Disney Cruise - Day Four: Tunisia

Our next port of call was Tunis, Tunisa. I was pretty excited to be able to say I've been to Africa after this stop. Granted, it's really, really northern Africa, but I'll take it!

Our shore excursion took us to the ruins of the baths of Carthage. We lucked out and got tons of sunshine that day. In fact, our whole cruise was charmed with tons of sun, and every tour guide told us how lucky we were because just days prior it had felt like winter. Even our cruise crew couldn't believe our luck with the weather.

Caleb loved exploring the baths. Anything that involves rocks, dirt and climbing make that kid happy.

We also stopped at an ancient amphitheater in Carthage. Caleb loved climbing to the top of the steps and back down. Anything to wear him out!

Our next stop was the town of Sidi Bou Said, which was very pretty. All of the buildings in Sidi Bou Said are painted blue and white. Our tour guide told us the white was to help keep the buildings cool in the midday sun and the blue was to keep the mosquitoes away! I wonder if the latter works.
We toured a typical Sidi house, which was crowded but pretty. I recently finished reading The Constant Princess by Phillipa Gregory, which was a fictional account of Catherine of Aragon, Henry VIII's first wife. Gregory's account went into a lot of detail regarding Catherine's childhood growing up in Moorish villages that her parents had conquered. Touring this house made me think of that book.

We also had a bit of free time to explore the market stalls along the road. We picked up a few ceramics, a couple of which broke on the way home to England. Nuts.

I grabbed a coke in the cafe where our tour group was meeting.

When we got back to the ship, Caleb and I took a camel ride. I was worried he'd be scared, but he really liked it!

We hit the pool later that afternoon, and Caleb got in some good splashing time. He was becoming more confident, and as one of the older non-potty-trained toddlers, I had to really watch to make sure he was too enthusiastic in his splashing around the younger kiddos. (Don't worry, mom, we SPF'd him head to toe!)

That night we ate at The Animator's Palate again. The walls, which were decorated with black and white sketches of Disney characters, were filling with color that night. There were also screens playing scenes from Disney classics, which helped to keep Caleb entertained.

We enjoyed Malta and Tunisia, but we were really looking forward to our next three stops, which were all in Italy!

Disney Cruise - Day Three: Malta

I'm skipping day two since we spent it entirely on board the ship. I'll summarize by saying we hit the gym, we ate too much, and we watched "Up" in 3-D in the Buena Vista Theater on board. There! That's about it for that day! ;)

On the third day of the cruise, we awoke to views of Valletta, Malta from our verandah. It was gorgeous!

Since our shore excursion (or "Port Adventure" in Disney speak) didn't take place until the afternoon, and since it wouldn't involve Valletta at all, we decided to do a bit of exploring of Valletta on our own. Close to the port, there was a street lined with horse drawn carriages offering tours of the city. The first carriage asked for €140 for an hour long tour. We laughed and kept walking.

By the end of the road, a guy was offering a tour for €40. We weren't going to take it until we realized how much uphill walking we had to do just to get in to town. We were on a time crunch, so we decided to take him up on the €40 tour.

Towards the end of the tour, we ended up at a huge monument overlooking the harbor. It was an amazing view.

Here's a view of the beautiful Disney Magic! We saw a handful of other cruise ships in various ports, but none of them held a candle to the Magic!

We returned to the ship for lunch, and then got off again for our afternoon tours of Mdina and Mosta.

Mdina is a medieval, fortified town. We passed through the city gates and followed our tour guide around the narrow roads. We toured a church and passed along many of the homes owned by the town's aristocracy. You'll get tired of me saying this, but it was beautiful.

In Mosta, we had a chance to tour a cathedral inspired by the Pantheon in Rome. I'm glad we had a chance to see this one, since our tour in Rome a few days later didn't include the actual Pantheon.

This church had been struck by a bomb during World War II. The bomb pierced the domed ceiling that, incredibly, did not explode. This is my little weapon of mass destruction in front of a replica of the bomb.

We also had a chance to visit a craft village that was essentially an old military base converted into various craft shops and factories. We saw a glass blowing factory and a shop where they made silver filigree.

When we returned to the ship later that afternoon, Caleb had a chance to visit the toddler splash area. Since he isn't potty trained yet, he couldn't go in the kiddie pool, but he didn't seem to mind!

