Y'all are way too nice.
Okay - have my computer back. My MacBook died in Barcelona, and I finally got a Genius bar appt Friday afternoon. Had lost my operating system and some bridge... whatever that all meant. Then it took longer to fix, so they comped it!!
Yes - it was a challenge this time with the littlest one refusing to go to Oceaneer's Club or Flounders. She went the day we were at brunch, and the following day for 20 minutes before we were paged, but refused to go back. We even tried Flounder's to no avail. I was able to get DMIL to sit in the cabin with her while we had things, like Palo or a spa appointment, but that was about it. At least on WBTA 2011 she was happy with Flounders and we scheduled that a couple hours each day so we could have "us" time. Very surprising though, is that on the NCL Spirit cruise, she turned 3 on the fourth day, and could start the kids club there. She *loved* it and went daily! Then the last day in Venice she decided she didn't want to go when we were going to try to head back into Venice again for the evening. Go figure. I think the difference was that DCL has ages 3-12 all together whereas NCL has 3-5, 6-9, 10-12 separated in their younger club. Even in the same area, they had different colored wrist bands and would come out of the club telling us about their activities, which were different (since one child was 3 and the other was 6). I will say I was impressed with NCL on that, as this was our first NCL cruise with children (the other three were in 2000, 2003 and 2005 - for East Caribbean, West Caribbean, and Alaska).
Food - overall we liked Disney food better. We did miss having our set dining room servers, but that is partially our fault because we tried various restaurants onboard. We could have chosen to go to the same restaurant each night at opening requested the same server, which is what we did on our last two NCL cruises. With kids though, DCL has it down. One night we were at the Garden Cafe on NCL and after ten minutes of servers buzzing by us and receiving no water or acknowledgement, the kids were already ancy, and their food took longer anyway, so we just left. But would we book NCL again? Yes. But if looking for a comparison, DCL did have an edge to the onboard experiences and activities IMHO while NCL had the itinerary we wanted to back up to the EBTA (and at a decent price).
While we had about 400 children in Oceaneer's area (from what staff told me) there were only 200 on NCL for the 3-12 group. Ships were about same size for passenger capacity, but we felt our DCL CMs built better relationships with the children. Our oldest cried and cried and cried when having to turn in her wristband on the Magic, afraid she would never see them again (as her favorite from WBTA was not on there and no CM seemed to know or remember him). She was fine leaving kids club the last time on NCL - no tears - but did enjoy going every day and asked to go when we got back into port.
Characters - I was very surprised to not see the Fab Five. Instead, after asking multiple times, they did it the morning of Madeira and called it Mickey and Friends.... and closed the line early. We were turned away. They said they would do it again, but never did. That used to be touted on the DIS boards as one of the perks of longer cruises... chances to see unique groups of characters you don't get on the shorter cruises. There were also times of characters being in one place but the schedule had something different. Not sure what was going on with that this time. I was also bummed to not see the mosaic we took part in painting. The schedule had 1:30-3:30, we arrived about 2:50, and it was gone. Asked Guest Services and they said it was taken down due to rough seas and would be back up on Friday. It never was. Just odd scheduling things like that were different this time, so I was happy to see the picture someone got to take. I sat next to a doctor from Barcelona on the train from Milan to the airport, and told her to keep an eye out for it at the hospital
I think NCL did a better job of keeping handicap cabins for those who actually needed them. We were nextdoor to one on NCL and thankfully it was used by a family with a wheelchair-bound person. It saddened me to see the wheelchairs parked on deck 6 by midship elevators on DCL -- someone told me they were people who could not get HA cabins hence having to park their chairs there since they don't fit in standard doors. I was glad to see so many making the voyage though but it would have been nice if DCL could enforce it better, or guests only book the cabins if truly needed (honesty and integrity just is hard to come by these days it seems), or DCL assign guarantee cabins accordingly. NCL would also reserve one elevator on port days for handicap to get up/down from the gangway deck. Each day is truly such a blessing to be thankful for.
