Walt Disney World wasn’t the final destination of the winter vacation that I wrote about earlier this month. After two days at Disney’s Animal Kingdom Lodge, Disney transportation picked us up and drove us to Port Canaveral. There, we boarded the Disney Magic, one of two ships on the Disney Cruise Line, and sailed to Key West, Grand Cayman, Cozumel, Disney’s Castaway Cay in the Bahamas, and back to Port Canaveral.
Before I go into details, I’ll warn you—I’m going to sound like I was paid by Disney to write this. I wish I were. I’m just a huge fan of Disney vacations, and especially their cruises.
The Disney Magic from Castaway Cay
My family and I took our first Disney cruise in January 2006. Over four days, we sailed to Nassau, to Castaway Cay, and back to Florida on the Disney Wonder. Just like the corporate bigwigs must have planned in their meetings, we were hooked. Before we even left the ship, we booked another cruise.
In January 2007, we took our first seven-night Disney cruise. This one brought us to Key West, Grand Cayman, Cozumel, and Castaway Cay. Before we disembarked, we fell for their evil plan again—we booked a third cruise. Our third cruise would dock at the same ports, but this would be a holiday cruise over New Year’s Eve 2008.
The Art Deco Lobby of the Disney Magic
The almost two-year wait between cruises was tough. I think we started counting down about nine months before leaving. My daughter was packed at least six months early. I do have to say that the timing might not have been the best choice. It was pretty amazing to see Disney World and the Disney Magic decked out for the holidays, but leaving for a vacation on Christmas Day was a little hectic when you still try to work in all the family traditions. From the look of things on the ship, some people took their entire extended families on the cruise. There were groups of ten or twenty family members at some tables at dinner. Sometimes, we thought that our small family of three got a little lost in the shuffle. Before the end of the cruise though, I think that some of the crew realized this too and tried to make up for it. That Disney. Say what you want about them, but in my experience they always respond to their guests, and most cast members go out of their way to make vacations special for everyone.
Captain Mickey and Minnie
If you’ve cruised before but not with Disney, you’ll notices a few differences. First is the price. I won’t lie—a Disney cruise is expensive. For the same price, you could take three cruises on some other lines. But for anyone with kids, a Disney cruise may be the best choice. On board are three different clubs for kids—one for three to seven year-olds, one for eight to twelve, and one for teens. And by club, I don’t mean a place where they can have a juice and dance to Mickey Mouse Club hits for a couple of hours—I mean a place where they can actually hang out for about fifteen hours each day with a full team of trained counselors. My wife and I never left our daughter there all day long, but she would have stayed there if we let her—they make it that much fun. There are games, activities, parties with Disney princesses and other characters, “lab” experiments with Stitch, movies with Goofy, and tons of other stuff. They even take the kids to meals and outside on deck for fresh air and exercise. Another great feature of the Disney cruises is that the characters are so much more accessible than they are in the parks. One night on this recent cruise, we ran into Alice (from Wonderland) and Wendy (from Peter Pan) in the hallway and the lot of us stood chatting and taking pictures for a few minutes.
Walking to the Beach on Castaway Cay
With all the time that kids want to spend in their clubs, the adults must be bored, right? Wrong. There’s a full-service spa and health club, an adults-only pool, an adults-only restaurant, a dance club, a sports bar, a piano bar, poolside bars, a coffee bar…and there’s also just going back to the cabin for some time without the kids.
Other amenities onboard include a family pool, a kids-only pool, three formal family restaurants, a buffet restaurant, and several quick-service food stops. For entertainment, there’s a first-run movie theater (we saw Bedtime Stories just days after it opened, and could have seen about a dozen other movies) and there’s a live theater where each cruise you can see several different shows produced by the same team as Broadway’s Lion King and Beauty and the Beast. And all of this food and entertainment is free—well, free with the exuberant cost of the cruise itself. The only extras are spa services and alcohol.
Meeting Sleeping Beauty
From what Disney reports (I just know what I’m told) their cabins are a little larger than those on many other cruise ships. Each of them also has a split bathroom which can speed up the time it takes to shower and dress for dinner. Cabins range from inside rooms with no ocean view to the huge Walt Disney Suite—which I’ll probably never see in person.
I won’t go into writing about the ports that we visited other than to say that there are chickens on the street in Key West, there’s money in Grand Cayman, and there’s tequila in Cozumel. But there was one more stop and it’s the best of all. Like a few cruise lines, Disney owns its own island in the Bahamas. Disney’s is Castaway Cay and it’s always the final port of call on every cruise. For a full day, guests can hang out on the beach (where the ship’s crew become beachside waiters), try out lots of activities both in the water and on the land, eat at an island buffet with food served all afternoon, and shop at some of those ever-present Disney gift shops or at unique Bahamian shops that Disney doesn’t own. There’s also both a kids club and a teen club on the island for more of that alone adult time—which can be at one of several bars or at the adults-only part of the beach far, far away from the kids. (In emergencies—or just if the kids are having a bad day—parents are always reachable with pagers that Disney provides.)
There’s so much to see and do on a Disney cruise, that one week isn’t enough. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever been on a seven-day vacation where time flies as quickly as it does at sea with Disney. So are we going back? You bet we are. But I have to wait two years again. I think I’ll start counting down now.
