Embarkation Day

Hello, Jeff here again. Saturday was embarkation day. Picking up where I left off at the Work Center, I made my way back to the hotel to check on the girls and whether our lost bag had found its way to our hotel. It had not. We had breakfast at that well known Barcelona institution – Starbucks – across the street. We tried calling KLM multiple times to check on the lost bag but only got a busy signal. Bah! We decided to take another walk on La Rambla and stopped at the Cathedral in the Barri Gotic on the way. While the outside wasn’t much to look at since it was largely hidden behind scaffolding and netting, the inside was beautiful. We continued to La Rambla and walked down to the pier to see if we could see the Disney Magic and we could! Woo hoo! We returned to our hotel to check out and were happily reunited with our lost bag.

We took a taxi to the cruise ship (25 Euro) and went through a very smooth embarkation process. It took maybe 30 minutes from the time we first walked in the terminal door until we walked up the gangplank. New to me was the process where all passengers had to disinfect their hands prior to boarding. Disney seems to be going all out to try to prevent outbreaks of the stomach flu. Once aboard we made a beeline to Palo where we were able to book an 8:30 pm reservation on Susan’s birthday (6/19). We were put on the waiting list for Brunch on each of the three sea days. Next up was meeting up with fellow DIS board cruisers at Parrot Cay at 1:30 pm. It was really nice to finally put some faces to the names we’d been chatting with over the last several months! Taysmom (Steph), smilingjack (Jack), pillow (Jodie), worktoplay (Marie), also (Brian), princess jasmine, carolmb and probably others that I’ve forgotten. We had a nice lunch and nice conversation getting to know each other better.

Afterwards, we wandered around the ship, refamiliarizing ourselves with where all the main entertainment and dining locations were. We also went topside where I schooled Susan and Katy in ping pong. We had talked about going back ashore to do more touring of Barcelona but it started sprinkling and frankly, we just really didn’t feel like getting off the ship and getting back on. We attended the evening show Welcome Aboard! Let the Magic Begin. Definitely not a must see but it was entertaining. Our first night’s dinner was in Parrot Cay (Table 35) where we met our table mates Michael, Alice and their daughter Marta (16) from San Diego and Bob and Sara from Pittsburg. Our server is Toto and his assistant Analeia. Dinner was very good. The food came out promptly so apparently some of the bugs experienced by the earlier cruisers have been ironed out.