We had a great CruiseCritic group with a couple meets onboard, and it was fun running into each other. With many of us using Rick Steves' advice, I think we ran into someone every day in port! We look up at the Rialto Bridge area in Venice and see Woody and his wife - again. And of course we had gone early to Montserrat as Rick Steves suggested and ran into them there as well, but ran into Laurie/Lee at Parc Guell in Barcelona. Everyone in our CruiseCritic group was so helpful, sharing research, joining tours, etc -- but being such a port intensive cruise there were not any of the "DIS" activities you see. We needed sea days to recuperate and rest our feet!
NCL has some very unique itineraries, and we always arrived early into port. I can't recall if I shared the ports:
- Spain - Barcelona (disembarked cruise, spent 3 nights there seeing Parc Guell, Casa Batllo, Sagrada Familia, Picasso Museum, and other major sights)
- Spain - Monteserrat (went up the mountains to monastery, heard 800+ year old boys choir in amazing church, hiking with beautiful monuments telling the story of Christ, touched he black Madonna)
Boarded a 12-night cruise for the Med:
- France - Toulon (tourist train of town/beach, awesome crepes on the coast)
- Italy - went to:
--- Florence (too much to list, side trip to organic winery that we loved)
--- Pisa (that tower is still there)
--- Rome (yay for skip-the-line tickets! saw the highlights on an 8 hour tour - Colloseum, Palatine Hill, Spanish Steps, Trevi Fountain, etc)
--- Naples (archaeological museum for Pompeii artifacts, pizza from Rick Steves' recommendation, gelato, and the vespas zipping down the streets),
--- Venice (yay for maps! had skip the line tickets for St Marks).
- Greece - went to Mykonos - windmills, over 300 churches on island, had authentic baklabav (but Athens was cancelled due to a strike)
- Turkey - went to:
--- Istanbul (Blue Mosque, Hagia Sophia, a pharmacy LOL -- in Istanbul when the rest of the world was seeing the Taksim Square riots - we used public metro and heard the sirens blaring for prayer time at the mosques)
--- Ephesus the next day (and then a long tour in Ephesus to see Artemis, Basilica of St John, Gates of Ephesus, and last House of the Virgin Mary)
- Croatia - Dubrovnik and Ston - both places we would not hesitate to return to (tasted oysters from the Adriatic Sea - fresh, visited olive oil mill, wine tasting with walking tour of Old Town Dubrovnik; both towns had walls encircling them but Ston has the second longest wall in the world - next to Great Wall of China). Croatia was a last-minute itinerary change due to strikes in Athens. Kids were literally in bed, we had our PJs on, and the Captain came on the all-call to announce the news that we would not be docking in Athens the following morning but we would have a sea day followed by Croatia instead. It was nice to have something substituted instead of an additional day at sea, and we received about $4 in taxes credited back (and free drinks by the pool on the day we should have been in Athens).
After disembarking in Venice, we took the train to Milan, stayed at Park Hyatt Milan overnight (adjacent to the Galleria and Duomo) and then had an 11:00pm flight out to KEF (Iceland).
In Milan we did the Last Supper painting, amazing duomo (our favorite of all churches/basilicas/duomos we visited), exploring Milan, yummy homemade gnocci
- Iceland - did the Golden Circle and Blue Lagoon - and we will be returning!
We both start back to work today (yes, a Saturday). Early morning. This is the first time I have been using my Mac, and haven't even started to download pics from the two memory cards. I only had pics I put on facebook from my ipad.
We are booked on WBTA 2014 and have considered doing EBTA as well for a "roundtrip". I've posted on that EBTA thread a couple times but I have an odd feeling we will tack something onto WBTA instead. Vacation bidding is in August so we will know more then.
Okay - off to my first appointment of the day
Y'all have a great weekend!
love these pics Stevie, would you be surprised to know that I don't even remember getting these taken.
if I suggested cruising solo this summer again, the prices were just so cheap, the ports were not really special, however ok. I only hope that someone in DCL is listening or thinking already about how can we change things round a bit without pricing many families away from DCL, is it me or do you think DCL pays a large premium to each port just because the are Disney. 
(I'll keep harping on that example forever!) The only way prices will go down is if people vote with their feet. As much as I loved the Magic for all those sea days on the Transatlantic, it's a very expensive floating hotel on the more port-intensive cruises.
