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!