we enjoyed a few minutes of wifi and checking in with the outside world! There’s a really nice seating area upstairs so we stayed there for a few minutes just hanging out a bit.
Before long we headed back to the ship!
On the way in of course we took some more photos!
It was a quick trip on land but that’s all we really wanted! None of us were really interested in doing anything else on Nassau – next time I honestly think we might stay on board and treat it like a day at sea. There are so many other things we wanted to do that there wasn’t much time to spend on land!
When we got back to our room we were so excited to see that we had received some fish extender gifts!!!
Someone had pixie dusted us! I talked about fish extenders in my last post but if you don’t remember, it’s an unofficial thing where you can sign up to exchange gifts with other staterooms. We booked our cruise too late to sign up this time but we had left our names on our facebook group spreadsheet to receive any extra gifts that anyone had to spare, and we were so excited to get our first one!
Inside were some cute homemade magnets and some candy! The fish extender gifts aren’t anything crazy or expensive, just little fun surprises and we were so excited to have gotten our first one. I cannot WAIT til our Alaskan cruise when we can bring our own!
We dropped off Grant to the room where he wanted to take a nap, and Chris, Sarah and I headed out to do some activities. Our first destination was one of the pubs – they host a lot of activities in the adult areas during the day!
On the way there we walked by the movie theatre again and saw the first souvenir that we absolutely had to get:
These are GLOW CUBES that look like Thor’s hammer!!! We weren’t sure if these are normally offered on the Dream since it doesn’t do the Marvel cruises, but we snatched them up anyway. We also got one for our friend Ana who we were missing so much the whole time!
After our purchase we tried to sneakily get some info about a very exciting event that was happening while we were on board – Avengers Infinity War was set to come out on land the day we came back, and we were crossing all our fingers that we would get to see it premiere at sea! We tried to ask the cast member at the concession stand if there was going to be a premiere but he was tight-lipped and didn’t let anything slip. We would find out the truth soon!!
Anyway – after that brief distraction we were at the pub, in time for our first activity which was crafting!
The activity immediately after our crafts was trivia, so we also grabbed a trivia sheet on the way in.
The craft we were doing was an adults only offering (a trend on this trip) and we were making tile coasters! We didn’t really know what we were getting into haha but it sounded fun so here we were. The tables all had this plastic wrap stretched across them and a cast member came around and gave each table a big glob of glue.
Then they had us come up and collect some other materials – a small blank wooden coaster, a cup full of different colored tiles, and a few other things.
And then we got to work! Look how much fun Chris and Sarah are having!
It was a very simple craft – you literally just lay the tiles in a design that you like and glue them down haha. Nothing crazy here. The hardest part was that we kept running out of purple tiles – does anyone have any more purples???
I thought it was really cute and fun that they had things like this for adults to do. I constantly feel like adults don’t get to just do things like this because it’s “kid stuff”, and it was nice to be able to just sit down and do something fun and silly. Sometimes rude people are very critical of adults without children who take trips to Disney and similar kid-friendly places, but I think I’ve gotten more out of Disney experiences as an adult than I ever could have as a child. Chris and I don’t want to have kids ourselves, so why should we never be able to enjoy these child-friendly experiences again? Just because people say we can’t? I didn’t mean to get off on a tangent here on a lighthearted Disney cruise post haha but I just think it’s really cool how many adults-only activities there were on the cruise. It was really nice to be able to enjoy things like this and just have fun on vacation without being judged for not having kids!
Anyway. We actually had a lot of fun making our coasters! Sarah went for a cool tropical design, and Chris and I both made our initials!
After our tiles were done it was time for our next thing, which I mentioned above was trivia!!
They had a lot of trivia games going on throughout the day and this one was Ultimate Disney Trivia. We were so excited to play. A little known fun fact about me: my friendship with my two best friends (Sarah and Ana) actually started in part based on a Disney online community where we played games like trivia haha! Needless to say it’s a very important part of our friendship!
However… they weren’t kidding when they called it ultimate because the questions were really hard LOL
As soon as the questions started coming up we were like ….okay we’re in over our head hahaha. Starting with the VERY FIRST QUESTION we were really challenged!! If you can’t tell what it says: “In the film Iron Man 2, where is the Stark Expo 2010 located?” Listen, we’re big Marvel fans but they really didn’t have to go off like that on question number one!!! And Iron Man 2 is objectively the worst Iron Man movie and one of the worst in the MCU!! No one is checking for Iron Man 2 like that!!
So yeah, some of the questions were really hard! But it was weird because some were also so easy and I think most Disney fans could get them! I took a photo of our answer sheet – I don’t remember all the questions but I think I can probably figure out some of them from looking at our answers…I wish I would have vlogged this so I could remember all of them (next time!!)
