Cruise Day 10: Day at Sea

Day ten of our cruise found us with no port to visit at all----a sea day!!  To celebrate a sea day....what better character(s) than the cast of "Finding Nemo"?! LOL

I have to admit that this sea day was both good news and bad news.  The good news was that sea days are generally relaxing.  You don't have to get up by anytime.  You don't have a busy schedule to keep (unless you so choose---obviously they offer things on the ship to do, but you can opt into or out of any of it).  After 7 straight days of ports, some of which were super busy and hectic, a day to relax and just enjoy the ship and the sea was a welcome respite.  The bad news, however, was that this sea day meant that the Mediterranean portion of our cruise was coming to an end-----and that meant not only that our vacation was now 50% over...but the Adventures by Disney portion was coming to an end, as well...as I've already posted once on this blog....that was kind of sad considering we had such a wonderful experience.

But before I get too mopey about that.....I'll tell you all what we did this relaxing day at sea.....

Our day started with a character breakfast...which means even though I said you don't have to get up, I guess we actually did...but the good news was our breakfast wasn't until almost 10am so we didn't have to get up EARLY.  What is a character breakfast, you ask?  Every cruise you are invited to one special table service breakfast, usually with a tropical and/or caribbean theme, and a group of the main characters (Mickey, Minnie, Goofy, Pluto, Chip & Dale) stop by and visit your table for a photo op.  It's silly...but wonderful.  Here are some pictures of us (and note the fancy mickey mouse tropical shirts.....I made these shirts several cruises ago back in 2007 and they've been a standard part of our cruise wardrobe for "island jam" character breakfast ever since!!):

 In addition to the characters, our servers also made funny hats out of our napkins and put them on our heads for part of the breakfast LOL

 After breakfast we looked through the schedule for the day to see what there was fun to do.  We didn't have anything scheduled until our final Adventures by Disney session later in the afternoon...so we had plenty of time to fill and/or kill!  We saw that there was an "Art of Entertaining" demonstration (same series as earlier in the cruise where we learned to fold napkins) about plate and cake decorating.  I can't say we learned anything we would ever actually use at home...but it was fun to watch one of the chefs from the ship create pretty cakes and dessert plates.  Here are some images from the session and of his creations:

Immediately following the plate/cake decorating demonstration was another origami class.  This time it was taught by Oscar, one of the most popular cruise staff on the ship (and a favorite of a number of the readers of this blog----you know who you are!! LOL).  We didn't make flowers....but instead learned to fold paper hearts to write "love notes" in...and also to make origami frogs. 

Following origami, we went for some lunch and then just hung out at the pool for a little while...relaxing and enjoying the lovely sun until it was time to go to our farewell reception with Adventures by Disney.  It was a very nice event...and Robyn and Tina showed us a slideshow of images from our trip which brought back all the memories....they then distributed our final pins to us and we all said goodbye until dinner when they would come say their FINAL goodbyes and bring us our photo CD from the ship's photographer(s).  Here is a final goodbye shot of Robyn and Tina...as well as a shot of our Adventures back pack with all our special edition collector pins from every day:

 When the reception was done, we got cleaned up, and headed to dinner.  We forgot to have a picture taken of us wearing our ties....but here is a picture of the ties themselves (tonight we had "oddball" ties, too----one lion king and one jungle book...but we thought they went together with a wild animal/jungle theme LOL):

When dinner was over, we headed back to our room where our dirty laundry and our towel animal awaited us.....

....so we stayed up watching TV, relaxing in the room, and doing our laundry (this was an opportune evening to do laundry because most people on the ship were already packed to disembark the next morning so the laundry rooms were virtually empty....and we needed to get some laundry done or we'd be doing the beginning of the TransAtlantic cruise in the buff!! LOL)

The next day we would say good bye officially to many of the folks who'd been on the cruise with us for the past 10 days....but be greeting many of our friends who would be joining us on the TransAtlantic portion of our trip!