You may have noticed that I haven’t been writing as much until the last week. We went away on vacation, and I didn’t have any articles queued up. This week, the market volatility with the tariff news has effectively turned me into a day trader. I’m also trying to renovate a condo and catch up from the vacation. I even started to take a new small part-time gig this week. For this article, in the interest of time, I accepted all the Grammarly suggestions without reviewing them. Hopefully, it didn’t create too many crazy sentences.
We spent one week in Orlando and one week on the largest cruise ship in the world, Royal Caribbean’s Icon of the Seas. That leads to this being two articles in one. I’ll focus more on the Icon of the Seas cruise since it’s more noteworthy.
Orlando Week
As a military family, we get many discounts at Disney and Universal Studios. In fact, last year, I wrote about our Royal Caribbean and Disney Vacation. It’s been so easy and (relatively) cheap to go to Disney that the kids have started to sour on it. Many of the rides have been around for decades and don’t have the same thrill on the fifth visit for tweens. My wife doesn’t like Universal Studios because a lot of the rides are motion/video rides and they tend to make her sick.
The pricing for Disney and Universal often strongly pushes you to spend the week there. It seems like the 4th, 5th, and 6th days at Disney, in particular, are cheap. They have enough parks to keep you busy for 5-6 days, so you might as well take advantage of those cheap days. This year, we decided to focus on other parts of Orlando. They have plenty of independent things to do.
Unfortunately, we didn’t get very good weather. Many of the days started at 68 degrees and built up to 75 degrees. That’s much better than what we left behind in Rhode Island, but it’s not great for water parks. We mainly went without a plan. I had ChatGPT come up with some ideas, which was the extent of my planning.
Why didn’t we plan more? My wife’s been distracted by all the DOGE distractions with her government job. I’ve been trying to get taxes done while working on a condo renovation since our tenants unexpectedly broke the lease. Some of the planning works best when my wife does it because she has the best access to military discounts. Also, you must get tickets ahead of time to get many military discounts.
Lodging
We stayed at the Marriott Grand Vista, taking advantage of our exchange from our Aruba timeshare. I like Aruba better, but the kids make a good point that Orlando has more to do.
I didn’t like the Marriott Grand Vista too much. It didn’t seem like there was too much for the kids to do, but it served its purpose of being a huge hotel room. My wife said we were supposed to get a spa tub with water jets, but we had a big shower with water shooting at you 37 different ways. Some people may prefer that.
It seemed like there were a million buildings to hold a million people. To get to a pool or a place to eat, we had to walk a long way. The pools were always completely packed, and we were extraordinarily lucky to get one beach chair to share with the four of us. And this was when the weather wasn’t the best. The pool was heated, though, so at least it was good once you got in.
Activities
Here are some of the things we did:
Gatorland was a lot of fun. What could go wrong with hundreds, maybe thousands of alligators? There’s enough gator stuff to do for about 3-4 hours. There was a show where the trainer worked with an alligator. My son and I got to take pictures holding an alligator’s mouth. (They had tied up its mouth for the photo op. I’m not sure if PETA would approve.) They had a lot of unique alligators, like one that had no top jaw, which made national news several years ago. They do a lot of rescue stuff, so maybe PETA doesn’t mind them too much. It’s probably better than Florida Man having a pet alligator where something goes wrong.
You can order some alligators for lunch, but the kids aren’t keen on eating the poor performers.
At the ticket gate, I asked about a military discount and they gave my wife’s ticket for free and discounted the rest of use by 20% or 25%. I think it saved us around $40 or $50.
We had went to WonderWorks a few years ago and the kids wanted to go back. It’s kind of like a science museum, but their website says it is “a science focused indoor amusement park.” It’s good for about 4-5 hours. We went on a day that started off cold. However, as the weather got nicer that day, my wife got annoyed the kids didn’t want to leave the indoor fun.
It was about $120 which was about what I expected. We might have been able to hunt down some discount codes if we tried harder.
I wasn’t quite sure if SeaWorld still existed. I thought they might have been canceled due to bad treatment of the orcas. My wife was able to get FREE military tickets from her laptop, and I went with the kids. She had to stay back and work a couple of days – that was part of the plan all along.
