Christmas on the Magic 2016 - COMPLETED

[FSU Girl]

DAY FOUR - TORTOLA (DECEMBER 26) PART FOUR - BACK ON THE SHIP

Swimming for a couple hours in the ocean was so much fun, but built up a big appetite. We decided we'd swim in the adult pool for a little bit before showering and grabbed some food near the pool before taking a dip. We had the adult pool to ourselves and spent some time relaxing there. Then I noticed that the Aquadunk was open and had no line. We had been trying to go on this slide, but the first two sea days had been too windy to be operational. I jumped at the opportunity to go on it - and then ended up hating it. Maybe it's been a really long time since I've gone on a water slide, but I should have held my nose shut. At the end of the slide all the water rushed up it and I ended up coughing up water. Needless to say, that was my one and only time riding the Aquadunk. My boyfriend enjoyed it though.

We showered and my boyfriend took a nap while I watched some Disney movies on TV. (I don't know how to nap) When he woke up we decided to go down to deck 4 and relax on the chairs and look out at the island. It was getting close to sail away time and dinner. It was pirates night and I wanted to meet CAPTAIN Jack Sparrow before dinner started.


The sun was starting to set over Tortola.




I loved this action shot picture where everything was blurry except for him. I was a little disappointed when he didn't correct my boyfriend calling him Jack Sparrow, I think he should have corrected him saying Captain. Oh well.

So dinner was a bit of a disappointment for both of us. I had read the pirate menu online and thought it sounded good and had a few things to try. My boyfriend saw Grouper on the menu and was very excited. The menu on the app also had this menu listed. When we got to Carioca's they did not have this menu and instead had the standard menu for the restaurant. Before the cruise I had tried to get a dining rotation that would have put us in this restaurant the day we went to Palo, unfortunately this didn't happen. I found something to order, but nothing appealed to my boyfriend. Our head waiter came over and saw that we were upset at the menu change. Apparently, since Christmas had a special menu they wouldn't have the pirate menu this cruise. He asked my boyfriend if he liked Indian food and said he'd bring some for him to try. It's not on the menu or listed anywhere on the ship, but I thought it might help someone out to know you can order curry any day of the cruise if you want.


They brought him chicken and tofu and he enjoyed it. He had also mentioned to our head waiter (he was amazing and I'm sorry I can't remember his name) that he had really wanted to try the grouper. So this amazing man got him grouper on the last night of our cruise. I think while we were in port the next day he purchased it specifically for my boyfriend so at the end of the cruise we gave him an extra big tip.

Instead of the normal shows they had Pirates IN the Caribbean on the top deck. They also were showing Moana in the theaters before and after this party.


Since my boyfriend has been on two previous Disney cruises he had us go up to deck 10 and stand on the side where they shoot the fireworks off. (fireworks are my favorite ) The show was fun to watch, although I had thought Captain Jack Sparrow zip-lined down to the stage. I'm not sure if that normally happens? It was a very windy night I was worried they wouldn't be able to set off the fireworks because of the wind.




Captain Hook and Smee showed up. He's my favorite bad guy so I was really excited. I had already looked up in the app when I would have a chance to meet him in person.


They played the music from the Pirates in the Caribbean movie as they set off the fireworks. I thought it was a stunning show. And how cool is it that you can watch fireworks while out in the middle of the ocean???

The show happened between the two dinner seatings. After it ended we went to the smaller movie theater to watch Moana. They were showing it in both theaters, but the one in the big theater was showing in 3D and we didn't feel like watching it that way. It was the second time watching the movie (I went with my boyfriend before the cruise to see it) but we had both liked it and wanted to see it again, especially since there wasn't another show going on.


When we got back to the room this fellow was waiting for us.

Up next San Juan...

 

[chunkymonkey]

I am really enjoying your report on the Magic. Since my first DCL cruise was on the Magic as well, it's like revisiting my first time. The Christmas decorations look lovely! Palo dinner looked great - we only went for brunch and that was fabulous, so on our next Magic sailing (October), we'll aim for brunch and dinner! Looking forward to more!

 

[FSU Girl]

I am really enjoying your report on the Magic. Since my first DCL cruise was on the Magic as well, it's like revisiting my first time. The Christmas decorations look lovely! Palo dinner looked great - we only went for brunch and that was fabulous, so on our next Magic sailing (October), we'll aim for brunch and dinner! Looking forward to more!

I'm glad you like it! it was a fantastic meal I definitely recommend it!

