We're back! We had a little misadventure in the middle of our big trip, but I'll cover that in Part II. We took over 3000 photos so I figured I should break this up a bit, and the most logical break seemed to be the three cruise ships, so in this post I'll cover our time on the first cruise - the transatlantic crossing on the Disney Magic.
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| Disney Magic! |
We left from Miami and had to wait a LOOOOONG time outside in line before we could get in the cruise terminal. We heard from some other passengers that Disney recently changed the type of COVID testing and somehow this created longer than usual lines...maybe? Regardless, we were outside for about an hour before we finally entered the terminal and took and passed our COVID tests (hooray!).
The first task was to decorate our stateroom door! Aaron worked hard on some custom magnets for all segments of this big European vacation - he created the lower two magnets on the door. Normally we fill our Disney doors with magnets from all of our Disney cruises, but since we were going on 2 non-Disney ships and had to haul our luggage around all sorts of places, we limited the door to a couple of generic magnets and the current and most recent (Panama) Disney cruises.
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| Our door! Aaron made the lower two magnets |
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| Captain Mickey! |
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| Captain Minnie! |
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| Chip & Dale! These are my favorite characters to take a photo with. |
Dining on the ship was delicious and fun as always! We didn't manage to keep any of the serving team for the whole cruise...the head of dining staff was sick for the first couple of days, our main waiter came down with COVID about halfway through, and our assistant waiter had a family emergency a few days after that. We did get about a week of golden time with our proper team, and they were AWESOME. Our assistant waiter, Joe, made us origami almost every night.
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| We sat outside the buffet at the back of the ship for many breakfasts and lunches - amazing views! |
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| Dining in Animator's Palate |
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| Joe creating a fighter jet! |
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| Aris and Joe one morning in the buffet - this morning Joe had made me a beautiful flower from a paper towel!! He had it waiting when we randomly wandered into the buffet that morning. |
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| The last night of the cruise was our anniversary - if you zoom in you can see they brought us a special dessert with a 'Happy Anniversary' chocolate :-). |
Also as expected the entertainment onboard was incredible. Every sea day we heard from Bruce Kimbrell for an insider's view of a different aspect of the Disney company (and Disney World, Disneyland, etc.). Every sea day we attended "Anyone Can Cook" - a cooking class conducted (on this cruise) by the head of food and drink for the Epcot festivals. There were three main Broadway-style shows, including two of my favorites - Tangled and Twice Charmed. The adult activities director was amazing - she was so lively and entertaining that we went to her game shows nearly every night even though they started well after my preferred bedtime. One of my favorite evening shows was with Siegfried Tieber - a very entertaining magician who has been on Penn & Teller: Fool Us twice! Siegfried invited me on stage to help with one of his tricks with a Rubik's Cube. He held another small magic show and then a Q&A when he actually showed us how to do a basic card trick. We loved this guy!
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| On stage with Siegfried! I'm 'solving' the Rubik's Cube behind my back |
We ended up having to skip our first expected stop at the Azores due to a storm. The captain did not feel he could safely dock with the predicted waves, and was further concerned that sailing through the storm would be very uncomfortable for everyone on board. To his credit, he came to talk to us in person before the evening show the day they announced the cancellation. He had prepared a nice set of slides to illustrate the problem and his solution (skipping the Azores and gunning it to get to Lisbon ahead of the storm). We understood and appreciated the reasoning, but it was still a bummer to miss the Azores, as we had never been and were looking forward to it. On the bright side, this added one more day at sea, and the days at sea are really remarkable on a Disney ship, so that was good. In fact, when we finally arrived in Lisbon, the cruise director asked if we were excited to be done with our 8 days at sea...and the majority of the crowd cheered much louder when he suggested we could just keep on cruising and add a 9th day at sea!
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| Our captain and his explanation of our escape from the storm |
Finally: our stops! On the evening of our 8th day at sea we finally found land in Lisbon, Portugal. In a rare event for Disney, we docked in the evening and were allowed off the ship at dinner time. The dining rotation on Disney is such an integral part of the cruise experience that they normally make sure they are sailing at dinner time, but they made an exception this time I think as a slight compensation for missing the Azores. We went ahead and got off the ship and walked to a nearby square to observe the sculptures and get a drink with free wifi - Aaron tried a local drink called ginja that tasted like a cherry port. The view of the Lisbon skyline from the ship was beautiful, and we enjoyed an incredible moon rise over the city that I just couldn't capture in a photo despite my best efforts.
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| Nighttime at Lisbon |
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| A view of the city from Castelo de Sao Jorge |
After Lisbon we enjoyed three stops in Spain - Cadiz, Malaga, and Cartagena. We enjoyed each of these, though none had quite the old world charm of Lisbon.
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| In Cadiz we witnessed the low tide that beached many boats - in the foreground you can see a couple of men taking the opportunity to get some work done on their boat! |
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| A small RV park in Cadiz! We took a lot of pictures of this because we had never seen an RV park in Europe before...we came to find out as we continued to travel that small RVs are actually VERY common in the touristy areas of Europe, but at the time of this photo it was still a novelty to us. |
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| Outside Castillo de San Sebastian, which we couldn't tour as it is still active, but we enjoyed the half mile walk to it across Paseo Fernando Quinones |
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| At the Roman Theatre in Malaga. The Alcazaba, an incredible mostly restored walled city, is visible on the hill in the background. |
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| The Roman Theatre in Cartagena (we saw a LOT of Roman Theatres on this trip...this was the best restored). I'm sitting in the women's section of the theatre. |
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| While touring the museum at a mostly closed castle in Cartagena, Aaron found a postcard with a submarine on it. We spent the rest of our time hunting down the submarine...we found a whole shipyard actively working on submarines as well as this small Naval Museum annex featuring the first fully electric submarine. |
At the end of nearly two blissful weeks on the Disney Magic, we finally arrived at our debarkation port in Barcelona. Sad times!! Then the real adventure began...but that's a story for the next post.
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| Goodbye Disney Magic! |