Some I can remember based off our answers – how many ghosts are in the Haunted Mansion, what fraction is on the Mad Hatter’s hat, what is Michael, John & Wendy’s last name in Peter Pan, what is the dog’s name in Pocahontas, what type of pet does Maleficent have and what is it’s name, what does Ariel call a fork, what is Eric’s dog’s name in The Little Mermaid (I can answer questions about Disney dogs all day ok), the names of the seven dwarfs, and a lot more. It was a good mix of parks questions and movie questions. I felt like the overall trivia level was pretty hard! As you can see on question #11 we just wrote “NO” so clearly this went well.
But it really didn’t go as poorly as one would think – according to my notes we got 15 right, and we got second place! Aka the first loser. We are VERY competitive so we were sad not to win, and determined to complete a redemption arc before the cruise was over.
The next thing happening in the pub was sports trivia which we nope’d right out of! We went back to the room to drop off our coasters and pick up Grant. We were hungry again so we got some more food (I swear all we did on this cruise was eat!)
We also popped into the cute nearby Cove Cafe, but didn’t end up getting anything.
We DID end up getting something sweet elsewhere though…
Vanellope’s!! I was SO EXCITED to check out this relatively new addition to the Disney Dream. It’s an ice cream shop obviously themed like Vanellope from Wreck it Ralph. We absolutely LOVE Vanellope in this household so we could not wait to check it out. It seemed like a perfect stop for some birthday ice cream!!
The whole shop is SO cute, perfectly themed with so many cool details!
They had the most amazing assortment of ice cream and gelato I’ve ever seen!!!
They had regular gelato as well as specialty flavors with tons of ridiculous mix-ins – I was SHOOK at how good everything looked!! My mouth is watering just looking at it again!
We sampled a LOT of flavors before deciding – they were all so good.
They also gave HUGE scoops… my “2 scoop” cup actually had like 5. It was massive!!
They also had every topping you could ever want in your life!!!
It wasn’t JUST an ice cream shop though – they had lots of other sweets and treats too. It was like everything sweet you could ever possibly want, honestly.
Since Vanellope’s is a specialty dining offering, everything in there was for sale, not “free” like the other regular food you got on the ship. So there was a charge, but in my opinion it was totally worth it. Everything was really reasonably priced. Our ice creams were only a few dollars each!
The flavor I went with was a perfectly pink ice cream called King Candy – it tasted like cotton candy and had different types of candy mixed in too! It was so amazing.
In short we absolutely stan Vanellope’s. It’s SO cute and it made a delicious treat for my birthday!!
After our ice cream we had nothing to do on the schedule for a few hours, so we FINALLY had time to go to the spa! I wrote a separate post about our experience with the Rainforest Room because there were a lot of photos and this post is already going to be really long lol. You can read that one right here!!
Rest assured we absolutely LOVED the Rainforest Room and I can’t wait to do it again on future cruises!!
After our spa time we had yet another activity planned (we really like structure here if you can’t tell) that we were really looking forward to. Similar to Disney Parks, DCL offers a few fun tours (you can read some of my reviews of Disney Parks guided tours here and here!). Something we had read about before the trip that we really wanted to make time for is a tour called The Art of the Theme Show. It’s an adults-only offering that basically takes you to a few special places on the ship and shows you all the details inside. It happens a few times during the cruise but we had read to take it early in your trip, so you can fully appreciate all the details throughout the cruise. We LOVE behind the scenes things so we knew it would be a must do for us! The tour was set to start from the top, in a lounge on deck 12 called Meridian.
It had a “world traveler” type of theme, which was so cool!
There were surprisingly a lot of people there, which made for a nice sized group when our tour guide Kevin showed up to get started. He explained that this tour would take us into a few adults-only and otherwise exclusive areas of the ship to show us some really cool insider info on each of them. We were so excited to get going!
Our first stop was the adults-only specialty dining areas also located on Deck 12, Remy and Palo. We had plans to dine at each of them later in the trip and were so excited to get a preview inside before then. We started inside Remy, the super beautiful fine dining experience themed after the film Ratatouille! It’s important to note that Ratatouille is my favorite Pixar movie and one of my all-time films just in general, so eating at Remy was another must-do for me on this cruise!
Just inside the doors to Remy is a wine room with seemingly hundreds of different specialty wines. Kevin pointed out a few that had special significance, including some that are referenced in Ratatouille as well as some of the most expensive wines, which would cost over $20,000 a bottle 😵
Looking into the restaurant itself was like stepping into a dream – it was beyond stunning!