SeaWorld reminded us of Hershey Park but with a sea theme instead of a chocolate one. In other words, the rides are almost all roller coasters and pretty entertaining ones – not what you’d expect. The new penguin coaster was great. It lured me into thinking it was a slow touring ride, but it turned into a coast that I hadn’t expected. It was all indoors, so I had no idea. At the end, the exit brings you on a tour of hundreds of penguins.
Overall, the kids loved SeaWorld. They love roller coasters. The only downside is that things were very spread apart. We spent a lot of time going from one part of the park to the other. I would have liked to have done more shows than the orca one, but I couldn’t convince the kids. Also, they had to end the orca show early due to a medical situation in the crowd.
Fun Spot America is a small amusement park. It’s in between some of the traveling carnivals and a bigger amusement park like Six Flags. It has a couple of roller coasters, but they are smaller.
Two things set Fun Spot America apart from most other things we did:
- Entry can be free (rides cost money)
The park itself is free. You can buy a card with some kind of ride amount. We didn’t do that, but it’s a nice option if you have a couple of hours. We were early enough that we just decided to buy the unlimited ride pass for around $70. It looks like you can save $10 if you buy online. Whoops. - The park was empty
We hit it during a school day, and it was almost empty. We could ride the main roller coaster three times in a row without any wait. I assume that most kids were at school and that other locals probably had an annual Disney pass. Somewhere around 2 or 3 PM, we had to start to wait in line about 10-15 minutes because the kids got out of school. We were mostly ready to go home by that time.
While my kids love the big roller coasters that do crazy loops, they preferred Fun Spot over SeaWorld because we were always doing something. The food and drink was much, much cheaper. We spent around $100 for lunch at SeaWorld and it wasn’t that good. Fun Spot was better for around $30.
Restaurants
It was around my birthday, so my wife planned a special dinner at Capa Steakhouse at the Four Seasons. I had never been to a Michelin Star Restaurant. After watching The Bear on Hulu, it was something that I wanted to do. I think everyone loved the experience at Capa. It’s expensive, but it’s rare that everyone in our family comes out thinking it was one of the best meals we had. My youngest son is a vegetarian, so that’s especially high praise at a steakhouse.
Capa has an amazing view of Disney. We caught an awesome sunset and finished our meal in time for the famous Disney fireworks.
Several days later, I learned that Michelin only reviews certain cities. We have a couple of James Beard restaurants in our town – maybe they’d be Michelin star quality if they came here?
Next up, we’ll have to see what a 2-star Michelin restaurant is like.
My wife also found a great hidden gem in The Edison in Disney Springs. It had a steampunk, 1920’s vibe. The food was excellent, but the live singers were really what set it apart. We also had a dinner at The Boathouse which I think was kind of average. We had tried to take one of the carboat tours, but the timing never lined up for us.
Finally, because it was a timeshare, we had a full kitchen, so we saved money many days by simply making food at home. We made one grocery trip through Uber at the beginning of the week, and it worked out well.
Icon Of The Seas
When the Orlando week was up, we were on to Miami to board Royal Caribbean’s Icon. We took the Brightline, which seems to be a newer training connecting much of Florida. It was great 3-hour ride. It reminded of the train we took from London to Liverpool last summer. I could get used to traveling by train more often. It’s quite nice to sit around a table with my family rather than be squished into tiny seats on a plane.
Once at the Icon, the check-in process was extremely easy. We barely waited any time in line, which is weird considering they had over 7500 other passengers checking in.
One of the highlights of Icon is how incredible they are able to take care of so many people and meals and scale as well as it does. Even with all the people, Icon did not seem crowded. There were times when a couple of the pools were crowded. The piano bar was always popular and probably needed a little space.
However, for the most part, it didn’t feel like there were a lot of people there. Even on the last day, I found a couple of new areas of the ship that I hadn’t explored before. I knew there was a sports bar on the ship and went to it on the Wonder last year, but never looked for it this time. It was in an area designed for kids. It does make sense, as there are a lot of games for kids to play.
There are a billion YouTube reviews of Icon of the Seas by people who really know what they are talking about. I can’t begin to do a reasonable review here, but I’ll give you some of our personal takeaways on things to look out for.
