Cruising with Disney!

Hello, Friends in Blogland!

As promised, I am back to my blog after a brief two-week hiatus, during which I traveled via Disney cruise ship to Alaska with my family.

My sister's family, my family, my father & his wife, ready to board the Disney Wonder

[Note:  I could not add the photos I wanted to in this blog post.  Many of the pictures I selected gave me the message:  "Server returned invalid response."  I put in whatever I could manage, but am wondering if anyone else is having a similar problem adding photos to their blog posts.  Is it a Blogger thing??]

The Adventures Away celebration as the ship pulled away from Seattle.  Just a few of our closest friends!  :-)

As you might imagine, art-making and crafting took a back seat to meeting Disney characters with my girls, spending quality time with my dad and my sister, and shivering in the cold Alaskan summer weather.

My husband and kids huddle with me on my Dad's stateroom veranda to watch the floating ice in Tracy Arm, Alaska.

The girls got to meet a whole host of Disney characters, getting their autographs in little blank books they carried around with them:  Mickey Mouse, Minnie Mouse, Goofy, Pluto, Chip, Dale, Stitch, Belle, Ariel, Tiana, Captain Hook and Mister Smee. 

Bayla and Katy meet Mickey Mouse during the Character Breakfast on our first morning aboard the Wonder.

We attended a Princess Tea, where the girls learned to take tiny bites of their chocolate chip cookies, and dab the juice from the corners of their mouths.  (Pretty sure that none of those lessons stuck!)

Bayla practices dabbing her mouth like a princess.

I got to watch a few of the evening shows--a man juggling while riding a unicycle, performances of classic Disney songs, and Toy Story:  The Musical. 

We drank plenty of coffee and hot chocolate to keep warm on the windy decks, and I remained permanently ensconced in a grey sweater and red scarf...not my usual summertime gear!

Katy and I cuddle to protect ourselves from the cold of Alaska and the wind of the moving cruise ship.

The girls had one day of warm, when their daddy took them to the swimming pool.  I was on my way to jog on Deck 4, but stopped by just long enough to have multiple heart attacks while watching them dunk their heads repeatedly under water for the first time.

My girls are in blue on either side of the boy in white.

I have to say that the cruise ship cooks didn't have very good steaks, but I still had amazing food to eat all week.  Nothing like having four-course meals every night that I neither prepared nor cleaned up!  I don't consider myself a health-crazy eater, and yet I loved the vegetables and salad dishes more than just about anything else.  (The crab legs were pretty awesome, too!)

The highlight of the trip for the girls, I think, was the mid-ship glass elevator.  We used it to get where we were going as often as we could in order to humor them, and even rode up and down aimlessly a few times so they could enjoy the view. 

 

Giving my girls time with their grandparents was one of the highlights of the trip for me.

Our stateroom was awesome--room for a big bed, a sofa that transformed to a single bed, separate toilet and tub rooms, and a huge porthole giving us ongoing amazing views of the ocean and Inner Passage.   My sister and her family had the stateroom next door, and my father and his wife were just a short walk down the hall.  Their room had a veranda, which gave us great views of Tracy Arm, Alaska, without having the join the masses on the main decks.

We had four port excursions over the week:  Skagway, Juneau, and Ketchikan in Alaska, and Victoria in British Columbia, Canada.  I will share some photos from these side trips in a future post.  So much to share from our Alaskan adventure!

I am happy to be back to blogging, and to visiting my favorite blogs.  Taking a couple of weeks off, though, offers some healthy perspective, and takes some of the self-imposed pressure off that so easily plagues us in the world of blogging.

Thanks for coming back and finding me again!