 

[richkaryn]

Oh, yes, Capt. Jack zip lined down on our Dec 2014 cruise.....This was DS (turned 7 on this trip) first cruise and he thought that real pirates were getting on the ship and going to get us. He screamed and cried and of course at first we didn't know what he was upset about because it was loud and we couldn't hear between his sobs. I crouched down and calmed him and got him to tell me why he was so upset. That's when I found out he thought it was real pirates trying to get on the ship. (He's never scared of anything, and he's even seen the Pirates movies, and he knew it was pirate night, so we were shocked by this....but I think maybe being his first cruise he was just a little overwhelmed with all the excitement that it took him by surprise.) We get a good laugh out of it now, 2 years later.

 

[FSU Girl]

Oh, yes, Capt. Jack zip lined down on our Dec 2014 cruise.....This was DS (turned 7 on this trip) first cruise and he thought that real pirates were getting on the ship and going to get us. He screamed and cried and of course at first we didn't know what he was upset about because it was loud and we couldn't hear between his sobs. I crouched down and calmed him and got him to tell me why he was so upset. That's when I found out he thought it was real pirates trying to get on the ship. (He's never scared of anything, and he's even seen the Pirates movies, and he knew it was pirate night, so we were shocked by this....but I think maybe being his first cruise he was just a little overwhelmed with all the excitement that it took him by surprise.) We get a good laugh out of it now, 2 years later.

I'm sorry your son got scared, that must not have been fun for him at all I know I'd be scared if I thought real pirates were boarding the ship. I'm glad now you can laugh about it.

 

[FSU Girl]

DAY FIVE - SAN JUAN (DECEMBER 27) PART ONE

We decided not to do an excursion this day. Originally I had been going back and forth on what we should do this day and visiting the Fort was something that interested me. The excursion through Disney was around $60 a person to go around Old San Juan and the fort. It only costs $5 to get into the fort and was a 25 minute walk from the ship. There is a free trolley that goes around the city and right up to the front of the fort. If anyone is interested in doing this, I would highly recommend doing it on your own, it's a bit of a rip off through the cruise line. The city is completely walkable.

With no excursion to get up early for we finally slept in this day. We people watched people getting off the boat for a bit before disembarking ourselves. There were a couple different cruises in port this day. My parents were excited to see the Caribbean Princess ship since they will be traveling on that exact ship soon. There was also a pirate ship docked.



Our first stop was Starbucks. I am a total coffee addict and hadn't had a single drop this entire cruise. My iced caramel macchiato tasted heavenly, especially on this very hot humid day.


Once we had our coffee it was time to explore. We wandered around the city for a bit, heading in the direction of the fort. (There are two forts, I'm not entirely sure the difference between the two. One is very close to the port, the other was around a 25 minute walk. We only went to the far away one)





The fort off in the distance. This day was perfect weather (which was great since there had originally been an 80% chance of rain for this day). There were a lot of people walking around. There is also a cemetery near the water.



I found it a little scary seeing a sign for what to do in case of a tsunami.


The water was so pretty.





Here is a map of the fort. A word of caution, this fort has A LOT of stairs.

I'm not sure if this picture really captures how steep and long these stairs were. I was wearing wedges and had to walk down these very slowly. Going up was also quite the workout.

 

[FSU Girl]

DAY FIVE - SAN JUAN (DECEMBER 27) PART TWO









You could see a lot of waves out on the water from the top of the fort. Also off in the distance it was pouring rain. Luckily, the rain stayed away from where we were.

I was exhausted from all the stairs and it was very hot out so we decided to head back to the ship a little after noon. We decided to ride the free trolley back to the ship instead of walking. My feet were very appreciative. We had barely been outside the fort for 5 minutes before it arrived. It will come to the very front of the entrance and it will also stop at the very bottom. I recommend waiting for it to come up to the front to get on.

While riding the trolley we went by the other fort. The trolley will make many stops around the city. I'm not sure how close it gets to the actual port as we decided to get off a couple blocks away due to traffic.

Once back on the ship we went to our room and showered (I was soaked with sweat from the heat and all the walking yuck) and my boyfriend decided he needed a nap. I took this opportunity to call my mom since we were in an American port and it wouldn't be considered out of the country calling. I caught her up on how the cruise was while outside on our balcony. While out there another ship arrived, the massive Anthem of the Seas. The ship was HUGE, towering over us like a floating city. I was surprised that a ship was pulling into port at 2pm, it seemed kind of late to arrive.

There were a lot of people out on their balconies as the ship slowly pulled up to the dock. I saw some very interesting things on this ship. One: A man walked outside completely naked, clearly not expecting to see a ship outside his room and ran back inside. I was not expecting to see all of that. Then there was another person who was standing out on their balcony in a bra and underwear and believe me they were not a person you would ever want to see in that. And they clearly didn't care that everyone could see them. I don't feel like you'd see something like that on a Disney ship.


