February 28, 2015

Chapter 9
TundraDuck

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Sometimes a lack of pictures proves to be quite a disadvantage when I’m trying to recall exactly what happened each day. So before going on, here is something important that I missed from our first day.

Of course, one of the reasons we were most excited about sailing on the Dream was that we’d heard so much about the AquaDuck. The “water coaster at sea” acts as a visual weenie when you first look at the ship, and seemed like so much fun. As you could see from the pictures, our first day on board had really awful weather. It rained for a bit (though it stopped relatively quickly) and was generally dreary and cold. Tracy and I noticed, though, that no one was riding the AquaDuck, and we thought it was because they were all being wimps about putting on their swimsuits and facing the chilly weather. How wrong we were…

It’s true that there wasn’t much of a line to speak of for the AquaDuck, so we only had to wait about five minutes until it was our turn. We were planning to ride together on one of the tandem inner-tubes, and we boarded at the loading zone. Once we were off, I can barely even tell you anything about the slide. The water felt like we had plunged into a frozen lake. Within the first few seconds, both of us were gasping for breath as our systems went into shock. The thing about a water slide like the AquaDuck is that they assume you want to get wet when you ride, so there’s lots of splashing and waterfalls that you go through. Each one brought a new surge of cold, and I seriously thought I might pass out because I just couldn’t catch my breath. Tracy and I are usually screamers on rides because it adds to the fun, but neither of us could make a sound. I don’t know when (if ever) I’ve been in water that cold in my entire life.

I have no idea if the slide was fun because I just wanted it to be over as soon as it had begun. When we reached the bottom, we both clamored out of the tube and lucked out that we were right next to the hot tubs. Dipping ourselves all the way in, we finally felt like we would survive again. But it had not been the AquaDuck experience we were looking forward to. Unfortunately, the line for the slide was over an hour every time we wanted to go later in the cruise (when the hot temperatures would have probably made the water much warmer and also tempered our reactions to any lingering chilliness). In conclusion, if any of you ever have the chance to ride the AquaDuck on a cold day, don’t do it!

Anyway… waking up on the first full day of our cruise, it was crazy to realize how far we had already traveled.

We had slept relatively well, but we had both been woken up in the wee hours of the morning to a call over the ship wide intercom (which I didn’t know they ever used after leaving port). “Bright star, bright star, bright star,” it had announced. And then it gave a stateroom number. Both of us were too groggy to make much of it at the time, but I used a bit of our free Wi-Fi service to look up what exactly it meant. Though some search results claimed that “bright star” is the call for when someone has died (yikes!), others noted that it’s really the call for a medical emergency. Apparently they announce it throughout the ship in case a doctor on board wants to respond…? I thought it was a little odd that they would announce anything like that to everyone when people are so touchy about privacy concerns.

Anyway, that incident behind us, we pulled out the second Personal Navigator, which our stateroom host had left for us the previous night.

We didn’t need to draw much information from the Navigator because our plans for the day had largely been decided already. We had a Port Adventure booked for Nassau that would meet at 9:15am.

Still, we’d actually gotten up early enough so that we could enjoy an à la carte breakfast at the Royal Palace.

We essentially “rope dropped” the restaurant, which opened for breakfast at 8am, and we were the first ones there.

They started by bringing us our coffee and a choice of pastries.

Then I ordered the Disney Cruise Line Breakfast Trio (French toast, Belgian waffle, and buttermilk pancakes served with cinnamon butter, syrup and whipped cream, accompanied with bacon).

Tracy, of course, opted for Mickey Waffles (which was the real reason we had been so anxious to make it down for breakfast this morning).

She was very happy to see those beauties.

Since this meal was our first experience at Royal Palace, we looked around at the decor a little and appreciated the nods to Beauty and the Beast in our section.

Even once breakfast was over, it still felt like the ship was entirely ours. No one else was in the corridors.

We hadn’t quite made it to Nassau when we woke up, but we started to dock as Tracy and I finished getting ready in our stateroom.

There’s the famed Atlantis.

Once we were all set for our morning, we started to go down toward our Port Adventure meeting location in the Buena Vista Theatre. We were early, though, so we went to Deck 4 and stepped outside for the first time.

The difference between the weather in Florida the previous day and the weather here in The Bahamas could hardly have been more extreme. The night before had been cold and dreary (see above), but the weather here was hot and extremely humid.