As I write this I am sitting in the Orlando airport, waiting for our flight home, which isn’t for another 2 hours. The Maiden Voyage of the Disney Fantasy is over – it went so fast! But it was just wonderful – truly a once in a lifetime experience, made even more special because we were able to share it with friends. And everything went so well. Everyone else at our table was on the Dream’s Maiden Voyage, and they all said how much better this one was. Disney obviously learned a few things!

Our final night dinner was nice – I think it’s a new menu, and it had lots of really appealing menu items – more than I was able to try. Some menus I look at and say: “Well, I guess this would be ok…”, but on this menu there were a lot of great choices! The final night is always bittersweet, though.

Like on the other ships, this menu featured the Baked Alaska for dessert, but we didn’t get the parade of the flaming baked Alaska and the servers and flags through the dining room like they do on the Magic and the Wonder – we all missed that.

We went back to our stateroom to pack after dinner. And had yet another gift on our bed – a collection of all of the dinner menus with the “Maiden Voyage” notation on them.

With all of these wonderful gifts my suitcase is a lot heavier than when I boarded! We wanted to make sure we could get off the ship early since we had an 11:30 flight, so we were planning to carry our own bags off. That meant we didn’t have to do ALL of our packing last night, but we did most of it.

Lee went to see the Believe show, which we were told had been tweaked slightly. But when they compared notes later, no one who saw it seemed to be able to tell what was different.

And we finished our evening off, in, guess where, Ooh La La! As I think you can tell we had a great time there. The three Ooh La La ladies, Adriana, Kristina, and Lindsay, were just wonderful, and they made us feel very welcome. It wouldn’t have been the same without them, and I’m really going to miss them!

It was not too busy when we arrived but the crowds picked up later – I guess after everyone had finished their packing. it was the place to be – we saw John and Nancy Lasseter and Joe Lanzisero in a group there. Someone came in with this towel creation and showed it to John – and John took a photo of it himself! Very clever.

All too soon it was time to say goodbye. Kristina told us that they rotate around the various bars and only stay about two weeks at any particular one, so who knows if/when those three will be together in Ooh La La again. But I hope so.

We knew when we arrived in Port Canaveral this morning – the stern thrusters started about 5:00. We did manage to go back to sleep, but the alarm went off at 6:00. Way too early. We finished getting everything in our suitcases and went down to breakfast at 6:45. We were the only ones there for a while, but eventually everyone except Beci arrived (and she’d told us she wouldn’t be there – much too early for her! 🙂 ). Breakfast was pretty quick, and we said our goodbyes to everyone. 🙁 That’s always the bad part of every cruise. I miss them already!

We had ordered a photo CD from Shutters, and we needed to pick that up. Quite a few other people were doing the same thing, and the line was pretty long. I thought the process was rather disorganized – we were picking up pre-paid CDs, so all they needed was our stateroom number, but it took a lot longer than it should have – we were probably in line for 20 minutes. The CDs did not seem to be very well organized so that they could find them quickly.

The photo CD contains all the photos from our ruise, but we will only be able to save 10 of them. We’ll see how that works.

Getting off the ship and though Customs was very quick – we left a little before 8:00. We didn’t have to wait in line at all to get off the ship, and the Customs line was pretty short so it didn’t take long at all. We called our Happy Limo driver when we exited the terminal, and didn’t have to wait too long for him to arrive. We got some final looks at the Fantasy from the car…sigh. We were at the airport by 9:00 – in plenty of time for our 11:30 flight.

And so we come to the end of another cruise. I’ll still have a few more blogs, though – the food blogs, some final thoughts, the new Animator’s Palate show, and a little more about Europa and Ooh La La. Thanks for reading!

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