Trip Report: May 16, 2018 5 Night Pacific Coast Cruise – Day 1

You can start this trip report from the beginning by clicking here.

Day 1: San Diego

Because I was still on east coast time, I easily woke up at 6:00 am.  I checked the Marine Traffic app and saw the the Wonder was approaching the port:

This Embassy Suites is so close to the port that some of the rooms have a view of it and would have been able to see the Wonder pulling in, and I meant to request a bay-facing room when we checked in but I forgot.  So, I had to rely on the app.

We didn’t have to leave the hotel until about 10:30 (I think our port arrival time was 10:30, and it was a very short drive), so we took our time getting ready.  We went downstairs to eat breakfast and saw several other families who were getting on the cruise.  I will explain the furry vest later.

We eventually got all of our stuff ready and headed to the front desk about 10:30 to request a taxi.  Since we needed a minivan, it took a few minutes for one to arrive.  We piled in and made the 5 minute drive to the terminal, this time with a more talkative and friendly taxi driver.  Here we are pulling away from the hotel.  You can see our hotel on the right, and the Wonder in the distance.  This was our first glimpse of the ship!

Excited to be heading to the ship!

Our first close-up view of the Wonder:

Our taxi dropped us off and we handed off our luggage to a porter.  Then, we walked inside and the first room we walked into was pretty empty.  This wasn’t the room where the Disney cruisers waited – I’m not sure what it was for, but someone directed us through to another room where they had the security set up.

Going through security went very quickly (no pictures are allowed), and there were no long lines yet.  Then, we walked across this open area to the check-in/waiting room which was straight ahead.

There was quite a line to check in, but it moves quickly because they have so many stations.  I’m not sure how long it took in total, but I did note that we sat down in the waiting area at 11:10.  So, 40 minutes from our hotel room to the waiting area – not bad!

We were given boarding group #3 and our first Navigator:

By the way, I have already posted all of the Navigators and they can be seen here.

One thing that was new to me is that we received this form at check-in, one for each room (we were in 2 staterooms):

Because we were leaving from a US city but would be stopping in Canada, both staterooms had to fill out the attached customs form and turn them in by 1:00 pm Saturday.

This one is a karaoke nut and immediately had to check to see if they were having it that night:

Our Disneybound game was strong this day.  I’ll show you more photos later, but here is a preview.  Can you tell which character he is?

Boarding started about 11:45, and group 3 was called at 11:50.  We skipped the boarding photo like usual (honestly I hardly ever buy Shutters photos anymore, although I used to) and began walking towards the ship:

They announced our name when we boarded, and it felt so good to be back on the Wonder!  It has been almost exactly 1 year since we had spent 14 nights here on our Panama Canal cruise and it sort of feels like our home away from home now.  Generally speaking, I am not a fan of Cabanas, and especially not for lunch on boarding day when everyone has their carry-on luggage with them and a lot of people don’t yet understand the flow of things.  So, we walked over to Triton’s for the table service lunch.  In hindsight, the weather was so good that I kind of wished we had gone up to the pool deck and gotten food from the quick-service counters, although our lunch at Triton’s was lovely.  Here we are getting our first hand wipes of the cruise!

We were seated immediately and unfortunately, I didn’t take note of our server’s name but we got a nice table by the window.

This was the menu:

This was the beef empanada which was very good:

The girls couldn’t wait to have their first chicken tenders of the cruise.  I don’t know if it’s the seasoning or what, but DCL’s chicken tenders are fantastic!

My husband had the chicken caeser salad and enjoyed it:

One of the girls had the leek and potato soup:

I had the grilled salmon salad which had couscous on it and was delicious:

Most of us skipped dessert in lieu of ice cream later, but one of the girls got the cookies & cream cheesecake:

While I got the chocolate marquise bomb:

I don’t care too much for heavy desserts, so anytime there is something light and fluffy on the dessert menu I order it.

While we were eating lunch, we made sure that we all had the Navigator app dowloaded to our phoned and set up the chat feature between our devices.  We also signed up for our 50mb of free internet, one for each room.  You can read all of the details about the ship’s internet options here.  I noticed that they have made some improvements since last time we were onboard, and you can now see a lot more information that you used to:

When we were done, the girls wanted to go up to deck 9 for ice cream.  As we were leaving Triton’s, Ariel was saying hi to people in the atrium:

First ice cream cone of the cruise – check!  Today they only had chocolate and vanilla, which seems to be typical for boarding day.

By the way, the ice cream cones were so much smaller than they were on our cruise last year.  It’s hard to tell in this photo, but they seemed miniature!

Next it was time to go up to deck 10 and document our Disneybound efforts.  The weather was gorgeous today!