Once docked I thought this was a little odd. There were people getting off the ship with suitcases and a huge cart full of suitcases being brought on the ship. We looked up the itinerary of the ship and it had left New Jersey and was on an 11 night cruise (I don't really remember the amount of nights but that sounds about right). Would anyone know why there were so many people with luggage at this port? I'm just curious.


After about an hour my boyfriend woke up and we decided to wander around the ship. We ended up on the 4th deck and decided to relax there for a bit looking out at the other cruise ship docked. It was nice since our room was on the other side of the ship and had a different view.

We went back to our room to watch us sail away. It was a little before 5pm that we left and the weather was still pretty perfect outside, but we could see rain off in the distance and hear thunder.



You could see all the other ships still in port as we left. I also liked that you could see the aquadunk from the balcony.


Our ship had the pilot boat guide us out of the port towards the open ocean.

Now it was time for dinner! Yum!

 

[FSU Girl]

DAY FIVE - SAN JUAN (DECEMBER 27) PART THREE
I hope the pictures come out okay, I'm having a little trouble posting and had to do this three times.

Before dinner we ate the ears off mickey. (This was the chocolate given on Christmas Eve that we hadn't gotten around to yet. We wouldn't finish him off until the morning of the last day.)

Dinner was yummy. I had some delicious jambalaya shrimp for an appetizer. Boyfriend had some salmon appetizer.



And then I guess I got so wrapped up in our food I stopped taking pictures and have no idea what either of us had.


Tonight they were showing the broadway production of Tangled. I was really excited for tonight as I had heard this show was great and the Magic is the only place you can see it. They had two O'gills takeovers this night. One was after the earlier show around 7:30pm and then there was another after the later show at 10:15pm. Since I wanted really good seats we opted to go to the later showing so we could get in line outside the theater early.

I did have the prettiest dessert of the entire cruise this night. And it tasted just as good as it looked.


It was the 4th night of Chanukah, not much in decorations for this holiday. But they did have a rabbi on the ship.

We decided to stop by O'gills to see how it looked before heading to the show. Since it was before the first show there wasn't really anyone there yet and I could snap away.
Soooo I took a million pictures of the takeover. I just thought it was a really cute idea and well executed.


The hallway leading into After Hours (the adult only bars area) They posted a sign over the normal O'gills name.




A quick peek inside Fathoms and Keys. We spent almost every night in Fathoms enjoying the adult games they had set up. The only time we went into Keys was for our Mixology class. When we did the first walking tour of the ship the guy leading it made a joke that the only people you'll find in Keys were the grandparents on the ship. I'm not really sure who was in there since we never went inside.



They had little touches of this takeover all over the bar

 

[Flossbolna]

Great trip report!!

I see that no one ever answered your question about photos: Besides uploading the pictures directly into the post, you can also link to pictures that are hosted somewhere else. I use photobucket, others use flickr. There are many different ways of doing it. If you click on the little "picture" icon next to the smiley in the top row you will get a window where you can enter the URL of your picture and then you can add 35 pictures into one post. On photobucket I even get the option to directly copy a link for message boards. it starts with [IMG

 

[Anchors Away 2016]

Besides uploading the pictures directly into the post, you can also link to pictures that are hosted somewhere else. I use photobucket, others use flickr.

Just wanted to say that sometimes I can't see the photos people post, whereas I can always see the ones in the posts on this thread. I think photos hosted by some of these sites don't make it to me when I view them. Others may have this problem as well. So I for one, vote for FSU Girl uploading the photos to this site, even though it may have some limitations.

 

[Flossbolna]

Just wanted to say that sometimes I can't see the photos people post, whereas I can always see the ones in the posts on this thread. I think photos hosted by some of these sites don't make it to me when I view them. Others may have this problem as well. So I for one, vote for FSU Girl uploading the photos to this site, even though it may have some limitations.

I have used photobucket for years now for my trip reports. And very rarely someone reports not being able to see the pictures. The only reason why this would happen if they access the DIS from work and photobucket is a blocked site for them. For example, I cannot see any pictures being hosted on Facebook at work. The reason why I mentioned photbucket and flickr is that those are the sites that have proven to work on the trip report boards for years now. Not sure what your issue is, why you cannot see some pictures, but it might also be that the picture did not upload correctly.

The advantage of using a hosting site is also that you can upload all your photos for the trip report in one go and don't have to do it individually for each post. Also you do not have to resize your pictures before uploading. The DIS has a limit on the size of the file.

