Nicole721 Takes on the Carnival Sunshine (...Again)

Hi friends!

I'm probably, like, three months late on posting this, but you know what they say: better late than never, right? And EVEN better if you can finish the review of your last cruise before your next cruise (which, in my case, leaves in just over a week, so this one is getting posted hot and fast).

If we haven't crossed paths on this board before, hi! I'm Nicole. And I really like going on cruises. I live in downtown Chicago, I work for a dot com that gives me unlimited vacation time (which really helps with the whole really liking cruises thing) and a few times a year, I hop on a cruise ship for some family time with my Mom and my sister, Stephanie.

We've sailed on the Sunshine before, a year earlier, for Christmas. And we loved it. Christmas cruises are so much fun. Any holiday is fun at sea, though (at least in our experience!). But we'd never been on a New Year's cruise. And I wanted to post this, especially, because I couldn't find many reviews on New Year's cruises (and, spoiler alert, there may be no more fun celebration at sea than New Year's!).

So a few days after Christmas, we headed off towards sunny Florida for couple of pre-cruise days in Disney before heading to Port Canaveral and the open seas for eight days in the Southern Caribbean to three of our favorite ports (Aruba, Curacao and Grand Turk).

I hope some of you will follow along and find this helpful. And I hope you enjoy it! And if there's any questions you have along the way, shout 'em at me.

These always start the same, don’t they?

I feel like they do.

We book a trip (probably a month before we leave, unless we’re going to Europe). I write about how work keeps me busy (always true) and how things just kind of snuck up on me and suddenly, we’re leaving. This time, I kind of knew things were coming up and instead continued on with an intense marathon of the entire series of Gilmore Girls with my coworkers when I probably should have been planning or packing or…something.

So this starts the way everything else does. It snuck up on me again.

We couldn’t decide on a cruise this year. We knew we were heading to the Baltics in May, but we couldn’t figure out where or what for the holidays. Stephanie had more time off work for New Years than for Christmas, so we pushed back a week. For a while, we were favoring the Oasis of the Seas. We’ve done the Eastern Caribbean ports, the Western Caribbean ports and most of the Southern Caribbean ports, so we didn’t really care where we went as long as it was warm and we could get in as many sea days as we could to get some proper R&R. And then the price of a Sunshine cruise dropped enough that the Oasis just didn’t make sense – the Sunshine offered eight days instead of seven and better ports of call. And we like the Sunshine, so it was a pretty easy call to make.

Airfare was a mess. But it always is during the holidays, isn’t it? Flights to anywhere in Florida were over $500 and I can’t bring myself to spend $500 on a flight to Orlando when I can fly direct to, like, Paris for the same price. Paris >>>> Orlando. I can’t do it. But thanks to the magic of Google Flights, we figured out that if we flew into Atlanta and out from Tampa, the price of the flight dropped more than $160 a person. Flying into Atlanta meant we could stop at the peach farm we used to visit back when we road tripped to Florida twice a year and it’s been five years since we’ve taken a good road trip. An evening flight from Tampa meant we could stop back at Disney Springs before heading home. It wasn’t ideal, but it wasn’t entirely unappealing, either. It was leisurely. I like leisurely.

We spent most of our Christmas break packing. I came in from the city on Tuesday night so we could all head to the airport together on Wednesday morning. We packed up Stephanie’s car and had to run the defrosters forever because it’s Chicago and the winter is terrible, even when it’s not so bad. Chicago winters are terrible as a general state of being.

O’Hare is less than 20 minutes from Mom’s house, and offsite parking runs about as much as a taxi to and from the airport and at least lets us travel at our own pace. We left Mom’s house at 5:00 am, parked the car, took the shuttle to the airport, checked our bags (which were, spoiler alert, over packed…again) and the magical combination of Priority and TSA PreCheck allowed us to walk through security, even on a busy travel day. We were at our gate by 6:15 am.

Our flight to Atlanta was on American Eagle, American’s regional carrier, which meant instead of the 737’s we were used to flying on, we were on those tiny regional jets for this jaunt. I wasn’t sure what the flight experience would be like, but found it to be pretty comfortable – less people meant quicker boarding (and deplaning), the seats felt wider and the leg room was more than adequate in our Main Cabin Extra seats (complimentary at booking with my Platinum Aadvantage status). And aside from a few bumps of turbulence as we coasted through the Tennessee mountains, it was a quick and uneventful flight that had us landing in Atlanta just before 11:30 am.

