Somehow, Nick’s parents beat us to the top deck. Seems Kim had managed to hoof it up those 6 flights of stairs on that new hip. Go Kim! We had been stuck at the back of Animator’s so we’d gotten a slow start. Sailaway was fun. Nick’s mom was WICKED excited. And we actually started sailing during the party. It was a great time!
After the party ended, we stayed back on deck for a bit, enjoying the scenery as we cruised down the channel. It was a gorgeous day, especially now that we had the breeze from moving!
Eventually Nick and I decided we needed a quick snack, so we directed his parents to meet us in a bit, and we headed back to the room, where we dined on cashews and trail mix that we had brought from NH. Hopefully there will be less to tick off the x-ray dudes at Miami’s TSA checkpoint!
At 5:45, we went down and knocked on my in-laws’ door. Nothing. Eventually we got a message from them on the app (which, we had thankfully set them up with at sailaway) that they were still on deck. We told them to meet us at the theater. This made me a little nervous, since neither of them are good with directions.
Nick and I headed for the theater, stopping at the bar outside of it for a Guinness for Nick. We then headed inside and easily grabbed seats in the first row of the top half of the theater, on the edge. Edge for Kim and me so we wouldn’t have to try to see over the railings that line the back of the bottom section of seats, front row for legroom for the boys.
Apparently, I needn’t have worried about them being able to find us. Kim and John showed up just a few minutes later. I had forgotten one detail...much of John’s job involves time on ships. While he can’t program a GPS, as long as he knows the ship directions and deck, he can find his way around. I will say, I finally, mostly figured out starboard vs port on this trip, thanks to giving John directions!
Tonight’s show was Twice Charmed, a spin on the Cinderella story. Basically, the evil stepmother tries one more time to get in the way of Cinderella marrying the prince. It’s Disney, so I’m sure you can figure out how it ended. I hadn’t expected much from this show, because I never see it mentioned, but we all really enjoyed it. We also liked our cruise director Darren, who reminded me a lot of Peter, the cruise director we had had on the Wonder. He gave us the lowdown on docking in Key West the next morning, since we’d be docking at the Naval pier, and also shared that if all the stars aligned, there would be a late night “premEAR” of Avengers: Infinity War the next night. I nearly lost an eardrum to the cheers when that was announced!
When the show ended, I think we made a quick pass through the stores to get an initial idea of what was in there. Then we headed for the atrium. We enjoyed listening to the music, and I happened to notice there was a good backdrop set up, so I hauled Nick over for pictures. We did prebuy the photo package after all!
Picture taking done, and Nick’s parents absorbed in the music, Nick and I headed over to the After Hours section. We glanced around a bit, and pretty soon I was curled up in a huge porthole seat outside the entrance to Keys, the piano bar. I had a great view of the ocean, and could hear the music perfectly. New favorite spot!
Nick and I hung out here for quite awhile. At some point, John found us. Then he disappeared again. As it got close to dinner time, we mozied back out to the atrium where we found Kim, exactly where we had left her. She was gushing about the awesome character interactions she had observed, and the great music in the atrium. I think we’ve got her hooked!
The line winding through the atrium started moving, so we headed for Lumiere’s, figuring John would catch up with us. When we got to the table, we discovered the 4 of us were assigned a table for 4. Admittedly, Nick and I had mixed feelings about this, since we had had a great time with dinnermates on our last cruise, but we also figured this was a good setup for our resident engineer.
Speaking of him, he did appear fairly quickly. Almost immediately after that, we met our serving team: assistant server Miguel, server Nikola, and head server Aziz. We liked all of them as people immediately.
Dinner was hectic (as our first night dinner had been on the Wonder as well), but excellent. We tried quite the variety of foods at the table, and we all enjoyed everything. In fact, we were only to the second course when Kim (who uses seasoning VERY sparingly in her cooking), said she “didn’t know food could taste this good!”. That was a statement that is still being echoed, 2 weeks later. I don’t remember what everyone had. I do remember that I had the fried brie appetizer, the potato and leek soup, the crusted salmon, and, most importantly, the grand marnier souffle for dessert.
As dinner wore on, Nick and I realized we had a real standout in our main server. Nikola was personable, professional, incredibly hard working, and had a great sense of humor. He was fantastic! We saw him cajoling the kiddo at the table next to us to eat instead of play with his Gameboy (“Mickey won’t come visit tomorrow if you don’t eat those vegetables”), and yet he was also able to engage John in a technical/science conversation. We couldn’t have asked for a better main server.
Aziz was equally personable, and had much more of a presence than our head server on the Wonder had. We were impressed there too. He wasn’t afraid to do some heavy lifting in the dining room either.
Then there was Miguel. We truly liked him as a person. Genuinely nice. He learned our names immediately. But he couldn’t keep a water glass filled to save his life, and he didn’t know what the drink of the day was. Hmm. We chalked it up to the quantity of bottles of wine he was serving to tables around us, and hoped the next day would be better in the water glass department.
Dinner wrapped up well after 10. I think we said good night to Kim and John at the restaurant entrance. Nick and I took a quick walk to Shutters to check out our first day pictures and then headed back to the room, where we found this critter waiting for us. And yes, there were jokes about crabs in the bed.
We then showered and crashed, knowing we would be docking very early the next morning, and I knew that meant I’d be waking up early.
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