I’m back with my third post to recap our Disney Cruise vacation on the Disney Wish. (I’ll have a bonus post later, but it’ll exclusively focus on the Castaway Cay 5K that Nathan and I ran on Disney’s private island.) On our third day on the ship, we woke up and were docked at Castaway Cay in the Bahamas. I’m covering the Pirate Night they had on the ship, fireworks (Disney is the only ship that does fireworks at sea!) along with our last at sea day on the ship. LOTS to cover in this post and I’ll try not to make it TOO long!
Disney has a NEW private island called Lighthouse Point in the Bahamas, but those cruises are NOT cheap since the island is so new (opened June 2024). Their new island is on Eleuthera Island, which is part of the “Out Islands” of the Bahamas, and are known for turquoise water and white sand beaches. The focus of the two islands are very different, however. Castaway Cay is based on a fictional story about “castaways” on a deserted island. While Lookout Cay is about showcasing the very real culture of The Bahamas, as well as nature.
The photo on the left shows what the view looked like from the deck to our room for Castaway Cay. Autumn had us take some photos of her in her super cute Aerie swimsuit coverup. She looked like she was in Greece instead of the Bahamas!
We were blessed with some really nice weather during our Bahamas vacation, because hurricane Beryl was right below us in Jamaica. The water was calm, there was hardly any wind… rain can really mess up a day when you’re off the ship, especially if it is a “beach” day, so I am really thankful this day worked out for us on our short (5 day) cruise. But, I was definitely feeling sorry for those that were hit by the hurricanes path.
Castaway Cay was our FAVORITE part of our entire cruise. The beach was clean, the water was turquoise colored and SO still/calm (like a bath!) and refreshing. They had 2 lounge chairs with an umbrella on the family beach and there were plenty of them for each guest. Only our cruise ship was at Castaway Cay that day and I’m guessing they don’t dock more than one Disney cruise at a time at Castaway Cay. There were plenty of life guards and you could buy a bag with ice and water to keep by your chairs/umbrella. Such a fun and magical day, thanks to Disney!! There is also a water play area for kids (Pelican Plunge) and an adults only beach for 18+ called Serenity Bay (no lifeguards there though).
One of the highlights of Castaway Cay is the free BBQ lunch they provide to everyone. I wasn’t sure how this would go, but it was truly a breeze. One tip I’ll give though is to have one family member stake out a picnic table in their covered area 10 minutes before they start serving the food and then have them get in the buffet line after the rest of your party gets back. The food was delicious, especially after being in the water all day!
After lunch, we did a little shopping/browsing and then we headed back to the ship. The teens would get tired out about 4-5 hours after we’d get off the ship, so we never stayed the entire day off the ship. We went back to our room and changed/rested a bit and then we went up to the top deck and Brian and I enjoyed the drink of the day, which was a pirate themed cocktail. Then we went down to see our show of the night in the Walt Disney Theatre. The shows were REALLY good, but entirely Disney themed and perhaps more catered to younglings. The shows we saw were: Mickey and Goofy (first night), The Little Mermaid (second night), Inside Out 2 (this was out in the theater when we saw it, but they played it on the ship for free… since Disney owns the rights to it!) and Aladdin. The shows were musicals where they’d recap the movie (The Little Mermaid) for you to watch in just an hour with live people. Very cute!
Shop Pirate Shirt:
We had PIRATE night and Disney provided each of us with a red pirate themed bandana. Of course, I had a Disney pirate themed shirt I got off of Etsy.
More Pirate photos of us.
Pirate night brought a Pirates of the Caribbean Menu and dinner.
There was a lot of seafood and mango items on the menu for Pirate Night. But, there were SO many options for each course, that if you didn’t like seafood or mangos, you’d be ok! I started with a crab cake for an appetizer and chilled mango soup for my soup selection. Each night they’d have a bread service with different bread/rolls and butter/oils. We had a mango butter this night and it was really good!
The shrimp and scallop pasta was one of my favorites along with the rum soaked chocolate cake. For the pasta, our waiter took the shrimps out of their shells for us when bringing the plates to our table. How fancy!
After dinner we headed up to the top of the ship for the Pirate Show and FIREWORKS! They had a photographer on top that took a photo of us.
The Pirate Show was really cool and we enjoyed the fireworks. Pirate Night is always on the same night of the week for this particular cruise, so we landed up seeing them on July 3 (one day before July 4). They did do another fireworks show on July 4, but we headed to bed early that night since we had to have our luggage packed up by 10:30 p.m. to place outside our room and we had a full day of travel (to go home) the next day.