The photo above was the only one I got of my husband at this time, but here is one from earlier at the hotel:

After our quick photo session, the older 2 walked over to the Edge to sign up and get their stickers.

I also walked around and checked out the views of the city and what was happening at the pools:

Here you can see the Embassy Suites that we stayed at – it is the building that the bridge appears to be running into:

This photo shows just how close the airport is to the cruise terminal – we watched several planes land and take off.

I think at this time we noticed it was 1:30 so the rooms were ready and we went to check them out and drop off our carry-on bags.  We were in 2 inside staterooms (6143 & 6145) that did not connect.  We would have preferred to have them connect, but there were not any available at the time we booked this cruise so we made do.  It ended up being just fine, as my husband, myself, and our youngest (age 8) slept in one room, and the 2 older girls (11 and 13) slept in the other.  You can read full stateroom reviews here (room 6143) and here (room 6145), but here are 2 photos:

As you can see, they are mirror images of each other.  These rooms are category 11B and only sleep 3 people because they do NOT have the pull-down bunk, and they also do NOT have the split bathroom.  For the cruise following this one to Alaska, we would keep one of these rooms, but swap out the other for a verandah room across the hall.

The Gold Castaway Club gift is still the sling backpack with 2 luggage tags, which we got in each room for this cruise and the one after it as well.  Combined with our 2 from last year’s cruise, we now have 6 of these backpacks!

We also found our tickets for our Princess Gathering and Frozen Meet and Greet:

As well as confirmations of our onboard credits:

None of our luggage had arrived yet, but something strange did happen while we were here.  As I opened the door to the hallway to leave, a woman was using her card to try and open our door.  She looked very confused that there was someone in the room, and told me that this was her room.  She showed me the little card that you get when you check in at the terminal where the CM writes down your boarding number and room number, and her card did indeed say room 6143.  There was a moment of panic until a room host, Hristo, walked by and helped us sort it out.  I’m not sure how he figured it out, but the lady’s card was wrong and her room was actually across the hall and down a few doors.

At this point, we decided to go down to guest services and ask if they could make all of our room cards open both rooms.  It turns out they couldn’t, so for the rest of the cruise, we just had to be careful about grabbing the appropriate person’s card if we were splitting up and knew that one of us would need access to the room that their card didn’t open.  It wasn’t a huge deal, and our room host, Holesman, was almost always in the hallway and willing to open a room for one of us if we were without the right card.

Next, the girls wanted to go check out the Star Wars area of the Oceaneer’s Club during the open house.  While they did that, my husband and I went to the Quiet Cove pool to sit and relax for a bit.  The girls sent us a message a few minutes later that it was too crowded in the Oceaneer’s Club and they were going back to the room.

Let me digress for a moment and talk about how/when we let our girls walk around the ship without us.  We did it for the first time last year on our Panama Canal cruise, when they were 12, 10 and 7.  We didn’t let them do it until we had been on the ship for about a week and we were confident that they knew their way around.  The rules were that they had to stay together at all times and send us a message when they changed location.  For this cruise, the same rules held and we never had any issues (our 13 year old is mature for her age, very responsible, and very protective of her little sisters).

Before we knew it, it was time for the safety drill.  We went back to the room to collect the girls and went to our assigned station (T) in Animator’s Palate.  Everyone from our station was there and on time, and our station leader seemed very excited about that.  Once it was over, we took the stairs straight up to deck 9 for the Adventures Away sail away party.

My husband and I LOVE the sail away party, and the girls like it too, just not as much.  Maybe when they are older and have jobs and responsibilities, they will get more excited about sailing away from the real world for a while.

We discovered that Natalie would be our cruise director!  We had never had Natalie before so we were excited!

The weather could not have been more perfect!

After the party, we walked by the drink station to get some drinks and then went to our rooms.  This was our first time to have a room so far towards the aft (back) of the ship.  At first I wasn’t sure I would like it, but the close proximity to the drink station and Cabanas ended up being convenient.  I would say that the only downside was that whenever the ship was docking early in the mornings, there was some noise and vibrations in our rooms.  We were getting up anyway for port adventures, but had we wanted to sleep in, I think it would have been annoying.

Once back at the rooms, our luggage had arrived so I took a few minutes to do some unpacking and organizing before dinner (we had early dining at 5:45).  We also met Holesman, our room host, for the first time.  He was very nice and did an excellent job keeping our rooms neat and tidy.  His English was not the best, but it was never an issue and we were always able to communicate with him.  He was eager to help and always smiling.

