Glad I Did/Wish I Did posts are a fun way for me to quickly share with others what worked and what didn't. It's been really helpful for us to refer back to over the years when preparing for our next cruise.

Glad I decorated our Stateroom Doors

Door decorations are very popular on Disney Cruise Line, and I'm always glad to partake. In the past, I've printed the door decorations onto magnetic sheets. This time, I made the door decorations out of metallic cardstock because I wanted Mickey's hat and shorts to be shiny and festive for New Year's. To magnetize them, I used super strong Neodymium magnets that I stuck to the paper with double-sided removable glue dots which ended up sticking to the door much better than the magnetic sheets. Because I went with fancy paper, I wouldn't say this is a cheaper way of making magnets than with the magnetic sheets, but at least this way I can reuse the magnets for our next cruise door decor.

We had an early morning in Falmouth, Jamaica! The Fantasy arrived in port at 7:30 AM, and our River Tubing excursion departed at 8:15 AM.

I booked our excursion through Shore Excursions Group, which is the cruise excursion booking platform for Cruises Only, which is Marriott Bonvoy's cruise booking portal. As I was searching for excursions, I came across a 5-star review that really sold it to me written by none other than Boyd Shingleton (a.k.a. "Stove").

We went on this exact River Tubing excursion when we were in Falmouth in 2017 on the Norwegian Escape and had such a great time that we decided to book it again.

On Day 4 of our New Year's Cruise, the Disney Fantasy arrived in Grand Cayman. After dealing with tender boats and a mostly closed port the week prior on our Celebrity Summit cruise, I was happy with our decision to stay on the ship today.

Rise and shine, it's Embarkation Day!! (Again!)

I thought that I had allowed myself plenty of time in the morning to get ready and pack... and then I realized that all of Aaron's clean clothes were hanging everywhere since our laundry day and needed to be folded and packed - eek! The careful tetris job of packing everything made it very challenging to repack so it all fit. If I were to do it again, I'd have Aaron pack his own checked bag, rather than us sharing a checked bag. Aaron said that if he were to do it again, he would only pack his suit and brown dress shoes, and not his velvet blazer and black dress shoes, and then he wouldn't even need a checked bag.

Needless to say, everyone was waiting on me.

As we left Central Florida and headed toward the coast, it became very cloudy.

I'm not sure why, but the line of cars for the Disney Terminal at Port Canaveral is always horrendous. It's been like this since our first ever cruise in 2001. I've yet to experience anything similar with any other port/cruise line.

Ahoy! It's time for another Christmas Cruise.... and New Year's cruise review!

This year's Christmas/New Year's vacation was elaborate in both planning and executions, so in order to set the stage, I'm dedicating an entire post to the story of how our Christmas Cruise - WDW - NYE Cruise vacation came to be.

If you've been following the blog for awhile now, you probably know that it is Shinglebell family tradition to cruise over Christmas. From 2009 to 2019, my sister Rachel and our parents (a.k.a. Stove and Judy) would meet together and set sail to spend the holiday at sea. However, we introduced our boyfriends into the mix, and Christmases became more complicated. Back in 2020, Rachel and I came to the conclusion that we could alternate Christmases every-other-year with our family and our boyfriends' families. Since the cruising industry was not yet open in 2020, Rachel and I offered the first year to our boyfriends' families with the hope that cruising would return by 2021 in time for a Christmas cruise. And it did! (See my Trip Report for our 2021 Christmas on NCL Encore.)