The Brink Bunch: Cruisin' on the Disney Dream... Planning and Driving to Cape Canaveral

Back in January on a whim, we decided to do a Disney cruise with another family. This was actually a big deal for Jamie because he doesn't do ANYTHING on a whim. I happened to mention how fun I thought a Disney cruise would be and found a pretty decent deal right before their peak season began, so I text (or is it texted?) my friend to see if she and her family would be interested (they said YES immediately) and within 3 days, we booked it. We had never been on a cruise, much less taken our boys on a cruise but we were incredibly excited about a new experience. Thankfully, there is much less planning that goes into a Disney cruise than a trip to Disney World and other than booking the cruise, there wasn't too much else to do except patiently wait for the next 4 months to pass by until our trip.... which wasn't easy! I did have a slight panic attack one night while trying to go to bed because it hit me that I didn't really think things through for Noah before booking the trip. Would they be accommodating to his needs? Would he be allowed in the Kids Club with Collier and the others? How would he handle the movement of the boat? Swimmy diapers aren't allowed in the pools so would Noah have to stay out of the pool the entire trip? etc etc etc. After getting on my computer and googling way to many sites about special needs and disney cruises until the wee hours of the morning, I relaxed... I mean, after all, it IS Disney! The whole reason we did this was because how incredibly special they had made our trip to Disney with Noah the previous fall. The next day, I called DCL (Disney Cruise Lines) Special Services department and spoke with an incredibly nice man who calmed most of my worries and set me at ease for our upcoming trip.

Finally May rolled around and it was time for our trip! We decided to break the drive to Cape Canaveral into two days and checked Noah out of school after lunch on Friday, and hit the road. We somehow managed to turn a 5 hour drive into a much longer drive by running into the Summit in Birmingham for me to make a clothing exchange at a store that we don't have in Florence, having to make several potty stops (I could blame it on our newly potty-trained 3 year old, but Jamie is just as bad with his pea-sized bladder and the big gulp diet coke that he gets at every gas station stop), as well as stopping to eat dinner at a restaurant. We rolled in to Dothan around 10 pm and checked into our hotel room and went straight to sleep. We weren't in too big of a hurry the next morning and got on the road around 10:30am for the remainder of our drive. We anticipated about 6 hours on the road, however once we were a few hours outside of Orlando, we had to take a detour due to a terrible car wreck that had the interstate closed down. The detour added a few hours to our journey thanks to having to drive through several small towns, terrible traffic (since everyone on the interstate had to take the same detour) and lots of traffic lights. We had originally planned to stop in at Downtown Disney for dinner but we had to cancel since we wouldn't be able to make our reservation and after the extra hours on the road, we just wanted to get to our hotel. When crossing over into Cape Canaveral the first thing you see is the cruise port and all of the huge cruise ships! We had booked a Park and Cruise package with the Four Points by Sheraton in Cocoa Beach, which is just a 5 - 10 minute drive from the cruise terminals and it ended up being a great deal. Our hotel was really fun and kid-friendly with a large floor to ceiling aquarium in the center of the restaurant and the sleeping rooms were large and very nice. Apparently, it's right on the beach and has a fun pool but we never saw either of the two. We had dinner surrounding the aquarium and the kids enjoyed getting to point out the different fish. Collier found Nemo, Dory and several others. After our dinner, our friends, the Cowley's, checked in to their room and came up to ours so the kids could play for a little bit. Their oldest Charlie and Collier are buddies and had been eager to see one another the whole day! After letting he kids burn some of their energy, the Cowley's headed to their room and we got our boys fast asleep and eagerly awaited the next day when our vacation would officially begin!

This is how we started our journey... Jamie driving, me and Noah in the back seats with Collier on the 3rd row (even though he's never set back there.) I thought it would make it easier for distributing snacks and entertainment with me in the back with the boys. WRONG. The newness of the 3rd row wore off fast for Collier and we played a little Chinese Fire Drill in Moulton in the Subway parking lot.