First Day Aboard the Ship (4/27)

So, faithful followers.....we're back (temporarily).  We have pulled into San Francisco and now that we're back at land in a US port, I can get internet access that is reliable and fast (and free---through my cell phone!!).  So I'm going to try to back track and give you blogs of the last couple days you've missed while our internet was shotty.

So when we left off, we had just had lunch with some of our DIS Friends onboard which was awesome.  Once lunch was over, we went down to talk to the dining managers with Deb & her mom because they weren't thrilled with their original dining assignment but were able to get themselves switched to be on the same rotation as us (so they'd be in the same restaurants as us every night) AND put at the table NEXT to ours (which was empty)----so they basically will get to eat with/near us each night which will be fun. 

After getting them hooked up with a better dining arrangement, it was about time to get into our rooms, so we headed up to our cabin---#7622.  The picture posted here is of our sad, lonely, undecorated door.  If you have sailed Disney before or read our last blog, you'll know that we (and many others) decorate our cabin doors with magnets....so later during this trip we'll post pics of our door spruced up a bit-----and we'll post some pictures of some of the special magnets we have for this trip. (Note:  On our last trip we had a new magnet for every day of the cruise, but for this trip we just didn't have the time to do that prep work....so we have brought back some of our themed magnets from previous cruises and we only made a few new magnets...but we'll be sure to share!)
Here are a few pics of our cabin:

Me standing on our verandah in the beautiful LA weather.

After getting settled into our cabin a bit, we changed our clothes and decided to go swim in the pool for a little while.  As I think I mentioned, the weather was GLORIOUS----sunny and hot and summer-like----and we had an hour to kill before the lifeboat drill and figured this might be our only chance to swim on this trip and freeze our butts off so we decided to take advantage.  And it was very nice because we were literally the ONLY people in the pool....very relaxing.

After that it was time for the mandatory lifeboat drill and then the sail away party.  This picture to the right is us at the Sail-Away party with our streamers and our bubble-machines (courtesy of a friend on the cruise, Michael----more on him on our second day in San Francisco because he organized the tour we're doing that day).

Sail Away is always a blast.  Lots of music and dancing and celebrating----and sounding of the ship's horn (which, for those who've never been on the boat before, plays the song "When You Wish Upon A Star").  It's always the official launch of your vacation and always gets me a little misty-eyed.  *smile*  It's even more fun surrounded by old and new friends:

Me & Linda, a friend of the DIS & previous cruises & scrapbook instructor extraordinaire!!

Our friend Deb.

Another shot of Linda & the lady in red is Deb's mom, Janette.

The big cheese himself performing at the Sail Away party!

After Sail Away we had just enough time to get back to our room, get unpacked and fully settled, go and iron all our clothes (there's usually an insane line to get to the irons the first couple nights but we were all alone in the laundry room and there were two irons so we got it all done in no time!), get showered and changed for the opening night show and dinner.

If you remember our last blog at all (or have cruised with us) you'll perhaps remember that a tradition for us is that we wear Disney-themed outfits (usually ties and/or tuxes depending on the night) nightly for dinner.  We don't have that many NEW ties  this trip because we wore most of what we own on the last big cruise, we took....but they might be new to you if you haven't seen them before!  So here are the ties we wore on Night 1 of our cruise and a pic with "friend" as well:

After dinner, we returned to our room to turn in for the night and we were greeted by our towel animal----which your stateroom host leaves for you when they clean/prepare your room nightly:

Tomorrow?  A sea day!