This day also happened to be Tommy's birthday! Our servers brought out a huge slab of birthday cake and sang him Happy Birthday. We were dining at Lumiere's that night.

It was a great day! We didn't make it to the evening's entertainment that night, which was a comedian. To be honest, I couldn't tell you what we did after dinner that night! But overall, it was a great day!

Disney Cruise - Day One: Welcome Aboard!

We started our cruise by winding our way through the line in the terminal and having our paperwork and identification thoroughly checked. Caleb did pretty well waiting in line, and to Disney's credit, the line moved fairly quickly .

We also had our first Mickey and Minnie Mouse sighting in the terminal. Caleb was excited to see them from a distance, terrified to get up close, and then ecstatic to shout, "I LOVE YOU, MICKEY!" as we walked away. His enthusiasm and fear turned out to be a pattern for pretty much the whole cruise.

As we arrived to the terminal, porters took our luggage for us. Disney had mailed us luggage tags a couple of weeks before with our room numbers on them, so the bags were magically whisked away while we got on board. We weren't able to go to our rooms yet because they were still being prepared, so we went up to the 9th deck to grab some lunch from the Topsider Buffet. Then we got to exploring the 9th and 10th decks, which were where the pools were.

We were able to get to our rooms before too long and drop off our backpacks. For the rest of the cruise, I carried around my camera bag which included a tube of lip gloss and my Key to the World Card, which is the card that counts as cash and gets you on and off the ship while on the cruise. I really didn't need anything else on board!

We checked out our room, which was a deluxe stateroom with verandah on the seventh deck. It was nice! It really did become our home for the next eleven days. Although I'm happy to be back in my own bed, I sure to miss the views from the verandah in Room 7594!

Our luggage hadn't arrived to the room yet, but it was time for our mandatory emergency evacuation drill! So we donned our life vests and headed down to Deck 4 where the life boats were to get a briefing on what to do in case of an emergency. Caleb wasn't excited about his big, boxy vest, and it was hard to hug and console him in my own big, boxy vest, but he survived (which, I guess is the point of a life vest, so hooray!)

That afternoon, they had a deck party at the Goofy Pool on Deck 9. The cruise entertainment staff and a bunch of Disney characters showed up to welcome us aboard. It was super fun. I'm totally a kid about this kind of stuff, and I had a blast dancing along and screaming for Mickey.

See the guy in the front? That's Dave. He pretty much has my dream job.

Dave is the Get-the-Party-Started Guy. For years, I've been saying my dream job would be to go to people's wedding receptions just to get the party started. I don't want to be the DJ. I want to be the person on the dance floor pulling everyone else out, the one who isn't afraid to do the funky chicken and even the sprinkler if necessary, the one who requests Dancing Queen and the last one off the dance floor. That's pretty much what this guy did. He was everywhere on the ship! I saw him in the Rockin' Bar D - a dumb name for a bar (I don't get it?) - but they had cool comedians and magicians and bands perform there every night. He was usually the emcee there as well.

The excitement of the day was a bit much for Caleb at this point, who fell asleep on Tommy's shoulders during the deck party. At the end of the deck party, they sounded the ship's horn to signal the start of the cruise. The horn sounded like the first eight notes of "When You Wish Upon A Star." It was pretty awesome to hear that coming so loud from the ship's horn, and the whole boat pretty much went crazy when it sounded.

For dinner that night, we ate at The Animator's Palate. On board the Disney Magic, you eat on a dining rotation. There were three main restaurants - The Animator's Palate, which was kind of general dining; Parrot Cay, which focused on Caribbean-inspired food; and Lumiere's which featured fine dining with French influences.

All of them were amazing! Each night we ate at a different restaurant (on a scheduled rotation), and our serving staff came with us. By the end of the trip, Kendall and Walter knew what types of foods we liked, who were the experimental diners, and what drinks to bring without even asking. It was awesome.

We discovered our friends from base were sitting two tables away from us the first night. Caleb was very happy to see his friend Tehlaia, who is only two months older than him. Our servers noticed we were spending a fair amount of time at each others tables that first night and offered to let us move to their table permanently. It was nice to see familiar faces at the end of the days!

After dinner, we attended a live theater show in the Walt Disney Theater on Deck 4, which seats about 600 people. The show was called "Welcome Aboard; Let the Magic Begin." It featured a lot of the characters and really captured the excitement of our first day on board! The Walt Disney Theater was gorgeous! They had some sort of live performance, whether it was a play, a comedy act, a magician, or a talent show every night either before or after dinner (depending on your dining schedule.)

