iloveeeyore
DIS Veteran
- Joined
- Aug 12, 2003
DH and I just returned from our first DCL experience, the Fantasy Western Caribbean, January 4-11. It was amazing!! This is our trip report. Please enjoy, and feel free to ask any questions! We have gained a lot of knowledge from DISBoards over the years, and love to share some of our experiences so others might benefit.
We have wanted to try DCL for soooo many years, it just felt like the right time to go for it now, for a number of reasons. We have recently lost some very close friends to crazy illnesses, and we know life is too short to keep putting stuff off to “someday.” We are in our 50's, and for the past 20 years, every vacation we took was with our kids (who are now 25 and 23). We LOVE travelling with them (we might be somewhat biased, but we think they are AWESOME) and wouldn’t trade any moment of our time with them for anything, but it was time to spend some quality time on our own, with greater focus on romance and relaxation. We will celebrate our 30th anniversary in 2020, and thought a Disney cruise would be the perfect way to kick off our 30th year together. Even though it wasn’t technically our anniversary, we noted on our reservation that we would be celebrating our anniversary…who knew what kind of pixie dust would happen?
We booked through Dreams Unlimited Travel, kind of last-minute (around 6 weeks out, around Thanksgiving week), which is not usually how we book cruises. It was pricier than most cruises we have taken, which is why we have always hesitated to try DCL, and it was even MORE expensive than usual due to the last-minute nature of the booking. DU offered a generous $200 on-board credit, so we decided to give them the reservation. We put in a request for a quote and were randomly assigned to Eileen Smith, who has been wonderful and attentive, even now that we’re back. What I’m trying to get at here, is that this cruise was kind of an impulse buy (at least for us)…seemingly very against our usual, very meticulously planned vacation pattern…and we loved it that way!!
Here we are with our lovely gift basket from DU:
We have wanted to try DCL for soooo many years, it just felt like the right time to go for it now, for a number of reasons. We have recently lost some very close friends to crazy illnesses, and we know life is too short to keep putting stuff off to “someday.” We are in our 50's, and for the past 20 years, every vacation we took was with our kids (who are now 25 and 23). We LOVE travelling with them (we might be somewhat biased, but we think they are AWESOME) and wouldn’t trade any moment of our time with them for anything, but it was time to spend some quality time on our own, with greater focus on romance and relaxation. We will celebrate our 30th anniversary in 2020, and thought a Disney cruise would be the perfect way to kick off our 30th year together. Even though it wasn’t technically our anniversary, we noted on our reservation that we would be celebrating our anniversary…who knew what kind of pixie dust would happen?
We booked through Dreams Unlimited Travel, kind of last-minute (around 6 weeks out, around Thanksgiving week), which is not usually how we book cruises. It was pricier than most cruises we have taken, which is why we have always hesitated to try DCL, and it was even MORE expensive than usual due to the last-minute nature of the booking. DU offered a generous $200 on-board credit, so we decided to give them the reservation. We put in a request for a quote and were randomly assigned to Eileen Smith, who has been wonderful and attentive, even now that we’re back. What I’m trying to get at here, is that this cruise was kind of an impulse buy (at least for us)…seemingly very against our usual, very meticulously planned vacation pattern…and we loved it that way!!
Here we are with our lovely gift basket from DU:
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