Today is Wednesday, July 30, 2025. We have returned from our three-day Disney cruise to the Bahamas to celebrate my son’s 40th – Egad! – birthday on July 28, the day we docked back in Cape Canaveral, Florida. I have to say that my son was overall pleased with the Disney extravaganza, even having no children of his own. As I mentioned in earlier blogs, the reason we took this type of sailing experience was that his good friends have two small children, one being 7 months old and the oldest being about 3 and a half years old. Otherwise, you wouldn’t find me on such a ship going to the Bahamas in late July. Generally, I find the ports rather lackluster and the heat is always a problem. This cruise made two stops: Nassau, the Bahamas, and Castaway Cay, Disney’s own island. I stayed onboard for the first stop and got off briefly for Castaway Cay to go to some beach there and lounge just about a half hour before starting back to the ship. On the island, passengers were treated to a sizzling barbecue, but I eschewed that culinary experience because of the heat and just hightailed it back.

All in all, the cruise sparkled with everything one associates with the Disney brand: movies with a Disney theme, the characters welcoming all of the passengers onboard, shows for two nights related to Disney, the first night being The Little Mermaid and the second Aladdin. There were trivia contests, but most of them had a Disney theme. I tried to enter one of these contests, but had trouble identifying many of the answers to the questions. I even entered an 80s musical trivia game, and if not for my asking to join two other men seated in the lounge waiting to enter the contest, I would have probably answered only one question if even that. I found the questions quite difficult since only a few chords were played to a song, not much more than that.

On the last night of the cruise, all of us celebrated “Joshua’s” birthday in a cool Disney restaurant: Arendelle: A Frozen Dining Adventure, which featured characters from the film and play Frozen (which I was unfamiliar with, of course) staging a show right in front of us since our table faced the stage in the middle of the eatery. The waitstaff came around to sing “Happy Birthday” to Joshua who winced at all of the attention.

The true highlight of this short cruise was the fireworks display off the bow of the ship on Saturday night. I took a several-seconds video of the entire display and it was quite exciting. The theme that night was Pirates of the Caribbean and every passenger was expected to don pirate garb for dancing after the fireworks. I had no such attire, but did condescend to wearing the red bandanna that was provided to us in our stateroom that morning by our stateroom attendant, Sherbelin.

One of the specialized restaurants onboard was 1923 which was named after the year Walt Disney Studios was founded. Elliot and I had breakfast there on several occasions and enjoyed the food there. The buffet was found on Deck 11 in Marceline Market which was named for Walt Disney’s early childhood home in Missouri, according to the description of the ship found on Google. Even though the food here was plentiful, I found it not as bountiful as that found on the Celebrity Apex, the ship we were on in May. Also the design of the whole floor was not as open as that found on the Apex. One quibble I had about the ship was that the elevators were quite narrow, considering that this cruise apparently had 4,000 passengers on board for the three-day excursion. The elevators on Apex were quite wide as I recall them, and we had only a little over 2,000 passengers overall for that seven-day cruise.

One of the other drawbacks of the duration of this cruise was my not being able to explore the whole ship within those three days. There’s just so much you can do within that strict timeframe. I did see two films, or, actually, one and a half films, since I saw only one hour or so of The Fantastic Four: First Steps on the last night of the cruise at 10:45 p.m. If I saw the entire film, I would have come down to the room close to 1 a.m. We were docking around 5 a.m. and I had set our phone alarm to 6:15 that morning. That’s why I decided to dart out close to 12. Another reason was that I was not enjoying the film as much as I had thought I would. Actually, I dare say I thought the film was quite lackluster; I couldn’t accept Pedro Pascal as Mr. Fantastic, the leader of the group, Reed Richards.

The first film I saw in the Never Land Cinema on Deck 4, I believe, was 2025’s Thunderbolts which was dubbed The New Avengers. The film features such actors as Florence Pugh, Sebastian Stan, David Harbour, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus as morally ambiguous CIA director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine who tries to kill of this ragtag group of antiheroes at the beginning of the film who finally band together to fight this new menace from within. Pugh is a standout in the film as Yelena Belova who questions her role as a CIA assassin after her sister dies. Lewis Pullman portrays Sentry, the new supercharged adversary that Valentina pits against the group.