In some measure of magic (or, more likely, our bags heading to Atlanta on the earlier flight), our bags were already set out and waiting when we got to baggage claim and we were able to grab them and head straight to the air tram to the car rental center within a matter of minutes.

We contemplated making a quick stop at Zoo Atlanta to see the panda bears but figured we were better off heading straight downstate so we could make a quick visit to that peach farm on our way to Orlando. The two hour drive passed quickly and we were soon making our way down that quiet country road we used to know so well.

Peaches aren’t in season this time of year, but that wasn’t why we were going. We pulled into the same parking lot, we walked past that same giant peach sitting to the right of the entrance, next to those same rocking chairs I’ve taken a dozen and a half pictures of and…it was like nothing had changed. Five years passed, so much has changed since our last visit, but stepping through those glass doors – I could close my eyes and it was a different time in the same place.

The pack of Biscoff’s they handed out on the plane wasn’t really doing it for any of us, so we grabbed lunch in the small café, taking some dessert to enjoy in the car (because you can’t go to Georgia and pass up on cobbler and pecan pie!).

We had figured the drive to Orlando would be quick and easy – quick being a relative term because the drive is just about six hours, but when you drive from Chicago and break it up over two days, the six hours from Atlanta to Orlando pales in comparison to the 12 hours it takes to get from Chicago to Atlanta. I guess we’re out of practice, though, because while the drive was just as easy as we remembered, it dragged on. And on. And on. And just when we started to get somewhere Disney like, the traffic hit. It was nearly 8:30 pm by the time we got to the hotel.

We booked our stay at the Omni at Champion’s Gate this visit because we couldn’t get a decent rate at the Gaylord Palms, but we’ve stayed at this Omni before – the rooms are spacious and comfortable and the grounds are quite lovely. The staff were extraordinarily welcoming, even offering us free breakfast passes when we checked in.

It was nearing 9:30 by the time we were checked in and got all of the luggage up to the room, so we decided to postpone our errands and head out to Disney Springs. Stephanie still hadn’t seen the renovations and Mom wanted to grab a quick dinner at Earl of Sandwich.

Disney Springs is the area formerly known as Downtown Disney. Over the past five years, they’ve renovated the entire area, building a thriving shopping and entertainment district that reminds me a bit of The Grove in Los Angeles. But what I really loved about it is that when you walk through the Disney Marketplace area, it’s all the same. There’s a nice comfort in having a space that holds so many memories in tact while everything around it changes so drastically.

We didn’t stay at Disney Springs for long – an hour or two, maybe – but we had an early morning planned for Magic Kingdom and we would need all the rest we could get for the next two days in Disney World.

I’m convinced nothing good ever happens before 7:00 am.

On my normal, non-traveling schedule, I don’t even wake up for work before 8:00 am. So when Stephanie found some last minute breakfast reservations for the Be Our Guest restaurant at 7:40 am and jumped on them, I wasn’t entirely excited. Wasn’t this supposed to be a vacation? Are you supposed to wake up earlier than you do at home when you’re on vacation?

Stephanie had us up by 6:00 am and wanted us out of the hotel by 6:30 am. I tacked on an extra ten minutes to that because not having a cup of coffee in hand within 15 minutes of waking up makes me, like, 60% less productive. We hopped in the car and began the 20 minute ride to the Magic Kingdom. Premium parking is, apparently, a thing now. It gets you a closer parking spot and a bottle of water for the cool fee of $35. We opted for the regular $20 parking and in the first of a string of favorable happenstances, we were directed into a parking spot towards the end of an aisle, where a tram was waiting and took us directly to the Ticket and Transportation Center.

The park was open to resort guests and dining reservation holders at 7:00 am and wouldn’t open to the general public until 8:00 – you had to prove a reservation or a resort stay to get anywhere near the monorail, ferry or bus. We quickly passed that check and hopped on a bus that took us directly to the Magic Kingdom gates, where we swapped our email ticket vouchers for real tickets and made our way into a rather empty park.

A series of events that should have taken us much longer just fell into a ton of luck, and after snapping a couple of pictures, we strolled up to the Be Our Guest restaurant exactly at 7:40 am.

We haven’t spent much time in the Fantasyland extension since it was built – we haven’t done anything Disney beyond a Halloween or Christmas party since 2012 – and Stephanie was really excited to dine in the castle. Beauty and the Beast is one of her favorite Disney movies and the reservations still seem difficult to come by in peak season.

