Nicole721 Takes on the SUNSHINE: A Full PICTORIAL Review

[KPfromCT]

Welcome Back!!! I love reading your reviews and feel like I know you all.....

Great start. Your reviews are always so detailed with great pictures.:D:D

Come back!!!! Waiting patiently for the next installment.....:o

Edited January 15, 2016 by KPfromCT

[jjdshoe]

We will be on sunshine in March and looking forward to seeing your pics and reading your thoughts on the ship and ports!

[pmoniz]

Love your enthusiasm!!! Can't wait to read more!! I'll be sailing on the Sunshine in 50 days!!

[wantocruisemore]

Really enjoying your review! I LOVE Disney during holiday time, the decorations and specials are great.

[lauren0309]

Looking forward to following your review as I will be on the Sunshine in April!

[SenatorsFan]

Nice to see you back, Nicole. :) Your itinerary looks great; I've never been to Bonaire so the more pictures the better. Bring it on. :D

Heather

[janjan3839]

Looking forward to your review. I am on the Sunshine 3 weeks from today! :p

[wrigley80]

Great start to your review. I look forward to seeing more

[familyglow2008]

We (us 4 and mom and dad) stayed at WDW Saratoga Springs MLK weekend in 2015. These few pictures bring back good memories as dad passed in Sept. Saratoga was just a short walk the Disney Springs ( Downtown Disney). Looks like you had fun. I think we might still have candy from Goofys!!!

 

 

Even though it was getting late (we didn’t even check in until 8:45 pm), we needed to get some dinner and there was really only one viable option for us: Downtown Disney.

 

 

Except Downtown Disney doesn’t exist anymore. Did you know that? I didn’t. They turned it into Disney Springs a couple of months ago. Same concept, same stores and restaurants, bigger space. And parking garages, too. The parking garages were a major upgrade from the mess of a parking lot in the former days of Downtown Disney. The rest of it? TBD. I’m still trying to wrap my head around it.

 

 

As we drove towards Downtown Disney, we caught the fireworks off of Epcot right ahead of us, each boom and blast of brightness saying “Welcome home. We’ve missed you, too.”

 

We parked in that shiny new parking garage and traversed Disney Springs from the parking lot on the West Side to the Marketplace area, stopping into our old stomping grounds at Goofy’s Candy Co to grab some sweet snacks for later.

 

 

 

 

[cincicruisers]

Great review! Looking forward to the rest of it.

[SunnyDayz4me]

Love reading your reviews ! Can't wait for more :)

[josefina022]

Yay! I love your reviews, I think I've read every one :). love your writing style & it feels like I know you & we are great friends!

[jzad]

Hi friends!

 

After a brief hiatus from the Carnival boards since our last Breeze cruise (we jumped over to RCCL for a wonderful Europe cruise last spring!), I'm back and ready to share with you way too many stories and pictures from our Christmas cruise on the Sunshine!

 

Background

 

If we've never frequented the same threads before, allow me to introduce myself! I'm Nicole. I'm (recently and still coping with it) 30. I live in downtown Chicago, where I work in Marketing for a dot com during the day and travel anywhere and anywhere I can and write about it on my blog in my free time (see, Mom, I do use that Journalism degree!).

 

My family (my sister Stephanie, my mom and I) took our first cruise eleven and a half years ago on the Carnival Paradise, and we've been hooked ever since. Stephanie had just graduated high school, I had just finished my first semester of college and it only took seven days for us to be forever in love with cruising. Now, we're all grown up, working and leading busy lives, so we cruising is kind of our family time. Together, we've been to almost 30 Ports of Call across the Caribbean, Mexico and Central America and seven in Europe.

 

 

So yeah. Really love cruises. But almost as much as I love cruising, I love writing about our cruises. I love sharing our experiences and photographs, and I love hearing about your experiences back. Writing these trip reports gives me the opportunity to document the places we've been and the things we've said and done and it's an added bonus if you find something helpful out of it (I always think of it as paying it forward for all of the reviews I read before our cruises :)).

 

Itinerary

 

 

We'd been to Aruba twice and Grand Turk more times than I can count, but we'd never been to Bonaire before, so we were super excited to visit a new place!

