Disney Cruise, Days 4 & 5: Castaway Cay and Departure

We woke up to a beautiful sunrise and were super excited to spend a day on the Disney Island, Castaway Cay!

Castaway Cay is technically part of the Bahamas, but Disney is leasing it from them for 99 years.  Most of the island is just wilderness, but they've developed 15% of it and built beaches by dredging up nice sand for them and such.

We grabbed breakfast and then packed up all our stuff until it was our turn to disembark

As you step off the boat, the crew members are standing by handing out towels and a tram takes you to the first of three beaches.  Craig and I practically threw the kids off the tram where the kid zone was and headed straight to the adult beach where we had an appointment to get a couple's massage in a private cabana!  Then we sat with our feet in the water reading for a bit until we felt guilty and went back to get our kids...

I continued with my reading, but Craig and the kids splashed around in the water and climbed all around on the ropes course.  

This may be the best picture that's been taken of me in years...

By this point we were starting to get hungry, and this may have been my favorite thing about the whole island: they had an outdoor cafeteria with all the food you could eat just 50 yards from the beach and you just had to walk up and grab whatever you wanted!  It was so good and easy and clean and delicious!  It made everything about being at the beach a thousand times better!

And then we went to the third beach, which had water slides and a snorkeling area!

If you went out far enough snorkeling, they had a bunch of things sunk in the water for you to find.  I kept having to go back to shore to help kids, so I didn't find much, but Craig documented what he found, so it's all good.  (I did see some really cool fish, so I had a good time, too, even if I didn't take pictures!)

It's hard to tell, but one of the sunken objects was a submarine from the original 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea ride!  Now it's got coral growing on it, so that's pretty cool!

We were sad to head back to the boat.  It was literally the most perfect day at the beach I have ever had.

I showered off (I loved the shower in our rooms-- such great water pressure!), but Craig and most of the kids just jumped in the pool and rode the aqua-duck to wash off the sand!

Of course the pool is shaped like Mickey!

Our last dinner was at the Royal Palace, so we had various princesses marching through waving at us, and our servers were all dressed up!

We didn't take any pictures, but after dinner, Craig and I had reservations for the Rainforest Spa, so we had nearly two hours to ourselves to enjoy the saunas, mist rooms, heated deck chairs, and private hot tub, and trust me, we enjoyed every minute of it!  The full moon over the ocean was a really nice touch, too!

Once our time was up, we frantically threw all our dirtiest clothes and beach stuff into a few suitcases so they could be unloaded from the ship for us, then we went to bed.  Really late, as always.

Breakfast in the morning, back at the Royal Palace, was a sort of sad affair for me.  I had to work to not cry, I was so sad for our vacation to be over!  But I still managed to laugh when our server brought me the "little side of bacon" I'd asked for:

So. Much. Bacon!

And Bentley thought to snap a picture of the napkins, folded to look like a prince's shirt!

Then we grabbed the rest of our luggage and got off the ship.  Everything-- finding the luggage we'd sent on, getting through customs, finding our van-- went very smoothly and we were all loaded and ready to drive immediately.  The kids were exhausted and a lot of napping happened while we drove...

We took a bit of a detour on our way home and stopped in Atlanta to visit Craig's Aunt Lynda and Uncle Greg.  It was wonderful seeing them and they were so kind and fed us lasagne and cake to celebrate Kendra's birthday!  (Yup, poor Kendra got stuck in the car all day for her birthday.  Sorry, sweetie!)

Lynda and Greg had very generously invited us to spend the night, but we wanted to get a little closer to home, so we drove a couple more hours to South Carolina before finding a hotel for the night.  This turned out to be the cheapest and largest room we had for the whole trip, so yay for being in the middle of nowhere South Carolina!

Disney Cruise, Days 2 & 3: At Sea and Nassau

We began by sleeping in (YES you read that right!) and Craig brought me breakfast and we ate out on the veranda while the kids stayed at the restaurant eating.  Delightful!

Every breakfast carb and meat known to man!

Then we checked out the kids' club so we could see what kind of fun they had in store for Colton and Camille (and occasionally Ryder):

Before you could even enter, they had this AMAZING handwashing station, where you just stick your arms in these tubes and warm water rises up and washes and rinses your hands for you!  I WANT ONE OF THESE!!! 

Pluto stopped by, much to Craig's delight!

Flying the Millenium Falcon

Andy's room from Toy Story

And a fairy room for Tinkerbell and her friends!

We played mini-golf on one of the ship's top decks...

Hard NOT to enjoy this view!

And Camille and I were excited to run into Donald Duck (he's my favorite Disney character, probably because I understand his fits of rage)!

Enjoying dinner at the Enchanted Garden

Bentley was nice and rode the Aqua-duck with his siblings, even though it was freezing.  (I love his face here!) 

Several characters came dancing through during dinner!

We went to another play that night, Beauty and the Beast, and it was wonderful.  I think they made some subtle improvements to the development of Belle and the Beast's relationship, the performances were spectacular (especially impressive when everyone stayed in character as the ship rolled!), and the special effects were super cool.  It was just a really marvelous show and we were so glad we saw this one after Believe, since it was so much better!  

Then we kept everyone up really late so we could watch fireworks get shot off the boat!  They played fun music as the ship got into position (which Craig totally called-- at the last minute they turned it so the wind was going the right way for the fireworks) and the kids were rocking out and enjoying their ice cream and it was so fun!

The next morning we pulled in to beautiful Nassau.  Colton had woken up plenty early and watched the ship dock.  He informed us that he had seen a little boat crash into ours!  We quickly figured out that he'd seen the docking pilot pulling up so he could properly park the ship.  But his description was pretty funny!

Our original plan was for me and the kids to just stay on the ship while Craig went scuba diving, but then his scuba trip got canceled, and he wanted to at least be able to say he'd stepped foot on the Bahamas, so we decided we should all disembark together.  I was worried it would mostly be people yelling at us to buy stuff, and I was absolutely right about that, so it wasn't my favorite place to be.  But now I can say I've been to the Bahamas!

We took a taxi to a beach, but didn't bother with swimsuits and told the kids we'd swim the next day.

So of course they all ran screaming fully clothed into the very rough surf!  Oh, well...  We ought to know our kids well enough by now to expect that.  Camille is crazy around the ocean...

I love Sorcerer's Apprentice Mickey on the back of our ship!

There were four cruise ships docked at Nassau.  Seriously, these things are so huge!

Bentley on the streets of Nassau

Most of the kids bought little trinkets for themselves.  But we kind of hurried back to the boat.

And back into the hot tub!  The kids floated around in the pools watching the Funnel Vision.  Everyone was happy!

That night was Pirate Night, which we were all very excited about!  Some of the other guests even brought special costumes just for this!  We settled for the pirate bandanas that Disney provided, but we were very excited about those!  

After dinner I convinced Kendra, Ryder, and Camille to do karaoke with me.  Craig, Bentley and Colton absolutely refused to participate, and Bentley spent the entire time looking more nervous about the whole ordeal than any of us who were singing.  Because we couldn't decide on a song, we ended up doing three songs-- Next to Me, Thunder, and (of course!) Let it Go.  I was sort of surprised by how many people were there to watch, and how few people bothered singing.  In fact there were only five performances so, uh, more than half of it was just us up there singing.  Sorry, everyone!  But we had fun, despite Bentley's mortification.

And then, because we have absolutely no self control whatsoever, we stayed up for another character dance party and round 2 of fireworks!