Guest Trip Report: December 17, 2018 4 Night on the Disney Dream, Day 4

This is a guest trip report written by Elizabeth, who sailed on the December 17, 2018 4 night cruise to the Bahamas on the Disney Dream.  You can start this trip report from the beginning by clicking here.

Day 4: At Sea

(click here to see this day’s Daily Navigator)

We woke up this morning around 7, which was a welcome change. Our room didn’t vibrate at all this morning since we were at sea and not backing into port, so I think this helped our daughter sleep a little longer. We enjoyed the view off of our veranda before breakfast:

The restaurant still wasn’t open yet, so we went over to the Future Cruise sales desk and dropped a card in the placeholder deposit box. We aren’t totally sure that we will be able to cruise in the next two years (because we’d love to have another baby soon and aren’t sure if the timing will work out), but since it is fully refundable, we decided to go for it!

We wanted to enjoy a sit down breakfast at the Royal Table, so we headed over there to wait until it opened at 8. We ended up being the second people seated, so we got a table by the window!

I absolutely love the detailing around the edges of the dishes (sorry about the dirty bowl!):

We ordered our breakfasts (the American breakfast for my husband, and the Eggs Benedict for me), but by the time the servers got around to our table and put the orders in, the kitchen was slammed with everyone being seated. When we got on the ship and realized how much our daughter was enjoying her nursery, we decided to book her a morning slot so that we could have a day-date on the day at sea. We had a 9:00-11:00 nursery reservation, and unfortunately our food wasn’t ready by the time we needed to take her. My husband took her down to the nursery, and they fed her breakfast down there. Again, she was thrilled to be there and ran in while saying “bye bye” over her shoulder. The serving team was incredibly apologetic about the delay and was incredibly attentive for the rest of the meal after my husband returned.

I love the wall decoration in this restaurant:

We wanted to use her morning in the nursery to spend some time enjoying the adult only areas during the day when we could see the views, so we went up to the Quiet Cove. We popped into the Cove Cafe to take a look around, specifically at the Disney memorabilia on the shelves. We have a good friend whose grandfather worked for Walt Disney World and was actually commissioned by Walt himself to build the trains and the railroad track around Magic Kingdom, so we took this picture for him:

Look at this adorable Mary Poppins tea service:

We went up one more deck and sat in some lounge chairs and enjoyed our time together. The view was incredible! While we were there, a server came by and told us it was happy hour on all the morning cocktails, so we each got one:

And we chatted with the couple next to us who happened to live in the same city as we do. The husband even works in the same industry as my husband. Such a small world!

When it was time to go get our daughter, we took her straight down to wait for the start of the character dance party in the atrium. We positioned ourselves right by the stairs so that she could see them whenever the came down. Here she is playing around and waiting for it to start:

While she waited, I went to the bathroom and saw this on the counter:

I love Disney so much! You’d never see this in the real world!

Oh my goodness, was this dance party magical! This ended up being by far the best part of the cruise for her, I think! I’m not sure if it was because she’s a toddler or what, but Mickey, Goofy, and Donald each spent so much time dancing with her and spinning her around and generally giving her a lot of attention. It was the cutest thing EVER! The smile on her face was a mile wide!

Too soon, it was over and they waved their goodbyes. We took a family picture by the gorgeous and fragrant gingerbread house and then headed to lunch at Cabanas. Here are our plates:

After this full morning, it was time for our daughter to go down for her nap. We decided that my husband would take her back to the room to put her down, and I’d snag us some desserts to eat on the veranda. I decided to just get everything that looked yummy since we could count on two hours of quality time out there:

It was incredibly peaceful out there:

While my husband has been on the open ocean before, I never had. I still can’t get over the tranquility!

After she woke from her nap, we decided to pack so that we could go on the veranda after we put her to bed. Once we were done, we wanted to take our girl to meet Rapunzel at the meet and greet. Because we’d booked so late, we hadn’t been able to snag tickets to either the Princess or the Frozen meet and greets (I even went to Guest Services on embarkation day and no luck), so we really wanted to prioritize this for her. We noticed that there was a Mrs. Claus story time scheduled in the atrium 30 minutes before, so we took her down to that. It was adorable!

That’s not a great photo because I went to wait in line for Rapunzel (before the line even officially formed) so we could be right at the front. My husband sat with our daughter during the story time, and he happened to be right by the stairs when the characters made a surprise visit for an impromptu dance party! Again, we got some very sweet moments!

We have a full minute and 14 second long video of Donald dancing with her! He walked her around and twirled her and it was just pure childhood magic. My husband overheard the handler tell Donald “this toddler is cute; dance with her!” Haha! Character accessibility is a HUGE difference between the cruises and the parks, and it is a tremendous perk for those of us who enjoy character interactions.

