Disney Magic- Day 5

Tuesday, January 31, 2012  St. Maarten

We woke up today at 7 am to have breakfast in our room and watch the ship pull into port.  Can you guess who’s idea that was? 🙂 Once we were parked we took a nap as we were up super late the night before.

We woke back up and put on our swim gear then headed over to Quiet Cove Pool.   Ahhh, now this is the life.  Everyone was off exploring the island and we had the pooland hot tub nearly all to ourselves!  We’ve been to St. Maarten and decided to skip it this time to enjoy the ship without the crowds.  We swam for like 3 hours & hot tubbed it for a while too.  (check out how great my iPhone takes pics!) We got hungry in the sun (but didn’t get sunburned thanks to our new SPF swim shirts! (mine came from here and CSP’s from here) so we went to Topsider’s for the buffet.  We were wet from the pool or we would have gone to Lumiere’s for sit down service.  I wasn’t all that impressed with the buffet, but CSP found some things to eat.  I got a salad and a crepe.

After lunchwe walked around the ship so we could get some pics of the island  andall the ships.  It was likea parking lot  and CSP could not get over it!  Look!  Five ships in a row!  And that’s not counting the one behind us! It IS pretty amazing that they can parallel park these HUGE ships theway they do!

Since everyone was off on the island it gave us a chance to photograph the pools without the throngs of people!  Here’s Mickey’s pool and slide.    And this is theFunnel Vision big screen tv over Goofy‘s Pool.   They show movies on this screen day and night.

We went back to the room for nap time.  When I woke up I put my Fish Extender Gifts together.  Outside of every stateroom door is a fish. It’s a little place where crew members can leave you notes/ materials.   The fish extender is a long thing with lots of pockets that usually has your family name on it.  We got ours when we went on Lisa & Pete’s wedding cruise back in 2008.  Besides the exchange (which I’ll explain shortly) they are great as a landmark so you can pick out your room in the long hallways.  You can either make your FE (fish extender) or  buy one from someone crafty on Etsy or eBay.   By the way, the room doors are metal so you can decorate with magnets (just no tape).   Here’s a great explanation of the FE ritual.  You sign up to be part of the FE exchange via your cruise thread on the DIS boards.  It’s a big message board for Disney travelers.  There is a thread for each cruise date and someone from that group organizes it.  Everyone comes up with inexpensive little travel friendly gifts to exchange.  I like it when the gifts say something about where the giver is from.  Like last time we got maple sugar candy from people who live in Canada.  This go round we had 15 total cabins participating.  CSP and I went to Shealy’s to get barbeque sauce since the Carolinas are famous for BBQ.  I also included a Thirty-One key fob and a mini catalog since I’m an Independent Consultant with Thirty-One.  Did you know our new catalog is out and this month’s special is amazing!  For every $31 you spend you can take 31% off ANY catalog item!  Ahem, back to cruise reporting!

Tonight was our dinner at Palo!  We were so excited!   Palo has their own elevator lobby.  Everything Palo is so gorgeous.  Maria was our server again.  She brought out our bread first in a cool basket that CSP wanted to try and fit in my purse.   She also brought out anti pasta.   Then came our appetizers.  I chose polenta with portobello mushrooms.  SO good.  CSP got cioppino- a mixture of mussels, clams, scallops, and shrimp in broth.  It looked amazing and he about licked the bowl.   Maria brought us a lemon sorbet to cleanse our palates before the main course.

For our entrees we shared a lobster ravioli on Lisa’s recommendation.  OMG.  You could totally tell the pasta was handmade.  It melted in your mouth.  And you could taste the lobster.  Ahhhmazing.  CSP got the osso buco with the creamiest risotto ever made by human hands.   Osso buco is a veal shank.  They included the bone and CSP scraped out the marrow like some woodlands animal.  He was all proud of the empty bone at the end but I refused to photograph that carnage!   He really loved it all though and said the meat was like butter.   I was more civilized and ordered a tuna steak with potatoes, artichokes, and truffles.  I’d never had truffles before!  I felt like I was on the Food Network.  Dessert came next.  CSP got coffee and a tiramisu.  That boy loves tiramisu.  He said this one was fantastic.   I had a pot of the most amazing jasmine tea and a dessert called amaretto indulgence.  Honestly, I barely tasted any amaretto (one of my most favorite flavors), but it was still wonderful.   The little orange circles were some sort of orange liqueur so when I dipped the chocolate in the orange circle it tasted like the chocolate oranges you get at Christmas.  So yum.   Maria was kind enough to take our picture for us.   Don’t we look cute? And full?  ha!

We missed the Pirates IN the Caribbean dinner and party because of our Palo dinner.  We left Palo just in time to watch the fireworks through a window.  So no firework pictures. Oh well.  It was worth it.

We got back to our room and met our towel monkey.   You know, the turn down service is one of the things I miss most.  It’s so nice to slide into a tightly made bed every night.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention CSP’s favorite tv channel on the ship.    He loved being able to see how fast we were going, how strong the winds were, and see our position in the ocean.  I admit, it was really cool.  We didn’t stay up too late tonight and were asleep by midnight.