Itinerary
The itinerary of the cruise we took was not very good. We did Royal Caribbean’s “Eastern Caribbean & Perfect Day”, had only three stops: St. Kitts, St. Thomas, and Coco Cay (their private island water park). We picked it, so it was a limitation that we were willing to deal with. A day at sea on the world biggest cruise ship perfectly fine.
We didn’t have flexibility of when to travel – the kids school vacation is planned a year in advance. If we were going to take the Icon of the Seas we had two choices. We could choose the itinerary and the week we did. Or we could do all the same ports that we did last year on the Wonder of the Seas. (To do this, we would have had to switch the Orlando Week. My recommendation is to do Icon of the Seas to Western Caribbean & Perfect Day.
Excursions
The Royal Caribbean excursions were sold out extremely quickly, so we had plan our own excursions. Royal Caribbean needs to partner with more excursion companies. Maybe there’s just too many people on the ship to accommodate the ports.
My wife was looking forward to St. Kitts because she’s a big Hamiton fan, and sister island Nevis has his birthplace/museum. We booked an all-day tour, but it mostly drove around St. Kitts and didn’t stop much at anything. They saved the trip to Nevis for the last two hours, and we had four minutes to get out to see the Hamilton Museum. They rushed us to lunch at 2:30 – giving us 20 minutes to reach to catch the 3 PM boat that would take us back to our ship. It was weird to pay to eat lunch that late when we had free food an hour back on the ship. They don’t have fast food on these islands, so getting lunch in 20 minutes is no small chore.
Everyone on the tour agreed it was terrible.
Unfortunately, it only got worse from there. We were supposed to have a day until 3 PM at St. Thomas, but it got cut short and we only had 7:30 to 1PM. Maybe weather was a factor, I don’t know. We had a snorkling excursion set up, but the company had to cancel it because we wouldn’t have time with the itinerary change.
My kids don’t get up early on vacation, so we really didn’t get out until 9:00. We took a group taxi to Magen’s Beach, which seemed to be the thing to do. It was $70 each way – cash only. We barely had enough cash to come back. The beach was beyond crowded – they ran out of chairs to sell.
Perfect Day at Coco Cay was not perfect, as it was canceled due to the weather. From what I’ve read on Reddit, this seems to happen a lot. There are people who have had it canceled on them three times. If it’s going to be a centerpiece selling point of the cruise – there should be some accommodation made when customers don’t get it. I understand that Royal Caribbean doesn’t control the weather, but if you hype something, either deliver it or do something to make customers happy.
In the end, they set the expectations sky high for “Perfect Day” and I had grumpy kids to deal with. Of the three stops, we had one and a half days of stops that were extremely disappointing.
Royal Caribbean Needs a Tween Club
My kids are 11 and 12, and Royal Caribbean offers nothing for this age group. They are too old for the kids club Adventure Ocean, which is ages 5-12. It’s just not a great fit to have a 6th grader doing the same activities as a first grader. They have great stuff set up for kids that are ages 4-8 or 9, such as Admiral Awesome shows and a splash pad. If they were 13, they could hang out with the older kids in the Teens Club. In my experience, teens who are 15 and 16 aren’t very interested in doing stuff with kids who are 13. Maybe we’ll find out it’s different when our kids get to that age, but I’m not optimistic. In fact, it may be worse next year when they are 12 and 13, and we would need to split them up.
There needs to be more activities for “Tweens” from 10-14. There’s a reason why we have middle schools. It’s okay if to have overlapping ages. Maybe some of the 10 year olds want to do some of the smaller kid stuff. Maybe the 14 year olds do fit in well with the older kids. It would be great to have options instead of a cut-off where you are in the sweet spot of 2nd grade or 10th grade.
Final Thoughts
I realize I was quite negative on the Royal Caribbean trip, but we did have a lot of fun. I am tempted to say that our expectations were raised last year from Wonder of the Seas, but everyone agreed that the Icon of the Seas ship was better. They kids loved the food on the ship. Part of my joy in taking a cruise is that I don’t have to worry about cooking or cleaning. I think that’s an underrated part of any vacation.
The Orlando week may have sounded a little negative as well as we didn’t plan stuff. I enjoyed not being on a schedule and having flexibility to do whatever felt fun that day.
If you’ve read this far, thank you for indulging me. I apologize for the lack of personal finance, and I’ll get back to it early next week.