Now we’ll switch to our LAST full day on the ship (sorry, this post is getting long!). Today I decided to go all out for breakfast instead of sticking to the basics… I even added some Mickey Waffles to my plate!
Since we were at sea all day and it was our last day on the Disney Wish, we kind of explored what we hadn’t checked out on the ship yet and took it easy. There was this really pretty lounge on the ship called The Bayou Lounge and there were faux flowers and lights on the entire ceiling. We sat down and ordered drinks at the bar. I landed up getting a coffee martini and it had Alcohol Loading laser printed on the top. So fun!
Brian got a regular cappuccino with a Mickey lasered on top and Autumn got a non-alcoholic Shirley Temple, which was so cute!
Next door to The Bayou Lounge was the Hyperspace (Star Wars themed) Lounge. It wasn’t open for the day yet, but I snuck a photo of it. It had a sign on the door that you could only keep your seats for 45 minutes and there was already a line of people by the door waiting for it to open, so I’m guessing this was a hot place to stop by on the ship.
Since we had a full day at sea, we finally had time to go down to the atrium of the ship and get a photo of us by the Cinderella statue.
Annnd, with a full day at sea we finally had time to do the sit down lunch again! We did this the day we boarded the ship, but since it was a shorter cruise and we had two back to back days where we were docked at the Bahamas, we had grabbed the quick service lunch on the top deck from the restaurants up there. It was fun to sit and have a 5 course lunch again, although I think it made me a little full still by the time we had our big dinner again later in the day. Such is life on vacation! Ha, ha! I had tomato soup and this really good cold sliced mushroom appetizer.
For my main entree, I selected this delicious pasta with bread crumbs on top. For dessert, they had a cherry crepe a la mode and whenever there is a crepe as an option, I’m all in. It was delicious!
After lunch, we rested in our room for awhile and watched Moana on the TV in there. Disney had all their movies available to watch, so that was nice to have a little time to chill. Then we went swimming one last time (no photos) and after swimming, I always get hungry. I enjoyed some snacks from the quick service restaurants up top, such as mac and cheese and cornbread (from the BBQ restaurant), cheese pizza (from the pizza place) and my favorite soft serve ice cream in banana and chocolate. YUM! Since our dinner wasn’t until 8:15 p.m., we always needed a snack to hold us over in-between lunch and dinner.
I was really excited about our last dinner, because it was in the Marvel Room! Except, one person in our party wasn’t feeling well, SO it wasn’t as enjoyable as I had hoped. But, on a good note, they felt better later that night. So, we missed the live show with Spiderman (but, that is what YouTube is for!). We also had to rush through dinner. Anyway, the Marvel room was decorated with Marvel decor, plates, etc. and every table had a Quantum Core on the table that had buttons on it that you could push. We did get to activate ours at the beginning of dinner and a movie came up with Ant Man and Wasp in the dining room. So, we caught about half of the show before we had to leave.
I read online and had to kind of agree that the food wasn’t the best in the Marvel room, but the show makes up for it. It wasn’t bad, it was just kind of meh. The rolls were marbled and red colored and then for my appetizer I selected this warm mushroom salad. I really couldn’t eat all of it, it was very rich and just a lot of mushrooms with a sauce that just wasn’t very interesting. It would have been maybe better suited on top of a steak? But, after these items, I really enjoyed the rest of the dishes I selected! (Also, if you don’t like something they serve, they do offer to replace it.)
I had a potato soup and salad with tortilla chips, tomatoes, beans and salad. Both of these were really good!
I selected the pasta that had a wine sauce and scallops (YUM!) and then key lime pie is one of my favorite summer desserts. If you want to see the live show they put on during dinner, I found a video of it HERE.
Here are the towel creatures we got the last two nights on the cruise. Are they both elephants or is the one on the left something else? We weren’t sure! Here is a fun blog post I found where a mom has posted towel animals of all their Disney cruises and there are some neat ones!
On our last morning on the ship, we had a Farewell Breakfast. This was kind of sad! We had our same dining team from our dinners and it was the last time we saw them. I ordered chocolate chip pancakes, eggs and a yogurt parfait. They brought around a big basket of breakfast danishes to select from and then you were off! My family really enjoyed the Disney cruise, we are already talking about doing another cruise in the future.
Disney Wish Cruise {Trip Recap 2 of 3}
I’m done recapping our Disney Cruise trip, but I will have one more post which will cover the Castaway Cay island 5K that I ran with Nathan.
