Embarkation Day

I don’t think any of us had a particularly good night’s sleep last night. For me it was too warm and stuffy. The Novotel clearly states that it doesn’t have air conditioning, but the desk fan they provided didn’t seem to do much at all.

I had booked the cheapest room they had, as I figured that we were only there for one night, so it didn’t really matter. The bathroom and toilet areas were in separate rooms. The room with the toilet in was really small and was quite difficult to squeeze in and out of. The bathroom had a small bath, with a shower over it, and a wash basin. The sides of the bath were quite high, so it was tricky to get in and out of safely. But, as I said, it was only for one night.

First thing this morning, we looked out of the window at the end of the corridor, and we could see the Disney Fantasy! After seeing the Fantasy through the window, we headed down for breakfast. I had paid extra for the buffet breakfast and we enjoyed it. There was plenty of choice from breakfast cereal, full English, different pastries and pancakes. 

We chilled for a bit after breakfast because our port arrival time wasn’t until 12.15, and check out time was 12.00. We arrived at the port and parked in the disabled parking area at the Horizon terminal. The parking area was that close to the ship; it almost looked like we could walk to it from the car! As we parked, someone came and took our luggage for us, so we were just left with our hand luggage.

It took a couple of minutes to walk to the cruise terminal, where we were allowed straight in as it was just after our port arrival time. Someone saw John’s white cane and fast tracked us through security. Someone else fast tracked us through check in too and by the time we had done all that, our boarding group had been called! The whole process took about 15 minutes, so we were very pleasantly surprised by that!

A sit-down lunch was being served at Animator’s Palette, so we headed there. George and I chose seafood and chicken gumbo, and John chose beef sirloin. John ate his beef, and after hearing George and I say how good the gumbo was, he asked for one of those too! Afterwards we all had a Welcome Aboard sundae, which was also very good. Coincidentally, a lady and her husband were sitting on the table next to us, and the lady was someone who John had been chatting with on WhatsApp before the cruise. She gave John a Mickey head magnet, that had Genie on it as a picture, and John’s name on the left ear.

After we had finished eating, our stateroom was ready for us, so we went off to find it. The room had been decorated for George’s birthday and looked really good. We also got to meet our stateroom host Dewi, who was really helpful and said we could contact her anytime if we needed anything. I also got to look at the Disney cruise ship bluetooth speaker I had preordered. We spent some time in our stateroom and went to explore a bit. It was really, really busy, so we headed to the adults only area. We headed into the Cove Café, where you can get speciality teas and coffees for an additional charge, but the cakes are inclusive. George had a couple of cakes and John had nine cakes! I didn’t have any as I was still full from lunch.

At 4pm we had the muster drill and after that was the sail away party. The cruise is really, really busy and it was too people-y for me, let alone George, so we returned to our stateroom to watch the ship leave Southampton docks.

A little while later, John thought that it was a long time until 8.15pm, which is when we were due to have dinner, so we headed up to Flo’s café. John got himself 4 slices of pizza, 3 hot dogs and an ice cream! We headed down to deck 3 after that to get a “magic” photo with Genie’s lamp. John also managed to grab a photo with Daisy Duck. We thought we’d have a look in the shops after that, but the queues were horrendous, so we decided we would go and have a look after dinner.

Disney has three rotational restaurants for dinner and tonight’s rotation was Animator’s Palette. George chose pasta, I chose chicken and John chose chicken, pork and beef – that’s correct, he chose three main courses. Our server, Fahmi, said they were large portions, but John was adamant that he wanted three. He managed to eat all three, but when it came to dessert, he only wanted one! Fahmi brought out the birthday cake and a group of servers, plus guests around sang Happy Birthday to George. Around the restaurant are various screens, that look like they’re under water, and Crush (from Turtle Talk with Crush) goes around and interacts with different guests at the tables. On his last go around, he also sang Happy Birthday to George. Later on in the evening, Fahmi brought George’s birthday cake to our stateroom for us.

Stateroom hosts make a towel or a blanket animal when they do their turn down service, while you’re at dinner, with tonight’s animal being a turtle. We have to put our clocks forward an hour to Central European time tonight, so it’s an hour less sleep at the end of a busy day.