Vernon Volumes text

Vernon Volumes text

Wednesday, September 4, 2024

Disney Cruise on the Wish for Labor Day - Bahamas and Castaway Cay


For Labor Day 2024 weekend, we boarded the Disney Wish in Port Canaveral for a short cruise over the holiday weekend. This was our 17th cruise with Disney, but only our second time on the Wish. 

Boarding was the fastest process ever, and without much hassle we got on the boat and grabbed some lunch. The Wish has a number of options, aside from the buffet, and our favorite was the Mexican spot "Donald's Cantina". The restaurant is similar to Chipotle and afterwards we stopped by the "Inside Out" themed ice cream shop for Andrea's favorite strawberry shortcake ice cream with sprinkles.


Paige enjoyed the soft serve ice cream and although the first day they only had chocolate and vanilla, they eventually also had mango and blueberry flavors available.



After unpacking and watching some US Open tennis on the TV's in the room, we went to dinner in the Marvel themed restaurant. 




Once we finished with dinner, we participated in some Disney trivia and then went to the show "Seas the Adventure" which featured Goofy and friends.


In the morning of August 31st, we ate breakfast and then tried out the Wish's interactive game "Disney Uncharted Adventure". It was a neat concept that allowed us to create our own characters on the Disney Cruise app on our phones and then we used our phones to interact with the screens in the game. We all joined a team together, but unfortunately Andrea's phone would not cooperate so only three of us were able to play at a time.








For dinner we decided to skip the formal meal since nothing on the menu looked that great, and we went to see "The Little Mermaid" in the theater in the evening. We watched some US Open tennis in our rooms before bed.

Sunday, September 1st, 2024, we slept in a bit and then had some food before getting off the boat. The last few times we've been in Castaway Cay, we thought that the food was only OK and since we've enjoyed the "Chipotle" style food on the boat so much, we decided to get that one more time.







Castaway Cay was pleasant as usual, but since we got off the boat late, it was hard to find a decent place for our stuff. We got a spot near the obstacle course over the water and had a little time to use it before it got shut down for "low tide". I think it was actually shut down because huge grown men were using the monkey bars against the warnings of the lifeguards. I had been waiting my turn, but a guy that went just before me was getting lectured and warned not to use the equipment, so it didn't seem appropriate.

We were impressed with Paige for making it all the way across, even with Connor's heckling during her attempt.



Andrea and I waded out fairly far in the low tide to a nice peaceful area to hang out, and we enjoyed the cool water on the hot day, before leaving to start our Stingray Adventure.


We did a short orientation, put on our life vests and snorkels, and then waded out in the water to little floating platforms where we were able to interact with the stingrays.



The stingrays had been trained and conditioned to swim up the left side of the platforms to get the food that we held for them. We were given shrimp and some weird cubes of gelatinous goo, and then were instructed to hold them in the water and release when the rays swam up. The rays were free to approach or not, and many of them seemed happy to just swim around through our legs to freak us out. The rays had their stingers, although they were supposedly trimmed so as not to be quite so dangerous, but we still avoided the tails as much as possible.



After feeding them for a while, we swam out in the confined area to see all the rays we could. Many of them were hard to see and it was neat to watch them bury themselves in the sand. "Panda" was the largest of the rays and we're pretty sure we saw her as there was an enormous dark ray near the edge of the enclosure.







After finishing up with the stingrays, we boarded the boat, washed up, and went to dinner. Andrea actually decided to eat the pizza one last time as it was her favorite food aboard. The rest of us had filet mignon at the 1923 restaurant. We had a quick dinner since we wanted the soft serve ice cream for dessert instead of the fancy stuff being served in 1923. 



Once we finished with dinner, we stood in a few lines to get pics with Pluto, Mickey, and Captain Minnie.






The last show of the cruise was Aladdin and it was cute with updated jokes and references by Genie.


Our cruise together was so much fun and on Monday morning we drove home and got ready to go back to work and school. We had some memorable family times on the vacation and we're thankful that Andrea plans our fun getaways for us.

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