10th Anniversary Trip WDW/Disney Magic About This Page:

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Day 5: Monday, Day at Sea
Our table mates included a couple from Orlando but they were staying in a One Bedroom Suite and had the option of ordering in room service from Palo whenever they wanted so we actually only saw them for 2 nights of the entire cruise. I believe they ate at Palo several times. They were nice and the woman had worked for WDW in the Animal Kingdom for a short stint so she had lots of interesting stories. Our Canadian dinner partners showed up every night, so we got to know them better. I will say that we had a rough start to our dining experience. We had the misfortune of being assigned Table #43. I never realized the location of your table affects your dining overall. #43 happened to be the furthest table in the corner of each and every restaurant, and farthest from the kitchen expect in Animator’s Palate where it was the last table sort of shoved in catty-corner wise in the back far left corner of the dining room. I was so glad none of us were first timers because you could not even view the dining room or what went on from this table. It was right next to the kitchen, but sadly this did not seem to matter for the speed of delivery. Everything was so slow that even with just 4 people at our table, it took over 2 hours to get through the dinner. When we had the same sort of experience the first night, the Head Waiter said he wanted to know if there was anything, anything at all he could do to serve us better, so we tracked him down and asked if they could just speed it up a little bit. We were nice about it, nothing wrong with the servers themselves, they were just really slow. And the service did improve as the week went on so we were glad about that.

Day 6: Tuesday – St. Maartin. We had done some research at home and decided to book an excursion not run by Disney. We hired Captain Alan’s to take a jet boat to go on a “4 snorkel/beaches” tour. We had been experiencing high winds on every day of the cruise so far. Seas were “moderate” at 6-8 feet, which were pretty big waves, but the Disney ship was so big you could hardly feel it except at night when you went to bed. It was very much like being gently rocked to sleep each night. We felt the movement of the ship more on this cruise than we had in the past. The day dawned partly cloudy with a forecast of rain, but the clouds gave way to sun as we headed off on our adventure. We had reserved transportation to the opposite side of the island where our dock and boat was. It was an interesting taxi trip – as many have commented, there is a lot of poverty on the island. DH and I are scuba divers and more into active excursions than the shopping side of things. We arrived at Captain Alan’s and they were expecting us, so we signed the usual waivers saying if we died snorkeling we wouldn’t sue them, etc. and off we went. It was a 28 ft boat with two 250 horsepower motors, quite the power (at least my DH seemed impressed by that). Turned out we would need it to get through those 6-8 foot waves. We had quite a ways to go – around ½ the island the long way around, and not in the best conditions. I should have known what we were in for when the captain of the boat asked for any valuables, stuff or cameras that we wanted to keep dry. He tossed then in a tiny cubbyhole underneath the captain’s stand. Less than 10 minutes out of the bay, I was sitting on a padded bench directly behind the captain and I might as well have just stepped into the shower clothed. That’s truly how wet we were and stayed that way throughout the entire trip. The waves were so huge that they came up both sides of the boat and just clobbered us. We were fortunate that neither the other couple or DH and myself were prone to sea sickness, or it would have been a really miserable day. But it turned out to be an adventure instead. We finally reached the first snorkeling location, a tiny island called Creole Rock. The clouds had come back out and the snorkeling was not much to rave about. Sunshine makes such a difference when viewing things underwater. We were unimpressed. 15-20 minutes and we were all ready to head to the next beach. This one was fabulous, called Happy Bay Beach. It was well hidden and only had 4 people and 2 dogs on it – all of the people going “au naturale”. It’s always the over 40ish that shed their clothes on nude beaches. We hopped off the boat in the shallow beach area and walked to the beach. We took a walk and snapped some photos of the gorgeous beachfront. Then the captain brought a large tub of mud he had mixed up and we all applied the mud to ourselves, then relaxed while it dried in the sun (which had now made an appearance). They harvest the mud from the cliffs on St. Maartin and it’s supposed to be known for its quality. It was a large lump of dried clay that they shaved added water to it to make a milky brown liquid mud. This was one of the better stops. Never found out who the dogs belonged to but DH had fun tossing sticks in the ocean for them to chase. After 30 minute with newly softened skin, we all headed back for the boat.

The next stop was Anse Marcel, which provided better snorkeling around another small island then finally on to Tintamarre beach. Disney actually had their own excursion to Tintamarre island. You can tell the island was into the cruise ship business as it was a tiny island covered in half by padded lounge chairs for rent and 3 bars. There was an interesting local craft/clothing shop set up that we enjoyed walking through. The clouds came back and the rain finally descended but only lasted 15 minutes as island rain showers tend to do. What the heck did we care? We were already wet. We were pretty tired by now and headed back to the boat for the long trip back around the island. The waves were very high by now and there was no keeping dry. I got a bit chilled on this trip but we had a nice ½ day excursion. It made me glad we had not signed up for a 6 or 8 hour excursion. I was beat. We took another taxi back to the dock and reboarded the Magic and headed to our cabin to dry off and then on to Topsiders for lunch. Then it was nap time! (And Rainforest time). Toy Story 2 in 3D was also on the schedule for this afternoon. No wait, one more thing happened this day. In the afternoon between nap and movie, I received a phone call. From WDW Lost & Found. THEY FOUND MY WALLET! Intact, with nothing missing! YeeHAW! Everybody say “Hallelujah!” I was so very, very happy. They were mailing it certified mail to my home address while we were on the cruise. This was just the icing on the cake – we could now finally relax about the whole identity theft thing and just enjoy the vacation for the rest of the week. TIP # 6, if you lose something at Disney, always check City Hall and then file a report with Lost & Found. They just may find it and mail it back to you!
More to come.....Annette in Wisconsin