While in line, I took some pictures of the crew biographies:

I love seeing how people ended up in these roles.

Then it was time for Rapunzel!

It feels like the entire day was just sprinkled with pixie dust because this was magical too! I put our daughter down and she bolted for the princess who held her arms out so our girl could run into them! And then our girl showed Rapunzel her shoes, so Rapunzel showed our daughter her shoes! So sweet!

Lest you think taking toddlers on DCL is this magical all the time:

She was totally not having my cute mommy daughter photo op by the Cinderella mosaic. Oh well!

Since we’d had such continued luck with the nursery, on this final night we planned to take our girl one last time. We took her before dinner so that we could have an uninterrupted meal and go see the new Beauty and the Beast show. Here she is running into the room:

Even though she’s been that morning, she was so excited. As the crew member opened the door, our girl yelled “HIIIII” and ran in! Once again, we saw Tiana heading in as we were heading out. They must go over to the children’s clubs quite a bit!

My husband and I wandered around the ship for a bit before dinner, finally settling on some lounge chairs under the lifeboats. Here is my engineer husband explaining how they are launched:

And our last dinner was in the Enchanted Garden, which our server said was his favorite and was modeled after the gardens of Versailles. It seemed a little random to me…does anyone know the Disney connection there?

Nevertheless, it was quite beautiful!

Here is my sweet husband ready for our date at our solo table!

Here are the menus:

The bread service (basically hummus. Yum!)

North Atlantic Lobster Ravioli (excellent)

Ahi Tuna and Avocado Tower (excellent)

Cream of Green Asparagus (very good)

Spinach and Raspberry Salad (good)

Carmelized Sea Scallops (excellent)

Slow Roasted Prime Rib (good)

Normally I’ve seen people take cute pictures of their children with their serving team on the last night. Well, I took a solo photo with our serving team because our girl wasn’t there and I hadn’t thought to do it on any of the other nights:

Here is the dessert menu:

We decided to go all out since it was our last night. Here is the cappuccino:

Lemon Raspberry Mousse Bomb (good)

Chocolate Brownie Sundae (very good)

Chocolate Garden Torte (very good)

We have a funny story about that one. Bertram told us that it was modeled after this famous Austrian chocolate cake called the Sacher Torte. Well, we went to Salzburg on our honeymoon, and I had booked my husband a surprise afternoon tea at the Sacher Hotel, one of only four such locations in the country and the only people who have the original recipe. He loves chocolate cake, so I just knew that he’d really love this world famous one…I went out of my way to make sure he got to try it. I literally filmed his first bite and he was like *shrug* “it’s okay”…I was like UM HOW CAN IT BE JUST OKAY WE FLEW HALFWAY ACROSS THE WORLD AND SPENT $15 ON THIS LITTLE SLICE. Apparently back in the day when it was created, sugar was a huge luxury, so they didn’t use very much even in dishes for the royalty; by today’s standards, it was pretty bitter and dry. We still chuckle about that to this day. He said this Disney version was much better than the original.

And, lastly, the Disney famous Warm Sticky Date Pudding (excellent, just as I’d heard):

After this, I wanted to go see the champagne bar Pink because I’d seen pictures on this blog and it looked adorable. It was!

When we walked in, we saw that the Cruise Director Lesley and her Assistant Cruise Director Matthew were leaving, so we bolted over there. I had really wanted to ask her a question, but I never knew where to find her. How funny that on such a massive ship, we were in the same place at the same time.

Once we caught up with them, it was even more funny to realize that they were chatting with the same couple that we talked to up on the adult deck earlier that morning! Wow…it’s seriously such a small cruise ship!

I ended up talking with Matthew for awhile about the cruise lifestyle and how it is sustainable and, frankly, legal. He said that the ships are flagged out of the Bahamas, but DCL is somehow affiliated with Italy and is under Italian labor laws. Fascinating.

We then booked it down to the show to try to get good seats. Since it was just the two of us, we managed to snag some in the middle near the front. Before the show started, Lesley came on stage once again to give some last evening information. While she was up there, she told everyone to make sure to say a big thank you to whomever paid for the cruise. My parents had paid for ours, so it was really special to us to acknowledge that.

The show was amazing! Lesley said that it had won the IAAPA Brass Ring Award and was the only cruise ship show to have ever done so. That’s pretty cool!

On our way back to the room, I remembered to take a photo of one of the really decorated doors:

I love it!

The time had come to end our final night on the Disney Dream. By this time, we were too tired to go out on the veranda one last time, so we just called it a night. I was so glad we’d packed earlier! We put our bags outside with the luggage tags attached. Here is our final towel animal:

Up Next: Day 5 – Disembarking and going to WDW!