Like many of you, we missed our summer vacation due to the COVID-19 pandemic and will be missing our winter vacation as well. Over the summer I came up with the idea of holding home “trips” to various Disney parks with our kids and they were a huge hit. But while each of those were a 1-day “experience” we are gearing up for a full-blown “2-day cruise” from home. Below are some of the ideas we came up with to prepare for a Disney trip from home. If you want to see a full breakdown of each of the trips see the links below.
Make Your Own Disney Cruise
Make your own navigator
Navigators are the full guide to everything on a Disney cruise. While DCL has shifted to digital in recent years with the DCL App, it is clear that many people prefer the paper (including us) since while they were gone for a bit they were brought back. The Disney Cruise Line blog keeps a catalog of as many navigators as they can get their hands on (since people like ourselves are nice enough to send scans of them) so people have an idea of what to expect on different cruises.
I made a make-your-own navigator template that I used for our first “cruise” and plan on using it again for our upcoming cruise. I will be continuing to work on our own personalized version for our cruise but if you are planning on using it I highly recommend using something similar whether in Publisher (which is what I used) or anything else you find to best layout the plans for the day. A few notes on the file and navigators in general
- The file was from our first “cruise” and so the schedule was very loose, we plan on doing a lot more planning for this one
- Leverage the top section for your “hero image”. I did a screenshot of other navigators to ensure the sizing worked right with the theme I was working on (e.g. the one in the file is from an embarkation day)
- Yes, we did watch Episode 1 that day but have seen watched all the other Star Wars movies; Episodes 1-6 and Rogue One (not a typo, that is all the Star Wars movies)
- A drink of the day can be a fun way to spice up the day. My kids have loved Jungle Juice for years, but you can make a lot of the Disney drinks yourself or invent your own! You can even have an alcoholic (I love Pina Coladas) and non-alcoholic drink of the day like Disney does
- There are a lot of areas on the ship and a lot of different interests, so as you can see the navigator has rows for each relevant interest. If you see something you don’t think you will remove you should go ahead and do that. Again, this is what worked for us.
Supplies
- Disney, like most cruises, do towel animals each night.
- We ordered a set of towels just for this to make sure we had enough for what we wanted to do
- Use this guide (or the many many others on the internet) to make whatever!
- We bought glow in the dark bracelets for the various “deck parties”
- Plastic balls and kiddie pool to create a “pool” for the winter
- Luau decorations for Castaway Cay
- We wanted to create a cruise lite atmosphere so we also ordered some items for the wall to try and theme things up
- Print your own door decals/magnets (or you can order from amazon your own custom ones)
Are you interested in how we pulled all of this together for our “cruise” or other park specific days? Visit the other posts!
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