Check in was outside the restaurant, where a host gave us a menu and directed us inside, where we were handed a plastic rose to track our breakfast to our table after we placed our orders with a counter service agent. All of the breakfast options are a flat $24.95 and include an entrée, a drink, a fruit cup and a plate of pastries to share for the table.

We quickly placed our orders and found a table in the ballroom section (you can also opt to sit in the West Wing, or in another room that has some character theming but an otherwise sterile feel). The music from Beauty and the Beast plays softly in the background while servers bring out food in rolling glass display cases. The experience was nice enough, but this meal in no way lived up to a $24.95 per person price tag. The pastries were stale, the fruit was too soft and our entrees, while satisfying in portion and unremarkable in flavor, weren’t exactly high quality or innovative fare. It was just okay. You dine at Be Our Guest for the experience, not the food. But that seems to be the case at a lot of the Magic Kingdom eateries these days – the prices seem much higher than we remembered them and the quality didn’t seem to increase with the cost.

After breakfast, we tried to get on as many rides as we could, walking on the Voyage of the Little Mermaid, Haunted Mansion, the Walt Disney Railroad and It’s a Small World before using our Fast Passes to walk onto Peter Pan’s Flight. But by 10:00 am, it was impossible to get onto anything without a Fast Pass.

We knew the parks would be busy this week, but I’ve never experienced anything quite like what we saw in Magic Kingdom. To say crowds were heavy would be an understatement. In some stretches, it was impossible to move because there were just so many people. At another point, we had to wait 20 minutes to get on the People Mover (a ride we’ve never seen any wait on period). The lines for every major ride extended beyond their queues – a castmember would stand with a stake marking where the line began, often times a few yards down from the ride.

We gave up on rides by late morning, opting to walk around the park and enjoy the beautiful weather, the spirited ambiance and take some pictures. We snacked on soft pretzels and eased the heat with Dole Whip Floats. But by 2:00 pm, we just couldn’t do it anymore and we headed out. We talked about coming back later for Wishes or to do some more rides since the park was open until midnight, but I think we all knew that we probably wouldn’t make a return.

Not totally ready to call a draw to our day, we rode the monorail for a bit, even taking a ride on the Epcot line to see what the lines looked like over there, with the park being the avoid park on the crowd calendar for the day.

It might have been difficult to call a close to a day in a Disney park in the early afternoon with the cost of tickets being what they are, but I think we were all at peace with it. With the drive in from Atlanta the day before and the early wakeup, we were so wiped out and we really wanted to be bright eyed and fresh for our day in Epcot the following morning.

So we left Magic Kingdom in the rearview mirror and headed out to the outlets (don’t get excited because, spoiler alert, we couldn’t find parking and gave up after a half hour because everyone who wasn’t in line for a ride at Magic Kingdom was apparently at the Orlando Premium Outlets). We ran our errands to pick up last minute odds and ends for our cruise and we headed back to the resort to relax and watch terrible movies.

It might not have been a totally satisfying Disney day, but for us, it was a perfectly satisfying vacation day.

We spend a lot of time in Florida. We often refer to it as our second home.

At one point in time, when Stephanie and I were both young, it was – when the winter would hit in Chicago, Mom would take Stephanie and I down to Florida, where grandma was waiting in Boca Raton and together, we’d wait out the winters with strolls around the condo complex, trolley rides to Boca Town Center and daily pool visits.

So between the early childhood winter birding and the frequent pre/post cruise visits, we know Florida pretty well. And we knew when we checked the weather forecast for our day in Epcot, we were in for a wonky day.

The day we came in, the highs were in the mid-80s. The day we spent in Magic Kingdom was in the upper 70s. The day we’d embark on the Sunshine, it would be in the mid-70s. But the day we were in Epcot? The highs were forecasted for the upper 40s and lower 50s.

That’s not a typo. The temps in Central Florida matched the temps we had in Chicago the weekend before we flew in. Needless to say, as we were heading off on a southern Caribbean cruise that would take us mere miles off the coast of South America, cold weather clothing didn’t make it into our suitcases. The weather forecast before we left wasn’t entirely accurate – we had been expecting mid-60s on the day. We improvised and picked up some sweaters the evening before when we were out running some pre-cruise errands.

But the uncommonly cold weather served as a precursor to an equally uncommon day. The day began just fine – we were up early, we grabbed our Disney gear and hopped in the car to drive the 20 minutes to Epcot from our resort in Champion’s Gate. We made it to the park 15 minutes before it opened, but that wasn’t nearly enough buffer time to park and get to the gate – the Epcot parking lots are wide and vast.

