Ep. 707 - The Real Reason Families Keep Coming Back to Adventures by Disney: Featuring an Adventure Guide

DCL Duo Podcast: A Disney Cruise Line Fan Podcast

This episode explores the profound emotional impact of an Adventures by Singapore river cruise through Holland and Belgium. Through interview

Key takeaways

• Tracy, a self-described 'pool girl,' successfully embraced an active itinerary through a biking excursion in Kinderdijk's 19 windmills.
• Cindy uses handmade friendship bracelets as a strategic tool to initiate conversations and connect with strangers on cruises.

Main topics

• Adventures by Disney River Cruises
• Family Travel Dynamics

Notable quotes

A vacation is where you go to stop. A trip is where you go to go.

Conclusion

The episode demonstrates that the true value of travel lies not just i

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) A little while ago, we did something we'd never done in over 700 episodes of our show. We told a story, a real one, with Axe. About three days, our family spent in Amsterdam with friends ahead of an Adventures by Disney river cruise. We weren't sure anyone wanted that from a Disney cruise podcast. Turns out you did. So we're doing it one more time. For now. Here's the setup. This past summer, we sailed through Holland and Belgium with a boatload of listeners as a part of our podcast cruise version 2.0. If you haven't heard of Adventures by Disney before, or ABD as we call it, you're not alone. ABD is Disney's luxury travel brand. The idea here is, let's get people out of the parks and into the world. So they offer land vacations, river cruises, and other kinds of experiences. ABD actually started back in 2005 with two trips, Wyoming and Hawaii, and it's since grown to dozens of destinations across six continents. with itineraries that have even reached the seventh. And if you've never done a river cruise, throw out most of what you picture when you hear the word cruise. There's no water slide, no atrium, no 5,000 people. These ships are long and low and narrow, built to fit inside the locks and under the bridges of a working European river. And they carry maybe 150 passengers instead of a few thousand. Instead of taking a tender into port, the ship ties up in the middle of a town. You walk down the gangway. and you're practically in town square. You unpack once, and the hotel sails to the next country, sometimes while you sleep. Disney doesn't build or run these boats themselves. For the river cruises, they partner with a line called Ama Waterways, a genuinely well-regarded name in river cruising. And Disney layers its own people and programming on top. The adventure guides, the kids' activities, excursions with special access, and the ships that Ama uses are perfect for ABD. They have spacious... well-appointed, well-organized rooms, some of them connecting to accommodate families. They even let you sleep three to a room, which can be unusual in the river cruising scene. River cruising is normally aimed at, let's say, a quieter demographic. But Disney's whole move here was to make the river a place you could bring a nine-year-old. And if this is the part of the show that's making your ears perk up, good news. This is not our first river cruise with Adventures by Disney. We have several episodes in our back catalog on Adventures by Disney, river cruising, and land-based trips, including our own prior experience with Adventures by Disney on a Christmas markets river cruise down the Danube. Same partnership, ABD and Ama Waterways, but through Germany and Austria in December with the twinkling market stalls and the mulled wine and the gingerbread. So if this episode gives you the itch, there's more where it came from back in the feed. So what's special about this episode? Well... I brought a microphone with me. I sat down with folks who came with us, put it on the table between us, and asked the obvious question. Was it good? Would you do it again? Fully expecting a travel review. Food, staterooms, would you recommend it? That is not what I got. Out of almost every conversation I had, I got something bigger and stranger and frankly more moving than I had any right to expect from a trip whose main food groups were chocolate, french fries, and beer. One of our listeners said it best. So I'll let her go first. Her name is Bree. She and her husband Sean have four kids and they drag the whole crew across Europe just about every summer. And I wanted to know why. I Speaker 3 (3:28) like the idea that we are letting them see the world. It's not just something they're seeing on the news and taking stereotypes or just highly opinionated opinions. And they can say for themselves. how the world looks and what the people are like and how much we all really have in common. Speaker 1 (3:48) Now that's a heavy thing to say on a trip whose itinerary is basically castles and chocolate, but it stuck with me because it kept happening. Four conversations, none of them overlapping, all of them quietly arriving at the same idea Bree had just handed me. So here's the trip we're going to go on. You'll meet four travelers, a woman who nearly didn't come at all, a woman who has, as far as I can tell, never once met a stranger, A family of six, including kids ages 9 to 21, who cannot agree on whether they even had a good time. And at the very end, someone who does this for a living, and who turned out to be the single best argument for this kind of experience that I have ever heard. And there's one more thing woven through all of it. I'm not going to tell you what it is. I just want to see if you can spot it before I do. From