Disney Cruise Line: First Impressions

Disney Cruise Line offers to have Disney’s Magical Express (or as we like to call it: Mickey’s Magic Bus) pick you up from the airport and get you to your ship, but I was nervous that if our plane was late we’d end up missing the boat, so we flew down a day earlier. The hotel we were staying at promised to send a shuttle to pick us up for only $50, but our plane that night ended up being about 45 minutes late and lo and behold…no shuttle. So we had to pay a taxi $150 to take us to the hotel by Port Canaveral! Needless to say I was not at all pleased that this was the start to our vacation when I was already a little nervous about the boat. What if it was terrible and we were stuck on it for a week? What if one of us was seasick? Those were my thoughts as we left the hotel the next morning and arrived to see the ship.

I really can’t express through text how large the ship was. It was humongous! However big you think the ship has to be, it is bigger. And gorgeous. Of course we could only see a small part of it since it was docked, so we went inside and checked in. Check-in was rather seamless, they took our pictures, then we got a group number that would be called once the ship was ready for boarding. In the meantime we wandered around the huge waiting room that had not only a model of a Disney Cruise Line ship that you could see inside, but Captain Mickey himself posing with pictures of everyone! 

Since our group number was pretty low, we then walked over to stand by the entrance, which was no regular doorway but looked like a big Mickey hat with Mickey ears! At this point despite being nervous, I was getting pretty excited. What would our room look like? Would the attention to detail be as amazing as what was here in this waiting room? We were sailing on the Disney Fantasy one of the very first weeks that it launched and I suddenly found myself as giddy as a kid on Christmas to get on that boat–no matter how big it was!