So to make up at least half of an AllEars full house, I too went on the DCL Pacific repositioning cruise from Long Beach to Vancouver. Unlike the rest of those lucky stiffs, I had to go rejoin Reality (such as it is,) before they continued on to Alaska, but it was still a great time. Since Laura, the blogging machine, is again taking care of all the details, I’ll just give some random observations.

One thing I noticed: Out of all the cruises on DCL I’ve taken, this one seemed as though it had the most changes as to the way they traditionally do things. My feeling is that a lot of the changes have been made to standardize things between the older ships and the Dream.

The Win:
A lot of the menus on board have been updated, mostly for the better. Some of the offerings, particularly the embarkation day buffet in Beach Blanket Buffet, had been getting a little familiar, so it was pleasant to see some change-ups there.

The shows are still very good, despite the fact that, along with Laura, I now prefer the updated version of Golden Mickeys, with the Tangled segment.

The Wavephones have made their way onto all the ships now, which continues to make communication a little easier for people now totally dependent on their phones.

The return of the dining room parades was a nice touch, and something you miss on the Dream, due to the larger number of people occupying the dining rooms at any one time.

The ports were few but extremely enjoyable. I visited the Walt Disney Family Museum and the Cartoon Art Museum in SF, and Butchart Gardens in Victoria.

It was nice to have an overnight in a port for a change, so for at least one day, you didn’t have to have the vague but constant worry that something would happen while you were out, and the ship would leave you.

Victoria and Vancouver were particularly nice–clean, and filled with helpful people. We actually took the rapid transit line from the Vancouver port to the airport (not difficult at all…if you weren’t dragging six days worth of luggage with you,) and people couldn’t have been nicer about giving us directions or holding doors for us.

Most people felt they would have preferred the two days in Victoria rather than SF, and I notice next year this cruise is one day longer, with an extra sea day and two days in Vancouver instead.

The Fail:
The embarkation process in Long Beach was a total flail. In the first place, unlike in Florida, there was no one to greet incoming cars or tell them where to go or what to do, so there was a great deal of slow, random driving as people tried to puzzle out the procedure. The LuggageGuys who take your luggage from the car to the ship were not outfitted in anything Disneyesque or even Port-esque, causing my family some concern that we just handed off all our stuff to random guys on the street.

Once inside, it wasn’t any better. No one gave us any help finding a line to wait in–we were supposed to be in the Castaway Club line, however on a casual glance it appeared that the only choices were “Platinum/Concierge” or “Everyone Else,” so we went with the latter. Subsequently, they had computer problems which caused the line to slow to a crawl, and then stop altogether when they had to reboot their computer systems. By the time we actually made it past the port, we had waited about an hour in line, surrounded by people with rapidly decompensating moods.

In the cabins, particularly the inside cabins, it was always a problem trying to tell what time it was. The only clock they gave you was an analog propeller clock which went well with the decor but was totally unreadable either in the dark or from the bed. Now it seems, with the addition of the Wavephones, they felt everyone could just tell time from those, and removed even the one marginally functional clock they had. The best advice I can give is to bring your own light-up travel clock, along with a power strip, since they now take one of the only outlet areas for the Wavephone charger.

The Meh:
Another thing they took from the Dream was the minimalist Navigators which still lack some of the listings–neither the Pirate Buffet nor the Dessert Buffet were written down, so if your server didn’t tell you about them, you were pretty much out of luck.

The late-night buffets are also altered–instead of setting up special tables with different offerings each night, they’ve switched to utilizing the already-available bar snack tables located in two of the lounges for them. The result is that there are far fewer offerings each night, which appear to be pretty uniform from night to night. This definitely seems like a downgrade.

Even the Pirate buffet, which used to be a huge, crowded event, now takes place in the Beach Blanket Buffet area. This provides people with better seating, but again, the variety of food and decorations is much smaller than previously.

At the end of the day, though, I was finally able to track down some chocolate-covered strawberries. And really, that’s what cruising is all about.

Disembarkation was pretty simple, although it seemed to take a little longer than in Florida–understandable, since this was the first time the Wonder had been to Vancouver. They allowed people to leave by announcing the various characters on the cruise luggage tags–the latest people were called around 0930-1000, so early flights out would have been challenging. There was then a considerable line to go through Canadian customs, after which you found your bags as usual, and sought transportation to your respective destination. Disney transfers to the airport ran $25 per person, and we were told cabs would cost around $40. The rail station was about 1 1/2 blocks from the port exit, and tickets ran about $3.75 each (amounts in Canadian dollars.) The rail trip took about 20 minutes, and we actually went through US customs checking into the flight, so we didn’t have to retrieve our luggage and redo the whole thing when we connected in Seattle.

On the whole, it was great fun, not the least of which was sharing the boat with all the other AllEars folk–we look forward to repeating on the Fantasy next year!

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