Trip Report Day 5: Very Merrytime 7 Night Western Caribbean Cruise on the Disney Wonder

Note:  You can see the daily navigators for this cruise here.

On day 5 we woke up in Falmouth, Jamaica.  I’m not sure if this was DCL’s first time in this port but if not, they have not been going there for very long.  We had always planned to stay on the ship at this port for 3 main reasons: (1) 3 excursion/port days in a row are exhausting for our family, and we had originally planned to do an excursion in Cozumel (2) with the limited research that I did, none of the typical excursions really appealed to us and it seemed like you had to drive a long way (hours, not minutes) to reach any of them, and (3) we like to stay on the ship for at least 1 port day and enjoy the empty pools.

When I first went out onto our verandah that morning, I took these pictures and thought to myself that there seemed to be nothing around this port.  I had read that it was one of the newer, less used, and remote cruise ports in Jamaica, but I thought I would see more than this:

I looked down and noticed that the crew was doing something with 2 of the lifeboats.  I know they sometimes do drills and lower them into the water and drive them around while in port.  I was hoping that is what they were doing and that I would be able to watch, but I never saw them move from these positions:

Not long after, I went up to deck 9 to the drink station and looked out the other side of the ship and saw an entirely different scene than I had from our verandah.  Other than the massive cruise ship, this was more like what I was expecting to see here!

The shopping area next to the port looked brand new, safe and very clean.  I was pleasantly surprised.

The massive cruise ship docked next to us was unexpected though.  I had checked the cruise port schedules for all of our ports beforehand (because I’m weird like that) and they all said that we would be the only ship in each of our ports (which was indeed the case in Cozumel & Grand Cayman).  I guess that either the information online was wrong, or at some point fairly recently, Royal Caribbean had changed the schedule for the Oasis of the Seas.  This cruise ship was massive!  I couldn’t believe how big it was.  I even used up some of my precious data allowance to Google it and learned that it holds over 6,000 passengers and that, along with her sister ship the Allure of the Seas, is the largest cruise ship in the world.  I was excited to get to see it close up!

Honestly, the best word I can think of to describe it is gargantuan.  The Wonder must have looked tiny next to it.

 When I got back to the room I saw that our concierge host Joanne had added some pirate flair to our door decorations:

They were even personalized with the girls’ names.  If you want to read about how I made our cheap, quick, easy, no computer-skills-needed Mickey head magnets you can do that here.

Since most people were off the the ship, it was time to hit the pools before they got crowded:

There was a lot of Mickey slide riding going on:

And some pretzel eating as well:

This was my 6th Disney cruise and my first time to ever see pretzels on a ship.  They were at the pizza place and seemed to be available everyday in both plain salted and sugar/cinnamon cream cheese filled.  They were fresh out of the oven and delicious!

 What??? A hot tub to herself?  Unheard of on a Disney cruise ship!  I had to document it with a picture:

We spent most of the day swimming and being lazy in the room.  All aboard was a little bit earlier than normal at 3:45 and since our verandah did not face the port area I decided to go down to deck 4 and watch the action as the ship prepared to depart.  I took these pictures from a lower angle than the ones I took earlier from deck 10:

This is the building that you have to walk through to get to/from the ship and shopping area:

Seeing as it was already past 3:45 I was surprised to see people still leisurely walking to the ship.  No one seemed to be in a hurry.  I heard later that one of the DCL excursions had been late returning to port so of course the ship waited for them.  I also wondered how many people who were not on the excursion and were late as well and just got really lucky.  I’m always wondering things like that.  I took some video while standing here.  It doesn’t show much but it does give you a pretty good idea about how big the Oasis of the Seas is:

As you probably gathered from the door decor earlier, this was pirate night and it was time to get everyone in their pirate gear.  If you want to see what we have worn throughout the years (you will recognize a lot of it in this post) you can do that here.

I bought nothing new for the girls.  I just rearranged clothing items among them that we already had and have used on almost every cruise:

I ask her to pose and she automatically does this.  Um, okay…….

Here they are with Dad who informed me that after 4 pirate nights in this outfit, he wants a new one before the next cruise that involves a long coat.  I think he was jealous of cruise director Peter’s which you will see later.

I am not even going to bother showing you what I wore.  My wardrobe was very limited because I still had surgical drains from my mastectomy coming out of each of my sides (sorry if that is TMI) and the only way to hide them was to wear baggy clothes, which ended up being mostly cardigans.

We went down to the lobby to try and get some pictures before dinner.  I got this great one of the tree:

We also jumped into a short line to meet pirate Goofy:

We ran into cruise director Peter and his awesome coat:

For dinner we were in Parrot Cay.  I love how the kids menus are pirate hats:

Here is the standard menu:

Dinner was so fun.  I just love the pirate festivities in the dining rooms on the classic ships.  Here we are in Parrot Cay:

Then, as we were leaving Parrot Cay we walked past Triton’s and they must have been a little behind the Parrot Cay schedule because they were just starting their party.  I filmed some of it from the doorway:

We had a few minutes before family karaoke at 7:30 (thank goodness it was finally early!!!) so we stopped by the room and found these:

Next we headed down to Wavebands for family karaoke.  It turns out karaoke is more fun when you aren’t half asleep.  Our middle daughter sang 2 songs, Defying Gravity from Wicked and Home from the Beauty and the Beast Broadway show.

Once it was over at 8:15, we decided to go up to the pool deck and stake out our spaces for the pirate party.  I wasn’t going to allow for a repeat of the Freezing the Night Away viewing situation.  We had to wait about an hour, but we got an awesome spot right up front at the ropes and found ways to entertain ourselves.  Our youngest started getting tired and needed some encouragement to keep pushing on……

We tried to keep her awake and happy by making her laugh:

Finally, it was time for the party to start!

Our youngest was half asleep but getting some help from big sister…….

I mostly took video of the party because it is so hard to get good pictures in the dark with them moving around so fast:

Here is a compilation of the video that I took:

After the fireworks we went straight to the room and crashed for the night.  At dinner our servers told us that there would be a pirate night buffet (complete with turkey legs) after the fireworks but we were too tired to go check it out.

Click here for Day 6