We had a 7am breakfast slot on debarkation day as we'd booked the earlier dining for this cruise. This was fine, but another reason we preferred the late dining with the accompanying later breakfast. I peered out the curtains and saw we were just coming in alongside the docks before heading down. Our suitcases were left outside the stateroom the night before, and I definitely recommend doing this. It made everything so much easier as you don't have to lug them to breakfast.
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| As if by magic, the port of Southampton appeared again! |
Ami our room host was absolutely fantastic, and we gave him a box of chocolates with a hand-drawn note (my husband drew some amazing little Disney character silhouettes on gratitude cards) alongside the tips. This is by no means required, but boy do these CMs work hard, and we like to show how grateful we are in a different way sometimes.
On the way down to Lumiere's for breakfast, I came off the WiFi and back on to UK signal. This is where I made an unpleasant discovery. Disney had overcharged my bank account by over $1300, and it would only get worse later. I'm not going to dwell on this too much here, as I don't want to take away from the amazing time we had.
I might instead do a separate post on this to elaborate on what happened — ultimately I ended up missing over $2000 (earmarked for bills) from my account and there was nothing Disney could do for over 30 days. I had some poor post-cruise service from DCL concerning this, but luckily my bank intervened after a week to free up the pending funds. About a month later DCL called me to apologise, but that's it. I don't feel they've really made up for what happened, but it doesn't detract from the actual cruise itself which was almost flawless.
Sadly I was in panic mode at breakfast after the financial turmoil so I forgot to take any photos, but I had a fantastic vegan omelette. I also had some fruit and oatmeal but didn't really eat much at the time. We still remembered to pass on a box of chocolates and a note each to Silvana and Francia, our servers, and personally thank them. They said they were hoping to transfer to the Wish so I really hope we bump into them again at some point.
We had made an appointment for guest services during breakfast, so headed straight there. Again, I'll probably write about this in a separate post as it's quite a complex issue, but we were there for quite a long time.
I took one last long look at the Disney Magic atrium, and really appreciated all the smaller fine details. On the way out we tapped our KTTW cards for the last time, and headed down the gangway (if that's the right word!).
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| Subtle character details can be found throughout the ship |
Despite the unpleasant twist at the end, we had such a good time. I've always wanted to try DCL, and before cruising, my main concerns were:
Will I get seasick?
Will there be too many kids?
Will there be enough vegan food?
Will it be too crowded?
I can honestly say that none of these things were a concern! I'm so grateful in a way that things turned out the way they did and our Disney World trip got cancelled. It pushed us to try something different and I'm so glad we did!
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