Cruise: Day 1 (Boarding)

We woke up early the morning after our day at Disney Springs to get ready for the cruise.  We bought a "stay and play" package for our hotel that included parking while we were on the cruise.  The parking (and cruise terminal) was about an hour away from our hotel, so we left pretty early to make sure that we had plenty of time.

We got all checked in to the cruise terminal with about 45 minutes to spare before boarding began!

We got on the boat right at lunch time, so we met up with Laura, Gino, and Ben at the buffet to grab something to eat!

We're all on board and ready for vacation to begin!

After we finished eating, we went out on the deck to look around the ship and the dock.  The kids were just amazed at how big the boat was compared to everything around it!!

Here's the nice shot...

But this was more like the reality of the situation!  A hurricane was making it's way up the Gulf, so the weather was super windy and a little rainy in our area of Florida.

We decided to try and play some mini-golf before it got super crowded, but the golf course is located on the highest level of the ship.  The winds were insane!

Cooper got a hole-in-one on his first shot of the first hole!  After this, we ended up leaving because it was too windy to deal with.

We went to our room to see if it was ready - it was!  We also had most of our luggage, so we let the kids hang out in the room while we got most of our stuff unpacked.  The kids loved our window seat!

We had our muster drill (which was miserable - so crowded and took forever), and then we went back to the deck so that the kids could watch us leave the dock!  The kids were excited to be officially moving!

We went back to the room after hanging out on the deck for a while so that we could start getting ready for dinner.

This was a favorite spot for the trip for sure!

I was excited for the kids to experience the more formal dining every night.  It's not our typical "eating out" environment, but I think it was so good for them and a good thing for them to learn.

I have no idea where in the world Cooper learned to "cheers", but he asked to do it every night!

Even though it was nicer dining than we're used to, they still had some activity sheets for the kids!

I'm pretty sure this ended up being the only night I took a picture of my dinner, but I got fried shrimp and rice.

When we got back to our room after dinner, we had our first towel animal!  The kids loved this and looked forward to it every day!

They also lowered the bunk bed while we were at dinner.  It was a super fun surprise for the kids - they loved it up there!  They ended up taking turns: LL had two nights on the top and Cooper had two nights on the top.

Leaving bad weather behind!  Seeing the full expanse of this rainbow was awesome.

Up next: waking up in the Bahamas!