After we docked, we drove to Vero Beach, where we stayed overnight at a lovely beach resort called Kimpton Vero Beach Hotel & Spa in which Elliot, I, and my son shared one spacious room. This was Monday which was my son’s real birthday, so that night we went out to a rustic seafood restaurant called Ocean Grill. The interior was quite woody, dark, and homey looking.

Since it was Joshua’s birthday, I joined everyone in ordering a drink, a glass of red wine. I brought two gifts to give my son later in the evening: a book on the Titanic (a subject he’s quite interested in) and the photo album I put together showing pictures of him from a baby to an adult. I would have to wait presenting him with these gifts as he excused himself from the table early on to state he had a headache. Maybe he was fearful of turning 40 or, as he claimed, he was suffering from being exposed to too much sun over the three days of the cruise. Whatever it was, he asked for his hamburger to be brought back to the room and we honored his wish. So we had dinner without him.

It wasn’t until Tuesday that I could present him with his gifts. This time it was during breakfast at the hotel’s restaurant called Heaton’s where I was able to give Joshua his presents. He woke up feeling much better after leaving last night’s restaurant quite early. Which was very comforting.

After breakfast, it was time to check out of our hotel. It was Joshua’s friend “Dillon” who was able to book an earlier reservation for Elliot on Delta since I was able to change my 7:35 p.m. reservation to 3:25 out of Orlando Airport on Tuesday, July 29, and couldn’t do it on Elliot’s app on his smartphone. Thus we were booked on the same flight and this was quite marvelous. Originally, Elliot had a 7:59 flight leaving for LaGuardia out of Orlando. This was much more convenient for the two of us and we have Dillon to thank. Joshua had to be driven to the airport earlier for a 2:10 p.m. reservation (which was delayed to 2:41 in the car as we were driving back to Orlando), so we all had to be driven to the airport together. Thus my wish to change our time to that of an earlier one without incurring any additional costs.

We got to the airport closer to 1. The driving time was close to 2 hours. It was sad having to say goodbye to Dillon, his wife “April,” and her two children, “Evelyn” and “Lincoln.” And, especially, my son who was going to start a new job very soon in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Anyway, the flight home was very unremarkable, except for some turbulence in the middle of it. During the flight, I was able to watch a Dutch film called Memory Lane about a long-married couple who take a road trip to Barcelona to visit a friend in hospice only to learn that things have changed since the last time they visited southwestern Europe. Also the husband, Jaap, also discovers his wife, Maartje, is suffering from early onset dementia. Not the most laugh-out loud kind of film to watch on a plane. But there were some very small moments of humor in the movie like the characters’ struggle with new technology as they try to enter a hotel room with a newfangled key, their bantering over how they seem so mismatched (Jaap enjoys his retirement by watching TV news, while Maartje yearns for more joie de vivre in her life. She convinces her grumpy couch potato of a husband to take that long-delayed trip by car to Spain to visit an old, dying friend. Along, the way, Maartje experiences spells of confusion, panic, and disappears for no reason at all. It is at this time that Jaap realizes his wife is now suffering from the early effects of dementia and has to accept it one way or another.

We touched down at JFK a stunning 45 minutes early: around 5:45 p.m. I think we actually got into the apartment close to 8. I walked in first, while Elliot left to do some shopping. I met Atticus who walked up to me as if to say, “Where were you all this time?” He allowed me to pet him and he seemed mostly unaffected by our absence. Whoo!

And so it went!

Here is the grand atrium on Disney Wish.

Here is the front entrance to Never Land Cinema where I saw both Thunderbolts and The Fantastic Four: First Steps.

Here are some characters at our dinner in Arendelle: A Frozen Dining Adventure. Don’t ask me who they are supposed to be. I have no clue.

Here’s our ship docked in Castaway Cay.

This is where I lounged in Castaway Cay for about 40 minutes.

Here is the staff going through their pirate motions on the top deck before the fireworks display.

Here is Spider-Man making an appearance during dinner at Worlds of Marvel restaurant. Here we saw Paul Rudd as Ant-Man and Evangeline Lilly as the Wasp speak to the audience from a large wide screen as they interacted with diners.

Here is Cinderella in the grand atrium.

This little amusement took place on the first day on Deck 11 when it was stunningly hot up there. Here are some of our beloved Disney characters dancing and schvitzing in their costumes. I’m surprised no one fainted in that group.