Security was a nightmare. Hundreds of (if not a thousand) people were pooled into two three-lane checkpoints, and it took us nearly a half hour just to get to the first check point, just in time for them to open up three more lanes to the back half of the line. It happens. It sucks, but it happens. To make myself feel better, I reminded Stephanie of the dozens of times we get to the TSA check point at O’Hare and get directed away from a line dozens of people deep into a new line with no wait. The universe has to balance it out at some point, right? And better on a leisurely Disney day than when we’re running for a flight. Or a cruise ship.

We finally made it into the park and had originally intended to make a run for Test Track. The new Fast Pass Plus system only allows you to book Test Track or Soarin’ (or the Frozen ride, if that’s your thing), but you can’t get passes to all three. We opted for Soarin’, so we wanted to try to get on Test Track as soon as we got into the park, but by the time we got into the park, we only had a half hour left in our Fast Pass window for Soarin’, so we put the speeding cars on pause to head off to The Land pavilion.

To the credit of the current Fast Pass Plus system, it truly had been (in our experience) a fast track to the rides – much quicker than the old Fast Pass system seemed to be. But it also seemed to create a larger issue with queues by limiting the number of Fast Passes you could get per day on days where the park was at capacity.

This was our first time on Soarin’ since the ride was redone to soar over the world instead of limiting its scope to just California landmarks. I’ll always have a special fondness for the California version (and for that moment when you smell the citrus as you glide over the orange groves), but this new worldly version was just magnificent, fueling the wanderlust that always bubbles over in my heart and making me want to book a trip to China ASAP (…and Brazil. Egypt. Monument Valley. Oh, and back to Switzerland, too. The good news was the trip to Germany was already booked, so we could check that one off the to-do list).

I was approaching hangry status by the time we got off the ride, so we grabbed a quick breakfast at Sunshine Seasons before hopping on Living with the Land, which had went from walk on status when we arrived at the pavilion to forming a short queue. If our day at Magic Kingdom had been any indication, we needed to get in as many rides as we could, as early as we could.

After we floated past farming innovation techniques of the mid-2000s (not a complaint – I enjoy the nostalgia factor!), we hopped over to the next pavilion to The Seas with Nemo, which showed a 15 minute wait but was really more like 25. We’d always walked right through the queue, so the stop and go gave us more time than we needed to enjoy the attention to detail in the underwater grotto that made up the queue.

We took a few minutes to watch the manatees enjoy their breakfast of romaine lettuce while we plotted out our next move, but that’s kind of where it all went downhill really fast. It wasn’t even 10:00 am and every major attraction had a wait of at least 45 minutes (Living with the Land) and up to two hours (Test Track). The queues were longer than the park had even been open for.

Spaceship Earth was showing a 50 minute wait, and I was hoping it wasn’t accurate so we headed that way. The wait times weren’t always a reliable indicator of actual line wait – the way they measure wait times is flawed because it’s based on when a single person actually makes it through the line from start to end, and we’ve noticed that long line times turn enough people away to reduce the wait time. Waiting 50 minutes for Spaceship Earth seemed absolutely absurd to me, but we had no where else to be and nothing else to do. The line crawled. It wrapped around one side of the attraction, then the other, and then made for an intricate maze in the middle. By the time we could see the traditional queue entrance, it was showing a 70 minute wait, but we’d already spent so much time in line that we didn’t want it to go to waste.

It went on, moving a step or three every few minutes, which is never a good sign on a constantly loading ride. We made it through the one side of the queue, and then the other, and then as we were getting to that home stretch of that middle section of the queue, just as we were listening in on a family question a cast member on the logic of the Fast Pass to regular rider ratio (at the moment, they were listing 100 Fast Pass riders for every stand by party, so the party of two in front of them would go, and then 100 Fast Pass riders would be permitted to enter before their family of seven could), the ride shut down. And not like a momentary we-will-be-moving-again-soon kind of thing – they evacuated the ride, the queue and weren’t confident it would be up and running any time soon.

