A tale of land and sea - day 8

[pho3nix]

Hi all,

Sorry for the delay in posting, no excuses other than life getting in the way!

My resolution this year is to be more organised and that includes getting this trippie completed!

Without further ado, here we go…

Day 8 – Castaway Cay & Enchanted Garden

18th September 2016

Today is the day I have been most excited about, reading the trip reports where you guys all visited Castaway Cay I was so jealous and NEEDED to go there – and so the cruise was added to the holiday!
I was awake bright and early (no mean feat for me, despite liking to get up early and get on with the way, I am most definitely NOT a morning person) and ready for the day ahead!

Headed to breakfast at 7:30am and as we weren’t in a huge rush I spent some time taking photos of the massive selection of food available – even the fussiest eater in the world would find a million things to eat!

After a good while deliberating I managed to make my selection and chose breakfast potatoes, hash, veg omelette, sausage, Mickey waffle & syrup and hash brown. All good but todays’ stand out was the Mickey waffle of course!

My plate:

Sophie’s plate – hash, hash brown, blueberry muffin, breakfast potatoes and bacon. Favourites were the hash and the breakfast potatoes:

After breakfast we popped back to our room so we could get our first glimpse of the Island as we arrived and of course took plenty of photos of the momentous occasion!

Once we had admired the view and collected our belongings we headed down to the gangway on the 1st floor – wow was it busy! A little tip would be to use the rear gangway as it seemed much quieter than the middle one we were at…

Our plan for today (well my plan!) was to head out onto the Island with my DSLR to get some photos before heading back to the boat to drop this off before heading back out with as little stuff as possible to go snorkeling/swimming and enjoy the beaches – I just couldn’t leave all my stuff especially my camera while we went in the sea and it’s no fun if one of you has to sit and mind the stuff and then switch! I really think they are missing something with lockers here!

Anyway, mini rant over! We collected our towels and headed off…
First we walked to the family beach and then the tram to the adults only beach – of course taking some photos along the way!

And the beautiful dream:

The adults only beach area was absolute paradise!

After admiring the view – how can you not stop to admire this – and picking our jaws up from the floor, we picked our loungers as our base for the day.

Back to the beach…we chose our spot for the day on the front row – two loungers and with this you also get two chairs that can be moved into the water. I was quite shocked (in a good way!) that there was no rental charge for the loungers. We did pay a fee ($10.95) to rent a tube.

The beds on the front row do have the best view but if do pick carefully – ours were on a bit of an incline and at times I felt like I was slipping down my lounger!

I spent the next couple of hours alternating between sitting on the lounger, sitting on my chair in the water and swimming – AMAZING!
Apologies now for the photo overload but it is such a photogenic place!

At about 10:30am we headed off back to the ship to drop off my camera – we used the tram to get there and save some time…
So after a quick nip back to the boat we headed back out – this time to the family beach.

Quick note – from this point all of my photos were taken on my cheap waterproof camera so not the best quality!

So our first stop was to collect some snorkeling gear – at $31 for the two of us I was definitely wishing we had picked up some cheap gear in Walmart!

Again, we lamented the lack of lockers. Come on Disney, some people want to do the activities together not one at a time and you can’t just have nothing as you need clothes and also your ID to get back onto the boat! We left our stuff near a lifeguard thinking that this might be the safest place although I did still worry the whole time we were snorkelling!

Enough of that and onto the snorkelling lagoon – the water was so warm and we enjoyed this so much! We saw plenty of fish, a couple of rays and even a few Disney surprises!

Continued in next post...

[pho3nix]

...Cont from previous post

By the time we finished snorkelling it was around 12:30pm so we decided to head back to the adult beach and grab some lunch at Cookies II. The food here is BBQ style and we loved it! I cannot complement enough the food and the staff who were working.

I had a burger with cheese, salad and some of the lovely red bell pepper BBQ salsa and I just had to go back for seconds of a hot dog and some BBQ ribs!

Plate 1:

Plate 2:

Soph had the steak, bbq ribs and salad and said the steak was great!
For pudding I had some lovely fresh watermelon and Soph had two ice creams – one banana & strawberry and one vanilla & chocolate.

After we had eaten our fill we headed back to the beach and spent the rest of our afternoon lazing around, swimming and floating on our tube. For a person who confesses to being unable to relax and needing to be busy, I found this afternoon to be absolute bliss! I don’t think I’m cut out for two week beach holidays but this day was fabulous. The water is so warm and so clear! You can see all the fish swimming around you even here!

At around 3:30pm we headed back over to the family beach to return the snorkelling gear and have a wander in the shops – nothing really took our fancy though and then headed back to the ship.

We decided it was still quite early and we didn’t need to get ready for the evening just yet so we popped up to the Satellite adult pool which we hadn’t made it to before.

This was great to just take a book and sit behind the blanket of the water and relax and cool down.

After relaxing in the pool for a while, we headed back to our room to get ready for our last show of the Cruise, ‘Believe’. This was a great show, very Disney and I may have just shed a tear, we loved our cruise so much and weren’t ready for it to be over! All of the debarkation papers were in our room – bad times!

We packed our cases before the show, and finished it off after.
A little tip I picked up on the Dibb which was really helpful was to pop down to the drinks station on the 11th deck to pick up a drink to take to the show rather than buy one outside.

We packed our two larger cases and put these out for collection and kept hold of our smaller case which we used for our valuables and for our clothes from this last evening.

Tonight, we were eating in the Enchanted Garden – beautiful setting!

If you read Day 7, you will know about the drama at dinner last night so safe to say we were a little bit nervous about tonight would hold! We arrived tonight before the mum and daughter duo and so were seated in the middle seats next to Ruth and Heather who had already arrived. We had such a great evening and chatted for the whole meal – mum and daughter were very quiet and didn’t seem too happy with tonight’s seating – every other night they had been in the middle and literally the centre of attention…

I couldn’t help but think how much nicer it would have been had we been seated with Ruth and Heather from the start or if the daughter had come with her sister as originally planned!

Tonight’s menu:

For appetiser I had Lobster Ravioli – this was really good and for the salad course I had the Spinach and Raspberry Salad which was also really nice.

Spinach and Raspberry Salad:

For main I had the Caramelised Sea Scallops – these were absolutely amazing!

Sophie also had the Ravioli and for main had the Seared Sea Bass which she really enjoyed.

I didn’t do so well with photos tonight but and this included the desserts menu – we were just having too much fun chatting!

I had the cheesecake – I can’t even remember what type it was!

Soph had the Sweet Temptation again.

After dinner we said goodbye to our table mates and had a little wander around the ship taking a few more photos before heading back to the room to collect my DSLR for the See Ya Reel Soon send off.

I love these cushions!

Now please don’t hate me but I did think the See Ya Reel Soon show was a bit drawn out although it was cute at the end!

Just a few character photos from the show:

After this we sorted out our bill and the tips etc and then headed to bed – I need another cruise in my life (and I still feel like this now!)!

Hopefully I will have the next day up a little quicker!

[Excited83]

Thanks for coming back to this! Sounds like an amazing day.