Remy offers a few different specialty dining opportunities – brunch, dessert, and dinner. We would be taking part in the dessert tasting a few days later and were so excited!! This restaurant was especially a Ratatouille-lover’s dream come true in particular because instead of hidden Mickeys, there were hidden REMYS!!!! There’s a little crystal Remy on the chandelier as you come in:
And more hidden Remys in the upholstery of the booths:
As well as on the backs of the chairs:
And in the railing:
They even had his whiskers on the mirror!!
They were everywhere!! My sweet little rat chef!!! Our tour guide explained the details of the restaurant to us – it’s modeled in an Art Deco style and is considered some of the finest dining you can get at sea. He said a dinner at Remy is estimated to cost about $400 a PERSON at a restaurant on land!! At $95 a person on board, it sure made it seem like a bargain. We could also tell how fancy and expensive it was because they had…
BAG CHAIRS!!! A CHAIR FOR YOUR BAG!! The only other place I’ve been in my life that had these was Club 33 at Disneyland and I was SO SHOOK to see them again!!
Everything about Remy was so fancy and unbelievably beautiful. We were VERY glad we chose to take this tour before eating there because we got to take everything in beforehand. It would have been a lot to absorb if we saw it for the first time when we dined there a few days later!
Remy also had a separate room in the back of the restaurant that is called Gusteau’s room, like the chef from Ratatouille! It’s just an especially fancy area – you don’t have to pay extra to sit there or anything, but it sure does feel extra special.
A small spoiler for a future day: our dining experience took place only in the main dining area so we didn’t get to eat in here, which made me even more glad that we had done this tour because we would have never even seen this room otherwise! I think I’ll definitely request to eat here whenever we go next time! It has a look into Remy’s kitchen as well as a beautiful mural made to feel like you’re looking out over Paris:
It was all just really stunning and I was so glad we got to see it all. Once we’d had our fill we made our way back out of the restaurant, more excited than ever to eat there on Thursday! Kevin pointed out the beautiful bouquet of roses on the way out, and explained that everyone who had dinner there was given one as a parting gift after their meal:
So charming! Remy is such a delight. It’s only on the newer ships, the Dream and Fantasy, so we unfortunately won’t be able to eat there when we sail away on the Wonder next year. I look forward to going back next time we’re on the Dream or the Fantasy though!
After we were sufficiently blown away by Remy, we headed over to its neighbor across the hall, Palo:
Palo is another adults-exclusive specialty dining experience. Where Remy is French-inspired, Palo is Italian-inspired, and equally beautiful! We had plans to eat here the very next day so we were also really excited to see inside.
As soon as you enter Palo, you’re greeted by this amazing blown glass light fixture. It’s meant to represent spaghetti and meatballs!
This is another adults-only dining area and it’s also VERY fancy.
Palo offers a specialty dinner for $30 a person as well as a brunch on sea days. We would be dining there for dinner the very next day and could not WAIT to eat here after seeing inside!
They had this special area called the captain’s table, considered to be the best seat in the house. Kevin told us that this table could be requested for larger groups when you eat there for dinner!
They also had a larger hall-type area that he said was often used for special events:
Palo was gorgeous and fancy, and again, we were so happy we took the tour before eating there so we could get a sneak peek! Palo is on all 4 Disney Cruise Line ships, and I am eagerly awaiting taking my whole family there on the Wonder next year!
After we finished up in the fancy restaurants we made a quick stop at the kids’ club on deck 5, before heading down to another adults-only area: the bars and lounges. Of course, we had already explored a lot of this area (see my day 1 post) but we were interested in hearing the hidden details and background stories nonetheless. Kevin told us lots of cool info about all the bars, and we even made a stop at our favorite place – Pink!
He actually told us a lot of cool details we hadn’t noticed about Pink before – like the fact that the bubbles on the wall occasionally showed pink elephants (I couldn’t get a photo, RIP) or that the bar was designed like a corset, or that all those light bulbs just above the bar are champagne bubbles!
It just made us love the place even more!
We ended at the atrium area of the ship.
For our last stop Kevin told us a few fun facts about the area, and also made everyone sing Happy Birthday to me, haha! It was a pretty fun way to end our tour. We honestly had such a great time on this tour and I would highly highly recommend it if you’re interested in learning behind-the-scenes fun facts like us! It was a great way to really appreciate all the details that go into these spaces.
Once our tour ended we made sure to thank our guide Kevin for an amazing tour, and chatted with him a bit about other Disney things too. We also asked about the Avengers premiere again and he hinted that some cool things would be happening!
After our tour, the next activity on the agenda was…bingo!!