To say we were frustrated was an understatement. It was two hours just completely wasted. And I tried to quell Stephanie’s frustrations by reminding her that two hours spent in a line at Disney World was better than two hours at her desk at work, but when I overheard a cast member tell a family that they could go complain to someone who wasn’t her, I just kind of lost it. Not actually lost it. I don’t really lose it. But I grabbed Mom and Stephanie and went straight to Guest Services. I’m a firm believer in manners and kindness and directing feedback (and frustration) to the appropriate place. It’s no one’s fault the ride broke. That happens. And terrible cast members? That’s an unfortunate fact of life kind of thing, too. But I wasn’t going to let two hours of our day be for literally nothing. So we politely explained to the guest services agent that we had spent two hours waiting for a ride before being turned away and were immediately given Fast Passes to ride Spaceship Earth later in the day (whenever we wanted, no time constraint, assuming the ride went back up) and an additional Fast Pass for Spaceship Earth, Journey into the Imagination, The Seas with Nemo or Mission Space. And that made us feel a little better – two hours for two rides kind of evens out. We left guest services just as a fight was breaking out behind us about line cutting.

I didn’t think it could get worse than Magic Kingdom the day before, but it was, on every level. The park was packed and the guest to space ratio was uncomfortable at best. Epcot has less rides than Magic Kingdom, too, which helped us understand why the queues were so long. With Spaceship Earth still down, we headed out of Future World to World Showcase. It was still crowded, but at least we could explore the pavilions.

I’ve always loved World Showcase. For years, it was the closest I could get to many of these countries, and now having visited many of them, I have a new appreciation for the theming, the décor, the shopping, all of it. And even though the holiday season was just about over, the Holiday’s Around the World exhibit was still going strong, with each pavilion offering food and drink options unique to their country during the holidays a la Food and Wine Festival.

So we started at Mexico (where the line for the Gran Fiesta Tour wrapped around the pavilion – a first, I’m sure) and spent the entire afternoon winding our way through all of the countries until we ended at Canada. We snacked, we shopped, we snapped pictures and even though it was crowded, we saw and did so much that it felt more productive than standing in never ending lines.

By the end of it, we’d walked nearly seven miles, realizing that the cupcakes at Karmel Kuche weren’t nearly as good as we remembered, marveled at how Epcot’s version of the Trevi Fountain is so far from how it actually is, contemplated how we could sneak a return trip in to Switzerland over a plate of cheese fondue and ended back in Future World.

Spaceship Earth was back up and running, but the Fast Pass line still extended beyond the attraction, extending down towards Guest Services. Mom gave me the you-aren’t-really-going-to-make-us-do-this look until we realized that, unlike the morning, this line was actually moving and even though the line looked daunting, it took no more than 15 minutes before we were on the ride. The line was even shorter when we left, so we used our bonus Fast Pass for one last ride.

We were tired and sore as we stumbled out of the park, wondering if we could take the tram to our parking lot. The driver said walking would be quicker and I’m sure it would have been if we hadn’t (in true fashion) gotten lost and walked exactly two parking lots beyond where our actual lot was.

A day. We had a day.

We left the park around 5:00 pm, this time with no actual intention of returning later in the evening. It was still cold and we were burned out on disappointment. We knew the winter break period between Christmas and New Years would be bad, but I don’t think any of us realized it would be this bad. We’d survived Memorial Day trips, August visits, even mid-December visits had never treated us poorly. But this was so much worse than we had ever thought it could be. It’s unfathomable to consider you could spend a day in one of these parks and really only get on four or five rides (and that’s if you plan it right). We’ll visit Disney again. We still love Disney. But I don’t think we’ll ever be back during the winter break weeks.

Dinner options at our resort were limited, so we grabbed a quick dinner at a Pei Wei on our way back to Champion’s Gate before settling in with a Game of Thrones marathon and suitcase (re)packing. A new day would bring not only a new year, but a new home for the next eight days: we were heading off on the Carnival Sunshine!

Great review so far. I used to be a huge Disneyfile and we went 2 to 3 times a year. On year my brother decided in November that he should take his family for Christmas holiday. I had to talk him out of it. Christmas to New Years is the busiest time at WDW. Anytime anyone tells me they are thinking about it, I look for the worst crowd pictures I can find and information about park closures due to capacity.

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I am along for the ride because I will be sailing on the Sunshine in September. Cruised on the Destiny a few times and since Sunshine will still be in our homeport of NY thru September, we decided to jump on her for old time's sake! I am super excited as we tend to do the same ships one cruise after another, so this will be a new adventure! We did WDW a LONG time ago when our DS'es were young. I imagine it is so much more remarkable now, but I am not into long lines and waiting. You are very patient and very upbeat, and I look forward to the rest or your journey.. Tricia, we keep crossing paths on threads lol. We will be crossing paths in person on the Pride in January! ;)

I always enjoy your reviews, and your blog! :)