We were pretty wiped after that so we went back to our room to unpack and get settled in. We had only been on board since about 2 or 3 pm, but it was a full and long day, so we slept pretty well that night! We knew the next day would be a day at sea as we cruised down to our first port, so we were going to have plenty of time to explore the ship!

Disney Cruise - Arriving in Barcelona

So in my most recent blogging draught, I totally skimped on discussing the build-up, planning, stressing, excitement and anticipation that led to the 11 day Mediterranean Disney Cruise we just returned from. So let me just summarize in a word: AAIIEE!! It was a lot like that.

Okay, one more tiny detour. I'm going to set myself a goal to finish blogging the cruise within the next two weeks. I'd like to do a blog about each shore excursion, but I may combine a few. All the same, we had seven stops, so I think a two week goal is achievable. There! I've made it public. I don't want to disappoint you now!

Enough poppycock. Let's get to the trip!

We left the day before the cruise and went to Barcelona, which is where our ship was going to embark. Unfortunately, it was pretty cold in Barcelona when we arrived, and I had been hoping for (and was dressed for) warmer weather. Additionally, we struggled to navigate our way through the public transport, mostly because everything was in Spanish! My husband's high school and college Spanish classes didn't help us on the metro. We got a bit mixed up and ended up walking a ton the first afternoon because we couldn't figure out where to get off.

Our goal was to make it to the aquarium downtown, but when we finally got there, the line was so long and we were so cold, that we decided to just grab dinner and went back to the hotel. I did have some good sangria, but that's really all we accomplished the first day!

The next day, we decided to make it easy on ourselves and took a taxi downtown. We started at one end of Las Ramblas and just worked our way up. It was a beautiful first thing in the morning before it got too busy. The middle plaza-like section of the street was lined with market stalls.

Unfortunately, we had a hard time finding a place open for breakfast (at 8 am!) So we settled for some super yummy pastries in a shop along the way. And I totally grabbed a Starbucks coffee. Terrible, I know.

We made it to La Sagrada Familia, a cathedral designed by Antoni Gaudi. It was beautiful, even with the scaffolding around the outside. The inside was beautiful, too.

From there, we hit a market along Las Ramblas which was quite seriously bursting with the freshest, most colorful fruit and vegetables I've seen. I wanted to move in there. Unfortunately, it was also bursting with people, and Tommy was eager to get out of there fast.

At the end of Las Ramblas, there was a huge, open square we wandered around for a while. The weather was much better the second day and downright warm by this point. We fed the pigeons, which was fun. And then we promptly sanitized our hands.

Nothing like a self-portrait with pigeons in your hands!

From there, we caught a taxi back to our hotel and then another to the port to board our ship! Our stay in Barcelona was short, and I wish I had had a chance to see more, particularly of Guadi's other buildings. But it was time to board the Disney Magic! And we couldn't wait!

Still here!

Remember how I said I was going to try and commit to blogging daily back in January? Well, clearly I have not met that goal. Not even close!

But if it makes you feel any better (and I'm sure you couldn't care less), I do think about blogging almost daily. The problem is really finding the time. Work days are long days. And right now Mr. K is out of the country and Caleb is boycotting bedtime, both of which make work days even longer.

But I do think of you, my three-to-five loyal readers, often. In fact, I've even started a few posts to finish up the story of my brother's visit, but those posts haven't made it to the public eye because, quite frankly, they sucked. And I think you deserve better than that. So I'll shelve them for now, work on them later, and hopefully get back into the groove soon.

I haven't given up, I promise! (This is what I told myself in March when my diet and exercise plan fell apart for a bit due to illness and family visits. But hey, April has been good for that regime. Maybe it'll pick up for blogging, too!)

A volcanic plume is either a.) heading to England, or possibly b.) already over England. This doesn't affect me personally as I don't have any immediate travel plans. It did make my coworkers' day quite unusual and surreal, I'd say. But I did just want to say we haven't been struck by the apocalypse yet. Don't worry, though. We have plenty of canned goods and diapers should things get hairy. ;)

That's it for now, but no post is complete without a pic. So here ya go. Caleb enjoying a beautifully chilly English spring Sunday this past weekend. Here's hoping for good weather (that won't be clouded over by volcanic ash!) this weekend! :)