I guess bingo is a very big deal on DCL – I had no idea!! It was on the schedule a lot, so we decided to give it a go. This is another activity that is important to our friendship, as it’s another example of one of the games Sarah (and Ana) and I played together online when we first became friends – we are very serious about our bingo, ok.
I was kind of confused as to how it worked but we figured it out quickly enough! Essentially the more you pay, the more chances you have of winning (obviously). They give you a combination of paper bingo boards and this electronic handset that gives you a number of electronic “boards”. The handset automatically keeps track of what boards you have that are the closest to having bingo – it’s all super simple and fun once you get the hang of it! The cast member who rang us up was also nice and gave us a couple of extra boards because it was my birthday!
Bingo was SO MUCH FUN!! Seriously – we didn’t even win and we had a GREAT time playing along. There was a decent-sized crowd playing and everyone was just so hype and having so much fun. We got really close multiple times – they had you stand up when you were 1 away from winning, and we were stood up there a few times!
Like I said, we didn’t win but it was SO much fun. We would have played again if I felt like blowing $40 on a bingo game again haha
After bingo it was already almost time for the evening show! We popped back up to the room to grab some jackets and ran into a friend on the way:
In the room we also found that we had been pixie dusted once again!
So cute!! I could not believe how many people were nice enough to give us things – like I said, I can only imagine how much fun it’s going to be to exchange gifts on board our Alaska cruise!!
Then we headed down to the theatre for the evening’s performance of Beauty and the Beast. They were actually performing it twice on our cruise, because apparently people had wanted more opportunities to see it. We decided to see it on the first night it was offered so we could leave our second night open for other things!
At our Beauty and the Beast show, our cruise director came on board and made the OFFICIAL announcement that they were going to premiere Avengers Infinity War for us at sea!!! We knew it was happening obviously but to get that confirmation was so exciting – we were eagerly awaiting Thursday night!!
Beauty and the Beast was a really great show. It had a LOT of really cool effects that were really well done and I almost couldn’t believe I was watching them perform on a cruise ship! The transformation of the Beast turning into a human was especially cool. Be Our Guest was a WEIRD number but overall we were into it. We also especially loved the Wardrobe! We really liked the show but didn’t feel the need to watch it another time on the second night it was playing, so we were glad to have gotten it out of the way to clear up our second evening for other things!
If you are so inclined or interested, I found a video of the whole show here:
Tonight we were at our second rotational dining restaurant: Enchanted Garden!
We had already eaten here for lunch on our first day and really enjoyed it, so we were eager to see what dinner was like.
You can click the menus to see them larger!
The restaurant was just as lovely at night:
For our appetizer, we ALL ordered the lobster ravioli! Our server Steph said it was the best choice because each serving costs Mickey $6 to make so it was the best use of our money hahahahah
It was amazing, of course!! As for our other soups and salad starters, we had the following:
Cream of green asparagus soup:
Harissa lamb salad:
And heirloom tomato soup, my favorite!
That tomato soup was one of my favorites from our time on board – I swear just put a soup in front of me and I’ll be happy.
During this time the restaurant was transforming before our very eyes into a nighttime garden scene – it was so stunning!
On to the entrees!
First we have Sarah’s pan seared sea bass with risotto and a wine sauce:
Grant’s slow roasted prime rib with potatoes and vegetables:
Chris’s pork tenderloin medallions with roasted potatoes, collard greens and a sour cream sauce:
And my marjoram scented roast chicken with sweet potatoes and spinach:
We also ordered the caramelized sea scallops to share – we really wanted to try everything!!
Everything was amazing, but I think my favorites were the scallops and the prime rib. I love a good meat and potatoes meal, and this one did not disappoint. I loved traveling with a group of 4 people because we got to try a lot of different things that way!
Speaking of which – the best part about cruise dining is that since everything is included, we were encouraged to try things that we don’t normally get to eat. In restaurants on land, oftentimes our decisions are determined at least in part by the price of the item, and we might be afraid to branch out and try something we weren’t sure if we will like in fear of wasting money. Since everything is included on the cruise, we can try whatever we want without that fear and really get to try a wide variety of new things!!
Once we finished our meal it was time for dessert:
Steph had us choose what we wanted and then brought mine out with a birthday song! It was so fun and special and really put the cherry on top of my amazing 25th birthday!
For our desserts, we had – the chocolate garden torte:
The southern-style pecan tart – this was a hit for all of us!
Warm sticky date pudding:
And the chocolate brownie sundae:
Everything was great! We enjoyed our dinner at Enchanted Garden, and it would actually be our last time dining there because the next night was our Palo reservation. It was a great birthday meal!