 

Why the Sunshine?

 

While we much prefer the newer ships over the older ships (and the Sunshine is an odd hybrid of the two), we chose this cruise mostly for the itinerary. We love Aruba and Bonaire was a new place to explore. Plus, the cruise going out of Port Canaveral gave us a day for Disney and four and a half sea days (sorely needed with the hours I was putting in at work leading up to the holidays!).

 

And we'd never been on the Sunshine. We have tendencies to repeat cruise on ships we like (this is how we ended up on the Miracle ::cough:: four times) and since it'd been over a year since our last Carnival cruise, we were excited to sail on a ship we'd never been to.

 

Let's Get This Started!

 

This is going to be a long one. It was an amazing eight days and I took a lot of notes...and more than 1700 pictures (What can I say? Bonaire is incredibly picturesque). I'm hoping to post a few times a week and I really, really hope some of you will follow along and make this even more fun for me. If you're reading along, I'd love to know it. If you have any questions, I'm happy to try to answer them. And if you're a lurker on these boards, you can also follow along on my blog or shout at me on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter.

 

So let's do it! Ready? Set? Go!

 

 

Holy moly! I feel like I just finished your Europe review! So excited for another one. Thank you

[pirate4me2]

Great review so far! Thank you for taking the time to write the it.

[pghsteelerfan]

So happy to find that you're doing another review. I have enjoyed your past reviews and love the pictures you post with them. I'll definitely be following along and looking forward to "seeing" what Bonaire is like since I haven't seen any reviews that include a stop there. Thank you for taking the time to do another review.

[LizSS]

Great start Nicole! I've stayed at the Gaylord Opry Land several times, those hotels are stunning to say the least. Truly unique!

 

 

 

Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

Edited January 16, 2016 by LizSS

[kindatravelsavy19]

Leaving on SH in less than 30 great timing for a new review. Thx.

[talliana]

I love the Gaylor Palms Hotel in Orlando. We took the kids to the Shrek Weekends a couple years ago--breakfast with Shrek and friends, Madagascar dance party in the pool and a movie by the pool, the kids loved it. I love their Christmas Ice show also.

[Nicole721]

Holy cow, you guys! I'm so excited to have you all following along! Hope you enjoy this next part!

 

How do you spend exactly one full day somewhere?

 

I should probably hold some expertise in that by now, with all of the cruises we take and my penchant for short weekend travel.

 

But when it comes to being in Disney, one day is never enough, and off the bat, I knew it wouldn’t be wholly satisfying.

 

I was up earlier than I wanted to be. Stephanie had an early morning flight in and Mom woke me up to talk to Stephanie on the phone long before I wanted to face daylight. I decided to stay up after she took off, taking my time in getting dressed and ready for the day.

 

 

We wouldn’t leave for the airport until Stephanie had her luggage, so while she made her way southward, Mom and I headed to the Orlando Premium Outlets to check out the inventory at Tory Burch. It was a Friday morning and the clouds were angry and gray, which meant we wouldn’t be fighting crowds on this visit.

 

 

 

We have a Tory Burch outlet at home, but the inventory is, for some reason that I can never really pinpoint, always better in Orlando. And with an extra 30% off on top of everything, I found a sweet deal on a beautiful black leather handbag to take on our Europe trip this spring.

 

 

 

After Tory was the Cosmetics Company Store to check in on some MAC pigment and then the Disney Character Warehouse, which liquidates excess inventory of souvenirs. Seriously, if you need souvenirs for family, friends, classmates, whatever? They have much of what’s sold in the parks at heavily discounted prices. Hoodies? $12.99. Coloring books? $1.99. Vintage style Disney pins will only set you back $0.75, and if you’re looking for a gigantic stuffed Olaf that’s larger than your toddler, they have those, too.

 

[Nicole721]

The skies opened up just as we were about to leave for Orlando International, where Stephanie’s flight had landed as we checked out at the Disney outlet. If you’ve been through Florida storms before, you know they’re generally pretty intense, but they’ll let up within a few minutes. So we waited out the storm while Stephanie waited for some pretty delayed luggage.