I also used this opportunity to run down to guest services and apply some gift cards and our VISA rewards card to our onboard account.  After that, we still had a few minutes until dinner so we sat in the Promenade Lounge, where they had chips & salsa and pretzels to munch on.  At 5:45, we headed to Tiana’s Place for dinner.  We were assigned to table 25, a private table (which our travel agent had requested beforehand) near a window.  It was a pretty good location except that half of the table had a pole blocking the view of the stage.  Since we had experienced Tiana’s Place last year and had seen the show before, it wasn’t a big deal.  The stage is directly behind the pole in this photo:

I didn’t normally take a photo of the bread service, but for some reason on this night I did:

Tonight was the Mardi Gras menu and celebration.  Our server gave us all beads when we arrived.

About this time I noticed that we hadn’t set sail yet, although the tug boat indicated that we would soon.  I never did hear what the delay was for.

We met our serving team that would be serving us dinner for the next 12 nights.  Our server was Lito from the Philippines, and our assistant server was Margaret (Maggie) from Trinidad.  Our head server was Faisal.  We have always had wonderful servers, but Lito ranks up there with the best.  He is competent, on the ball, and friendly.  He is easy to talk to and comes across as very genuine.  Margaret was quiet and not chatty at all, but I kind of liked that.  When she did speak, it was thoughtful and genuine and made you want to listen since she didn’t talk a lot.  She was very competent as well.  We didn’t have much interaction with Faisal as we never had any issues for him to resolve, but he did stop by the table most nights which is more than some head servers do, and always gave us puzzles to solve which we liked.  Okay, now onto the food!

Boudin sausage fritters (good):

Sauteed gulf shrimp and grits (excellent):

Louis walked through to say hi.  He is too large to walk between tables so he only stays on the main aisle.

Pickled gulf shrimp and satsuma orange salad (very good):

Tiana also walked by to say hi and take a photo:

Eudora’s artichoke ravioli (very good if you really like artichokes):

One of the girls couldn’t really find something she liked, so she got the slow-roasted breast of chicken from the “lighter note offerings”:

Cajun spiced sea bass (very good):

At some point during dinner, I noticed that we had set sail.

The dessert menu:

The stars on the cover actually lit up on our cruise last year, but this time they had been replaced by a version that didn’t.

The chocolate doberge gateau (excellent):

Tiana’s buttermilk beignets (excellent):

Lemon-raspberry mousse bomb (just okay):

Mama Odie’s white chocolate bread pudding (very good):

At the end of the meal, it was time for the Mardi Gras parade.  I just love this!  First the servers parade through the restaurant, then they encourage the guests to joint them.  I posted video of this on my instagram stories if you’d like to see it.  It is under the highlight titled “Cali Coast”, and then there is more video under “Alaska Part 2” when we got to experience it on the following sailing.

After dinner, the shops were open so we went to take a look but didn’t buy anything.  We were waiting for the next cruise when they would be putting out all sorts of Alaska merchandise.

Tonight’s show was The Golden Mickeys, and the Preludes lounge was all set up for red carpet interviews:

On the large screens in the theater, they show a count down, as well as the red carpet interviews that are happening out in Preludes.

The show was great, and we noticed a few changes since we last saw it a year ago.  I like that they are constantly updating a show that has been around for almost 20 years.  FYI, I overheard a guest say that a cast member told him that the Golden Mickeys would be going away in the near future.  Just a rumor, so take it for what it’s worth.

One other note: My husband I have a game that we play when sailing on the Dream or Wonder called “Find Tarzan”, where we try and see how soon during the sailing we can spot the actor who plays Tarzan in the Golden Mickeys (for those of you who haven’t seen it, a scantily clad Tarzan does some incredible acrobatics on a swinging rope during the show).  He is pretty easy to spot when out and about the ship in his white shorts and polo (usually as a character handler) because he is so muscular.  The earliest we have spotted him was on a sailing on the Dream when he was our station leader at the safety drill.  We hadn’t even seen the show yet, but it was pretty obvious he was Tarzan  because of his physique.  How long would it take us to find Tarzan this time?  Stay tuned!

After the show, we split up.  My husband, oldest and youngest were ready to go to bed so they went back to the room.  Our middle daughter wanted to do karaoke at 10:30, so she and I went up to the drink station on deck 9 and then to the D Lounge, where karaoke is held.  We got there about 20 minutes early and saw the end of the “Golden Mickeys After Party”, which unfortunately only had a few people in attendance.  I think on the first night of a cruise, people are just really tired and tend to go to bed earlier than other nights.  In fact, only my daughter and one other girl showed up for karaoke, so the CM hosting kept asking the 2 of them if they wanted to sing again, over and over.  At one point when no one wanted to sing, the 2 CM’s hosting performed a duet of “Love is an Open Door” which was really cute.  The karaoke attendance really amped up after this night though.

After karaoke it was off to bed, after a fantastic first day on the Wonder!

Up Next: Day 2 – At Sea

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