I think the (relatively new) option to upload pictures directly to the DIS is great for throwing in a few pictures in a quick post. But for a whole trip report I find it cumbersome.

Of course it is all up to @FSU Girl what she wants to do! Setting out to write a trip report is already a task and I only wanted to make it easier for her!

 

[FSU Girl]

Thanks @Anchors Away 2016 and @Flossbolna this is very helpful information. I had noticed others had so many pictures per post so this clears that up. I unfortunately do not have a photobucket or flickr account and probably won't be creating one at the moment, if I do more of these I might look into doing it that way in the future. I found a little way around the 10 photo limit by screen-shotting two pictures together and then posting it as one picture so I can then double my count to 20.

I'm really glad you're enjoying my trip report!!

 

[Flossbolna]

Yes, I noticed your workaround! Smart move! Photobucket it free by the way, but I can see that it makes sense to just proceed as you started now.

By the way, another tip from the trip reporting side: I write all my updates in a word file to avoid them disappearing when the DIS crashes... Does not happen nearly as much as it did with the old software. But it is also nice to have a nice file with all the text saved for yourself.

 

[FSU Girl]

Yes, I noticed your workaround! Smart move! Photobucket it free by the way, but I can see that it makes sense to just proceed as you started now.

By the way, another tip from the trip reporting side: I write all my updates in a word file to avoid them disappearing when the DIS crashes... Does not happen nearly as much as it did with the old software. But it is also nice to have a nice file with all the text saved for yourself.

If I do another trip report I'll look into photobucket. And thanks that's a good idea, it was frustrating yesterday when I had to rewrite everything three times.

 

[FSU Girl]

DAY FIVE - SAN JUAN (DECEMBER 27) PART FOUR



The girl on the left was who led our Mixology class. The guy on the right was the bartender of O'gills who was from Ireland.










The TVs in the back that normally had sports on them had the Snuggly Duckling signs.





These were doors in the kitchen area. I could barely see what was in the port holes until after I took the picture.



We had satisfied my picture taking and decided it was time to go wait in line for the show.

They put up the little purple and golden sun banners everywhere. I think Rapunzel came here to meet people, but I'm not exactly sure. We ended up getting behind only one other couple to wait in line. (Something I noticed, the line was always very long on the right side of the theater and almost no one was on the left. So we always went to the left to line up to wait. As the cruise went on the lines would get longer and longer the earlier we went. I think this was the most anticipated show of the cruise so we had to get here over an hour early to get a good spot in line.

And it worked. We got center stage row 2.

This is the only picture I took for the show since you aren't allowed to once the show begins.

We both though the show was great. They did a really good job. There were a few technical difficulties that happened that stopped production. The first time it happened they closed the curtains and the lights came on. They had an announcement saying that it would come back momentarily. The second time it happened it was for a little bit longer and our cruise director Leslie came out on the stage to talk to us. Eventually they got it all fixed, but for a while after the second problem there was a giant hole in the stage because the platform that goes up and down wouldn't rise back up.

I'm also not sure if this is a common thing with their shows, but they had fog come out to cover the stage for multiple scenes and it was not well controlled. The fog went up over the heads to around row 6 and many people were coughing and it made it difficult to breathe or see. I was disappointed this happened and wrote it on my comment card at the end of the cruise. I mentioned it to a crew member and they didn't seem to care about it. If someone had asthma or something it could have been a lot worse.

When the show ended we went straight to the Snuggly Duckling to get good seats to watch the mini show.

 

[Anchors Away 2016]

Did you switch to photobucket already or did I just jinx it? Now I can't see the photos in your most recent post.

 

[FSU Girl]

Did you switch to photobucket already or did I just jinx it? Now I can't see the photos in your most recent post.

No I posted them the way I've been doing all along I wonder why you can't see them

 

[scrappydew]

I think the DIS is acting up. Tried to listen to Pandora today and the station were all mixed up, too!

 

[Anchors Away 2016]

and now I can't see any of your earlier pictures either. OK. No problem. At least I know the issue is on my end. I'll get it sorted out or go over to the tech board to see if they have any suggestions. Who knows, maybe my problem is temporary and will fix itself! (or did I just jinx myself again?)

 

[Flossbolna]

and now I can't see any of your earlier pictures either. OK. No problem. At least I know the issue is on my end. I'll get it sorted out or go over to the tech board to see if they have any suggestions. Who knows, maybe my problem is temporary and will fix itself! (or did I just jinx myself again?)

Seems to be a DISnoards problem, I had trouble from my PC as well, on iPad I can see them again.