 

 

It took just under a half hour to get to the airport from the outlets, and Stephanie’s luggage didn’t appear on the carousel until we were just about there (and it was soaking wet, too – she sent a not so happy Tweet to American Airlines for that one). We all reunited at Arrivals and set out for…Wal-Mart. Florida Wal-Mart’s are their own breed. They’re huge. They’re insanely busy. And they have literally everything (including some super discounted but probably not licensed souvenirs). We stocked up on everything we didn’t pack (liquid hand soap, shampoo and conditioner, cheap champagne…you know…just the essentials), grabbed a couple of sandwiches at Subway and headed back to the hotel.

 

 

For Hanukkah this year, I bought Mom and Stephanie tickets to Mickey’s Very Merry Christmas Party. Our pre-cruise day in Orlando coincided with the last day of the party, it’d been a few years since we’ve visited Magic Kingdom and we love the Halloween party, so we were all really excited for this party. But with Stephanie up at 4:00 am to catch her flight and Mom and I still catching up on rest from our busy travel day the day prior, we knew we needed to take an afternoon break to be able to take full advantage of the party. So Stephanie took a nap while Mom and I grabbed some fro-yo and wandered around the hotel.

 

[Nicole721]

We’ve had at least half a dozen stays at Gaylord hotels over the past seven years or so. It’s been awhile since our last one (which I think came in 2012), but no matter how much time passes, there’s still something about this hotel that evokes a sense of coming home. And no matter how many times we visit, I still find myself in constant awe and delight. The attention to detail that went into designing that vast atrium filled with greenery is really something to take in, especially when it’s decked out for Christmas.

 

 

 

 

[Nicole721]

The party started at 7:00 pm, but our tickets granted us access to Magic Kingdom beginning at 4:00 pm. We wanted to take advantage of as much time as possible as we could in the park, so I strapped on my fanny pack (…seriously. That’s my biggest Disney tip, btw. I never visit Disney without it) and we headed out.

 

 

 

Parking set us back an additional $20 (it’s not included in your party fare), but an unseasonably cool day in Florida combined with the early closing time for the park meant low crowds (they kick out anyone without a party wristband at 7:00 pm). We parked at the TTC, hopped on the ferry launch and enjoyed a quiet boat ride to the park.

 

 

 

[Nicole721]

We’ve never visited Disney during the holidays and Magic Kingdom certainly didn’t disappoint. I hadn’t really felt that holiday season festivity this year. Between working through peak season at work and the unseasonably warm Chicago winter we’ve been experiencing, on some level, my subconscious still thought it was Fall. But walking down Main Street, decked out in holiday décor and blaring Christmas tunes from every speaker, it was a new kind of festive. We climbed up the stairs to the platform at the railway and just took it all in.

 

 

 

I stopped every few feet as we inched towards Cinderella Castle, taking pictures of everything and nothing, alternating between my real camera, my phone camera and the new instant camera Stephanie got me for Hanukkah.

 

 

 

[Nicole721]

We decided to do a quick ride on Haunted Mansion before grabbing an early dinner, taking a few minutes to appreciate the new updates to the queue (and noting how bad we’ve gotten at figuring out which wall will open to the ride).

 

 

After we rid ourselves of the hitchhiking ghost trying to follow us home, we headed towards Frontierland and Pecos Bill’s for a quick dinner. Pecos Bills used to have decent burgers with an awesome toppings bar, but underwent a pretty significant menu change since our last visit, now boasting generic Mexican cuisine and a new and different (but still impressive) toppings bar with plenty of different salsa options, cheese and even guacamole.

 

 

Chicken Fajitas and Fixin’s

[Nicole721]

Full on fajitas and anticipation for the hours to come, we headed out to go on as many rides as we could get in. We walked right onto just about everything (except for Peter Pan’s Flight, which has a new never-ending queue), stopping every once in awhile to grab some cookies and cocoa in between rides. The pamphlet for the party mentioned sugar, oatmeal raisin and chocolate chip cookies, but we only found sugar cookies and snickerdoodles. If cookies and cocoa don’t do it for you, you can also get apple slices and apple juice.