After dinner we had plans for a few more things (I’m realizing now that we really crammed a lot into this day!) We headed up to deck 4 to pop back into the lounges for some games. The first thing we wanted to check out was something called “Dream Quest”, which was described as a scavenger hunt and marked as adults only. We love scavenger hunts, and we especially love hanging out without children, so it really grabbed our interest.
When we arrived, Dream Quest was explained further and it was quickly made clear that it was going to be a lot of fun.
They split us up into group teams – we were team 1! The host would call out an item and we would need to bring it up to him to get points. For example – he called out asking for things like a Key to the World card, some cash, or something red, white and blue. It reminded me of the type of games you’d play at a bridal shower or something, like a “what’s in your purse” kind of game. He challenged us though – the first few were easy, but then he started to trick us by asking for things like “a piece of fruit” (we held up our iphone with an apple on the back) or a man wearing women’s shoes (Chris put on Sarah’s shoes in a flash, it was amazing!!). It was SO much fun. There were a few tables of people around us who showed up later and weren’t playing, so they helped us out and gave us things we were missing – it was a lot of ridiculous hijinks and again it was so fun to have something that adults could just enjoy and have fun doing without judgement!! It was seriously so much fun and we really bonded with our fans who were helping us out haha! And thanks in part to them we actually WON!!! We all were awarded with these super cute luggage tags!
It was one of the most fun things we did on the ship and I was so glad we went. I hope we get to do it again on a future cruise!!
After our victory we decided to stay put for the next game, which was “Match Your Mate”: a Newlywed Game-style thing where couples got up and answered questions about each other. This had been heavily advertised as a really exciting and fun thing not to be missed, so we were excited to check it out. They first asked for the couple that had been married the least amount of time (there was a couple who had gotten married just a few days prior and were honeymooning, so they obviously were chosen), and then for whoever had been married the longest (a couple who had been married for 25+ years). Then they had a “wildcard” couple, which they chose based on a dance-off. We weren’t going to get up and participate, but the music they chose for people to dance to was Gaga, and I can’t control myself when Gaga comes on, so…
We were up and dancing. I didn’t actually want to be chosen because I knew I would get anxious in front of people haha but we had fun dancing anyway. And we did not get chosen anyway so it was all fine! For getting up and dancing in front of everyone though, they did give us a consolation prize of a few more DCL luggage tags, which we gave to our fans who had helped us win Dream Quest.
Match Your Mate was so much fun to watch though – probably not for everyone, but I was really glad we stayed to watch. I was also equally glad we did not get chosen because some of the questions were VERY embarrassing and revealing and I knew I would not have wanted to answer them in front of everyone haha! It was a little risqué and obviously adults only for a reason, but the couples who were on it were really into it and everyone had a good time. And the honeymooners ended up winning, how cute!
Once we were finished with that it was about 11pm and we were starting to wind down, but didn’t want to go to bed just yet. First we made a stop to grab some more late-night eats outside the bar and lounge area… these little bites were seriously my jam pretty much every day:
We quickly went back to the room to change into more comfortable shoes and then walk around some more. At our room we were SO excited to find our invitations for Palo and Remy for the following days:
As well as our newest towel animal – an elephant!!!!
I love the dedication they put into the towel animals on the cruise – it’s just another one of those differences that sets them apart from Disney Parks. The details like this just make it so special and fun!
We headed out one last time for the day, just to walk around a bit more.
It was just so nice to walk around the ship after mostly everyone was asleep. It feels so different from when it’s alive and bustling during the day.
Naturally we also got some late night pizza:
I seriously don’t know how we ate so much on this cruise. It’s like whenever we were bored and didn’t know what else to do we just ate.
We also took a quick peek into the movie theatre, where The Last Jedi was playing:
It happened to be the best part of the movie (in that red room where Rey takes over and fights Snoke with Kylo Ren) so we sat down and watched for a few minutes.
And finally, we made one last stop at the princess chair:
As you can probably tell, we were exhausted at the end of this JAM PACKED day! It was such an amazing way to spend my 25th birthday and looking back I can’t believe how much we did. Some of my favorite parts of the trip happened on this day and it was one of the best birthdays I’ve ever had! I can’t wait to do some of these things again on our next cruise.
Tomorrow somehow managed to be even better – it’s our Castaway Cay day AND we were eating at Palo for dinner, so there’s a lot more excitement to come!! I hope you’re enjoying these posts and that you’ll like the ones to come as well – it’s been long enough since we took this cruise that I actually had forgotten how much we did and how much fun we had, so I’m really loving the opportunity to relive everything here. And of course it’s only getting me more excited for our next vacation! Thank you so much for reading, as always ❤️
until next time!