the DCL Duo, this is Brian. Come with us. Speaker 1 (5:00) All right, welcome back. We start with act one. Just tell me what to pack. We're going to start with the person who almost said no to this entire trip. Tracy and Michael are old friends of the show. You've heard them before. And when this trip came around, Tracy was, in her own words, nervous. Not about the money, not about the flights, about the general idea of this vacation altogether. Speaker 4 (5:22) So I was very nervous about this trip because it's, first of all, I'm a vacation girl, not a trip girl. So this is definitely a more, this is more like our adventure by Disney in Italy last year, where we were constantly moving, constantly excursioning, constantly doing something early mornings, late nights. And I was really concerned, you know, just about this is a vacation. I want to like, I'm a, I'm a pool girl at heart or an ocean girl at heart. Speaker 1 (5:50) A vacation girl, not a trip girl. I've never heard the fundamental divide of human travel put so cleanly. A vacation is where you go to stop. A trip is where you go to go. One has a swim at bar, the other has a 7am lobby call, and a man named Dieter telling you the bus leaves in four minutes. Tracy knows precisely which animal she is, and she signed up for the other one on purpose. So why do it? Her answer is the entire psychology of the anxious traveler compressed into one sentence. Speaker 4 (6:22) Coming with friends, knowing that they had my back, that I was going to be okay, that I could say no if I needed to. Speaker 1 (6:28) So that's the deal Tracy made with herself. I'll say no if I need to. I'll walk up to the scary thing, as long as there's an exit and some friendly faces between me and it. Remember that instinct. It's going to turn out to be somebody's actual job later in this episode. And here's what Tracy, the self-described pool girl, went and did on this trip she was dreading. She got on a bike. Speaker 4 (6:48) It was absolutely wonderful to take a excursion that took us biking past 19 windmills. We got to stop in a windmill and go through a windmill museum. It was absolutely fascinating to hear how they work and how the country itself has used technology and to be able to continue to do the things that they're doing, but also keep the history of the windmills, just the history of the windmills here in this country and how they're still using them. Speaker 1 (7:24) Now, Tracy says 19 windmills, and I want to pause on that for a second because that's not a made up number. Tracy's talking about Kinderdijk, one of the stops on our trip. There are exactly 19 windmills in Kinderdijk, most built in a two-year sprint around 1738 to 1740. standing in a row in a marshy nowhere southeast of Rotterdam. They exist because a big share of the Netherlands sits at or below sea level. About a quarter of the country is under sea level. And the Dutch response to that terrifying geographic fact was not to move. It was to build 19 enormous machines to pump the water back out and then keep them running for the better part of three centuries. They're a UNESCO World Heritage Site now, and the name Kinderdijk means Children's Dyke. from a flood legend about a baby's cradle found floating on the water, kept upright, so the story goes, by a cat. So the self-proclaimed vacation girl pushed her limits and took a bike excursion, biking through the single most concentrated monument to Dutch stubbornness on the planet. And ultimately, Tracy didn't just tolerate this river cruise experience. Speaker 4 (8:30) But I was, I would say I was... slightly surprised at how much I enjoyed it. And I would say it was definitely better than my expectations in most areas. Michael, Speaker 1 (8:43) meanwhile, Tracy's husband, is the one who booked this whole thing and had a front row seat to watch his nervous wife have a mostly good time against her own predictions. I asked him how hard it was to manage her anxiety going in. His answer was very Michael. Speaker 8 (9:00) My wife, Tracy, was reluctant to book a river cruise. It wasn't what we wanted. But with the DCL podcast cruise, it's like, well, we're going to do it. Speaker 1 (9:12) That was the whole strategy right there. He didn't try to talk her out of the fear. He just booked the trip. And he knew the fear would be surrounded by friends. And he'd let the peer pressure take over and do its thing. Honestly, Michael, elite marriage work, buddy. Even Tracy acknowledged in her own way. Michael had the winning strategy here. Speaker 4 (9:30) Why did we book this? Well, because it was the DCL Duo Podcast 2.0 cruise. I don't know that I would have taken the leap had it not been, but I knew that I was in safe hands with Sam and Brian and knew that no matter what happened or how everything went, that we would be with friends. And make Speaker 1 (9:50) no mistake about it. Michael knew what he was buying. He knew what he was getting himself into. The specific thing a riverboat cruise will give you, that no big ocean ship can. I Speaker 8 (10:00) was looking forward to it because it gets us to ports and cities, especially in Europe, that we won't get to otherwise. There's no way for a large ocean line cruise to get into these ports. So we were able to explore Amsterdam, which I had been to before, but Tracy had not. And through other cities in the Netherlands, Holland, and Belgium as well. So we got to places we haven't been before, and you couldn't get on an ocean cruise. Of Speaker 1 (10:40) course, Michael's right, and it's the whole pitch of a river cruise in one breath. A megaship holds thousands of people, as we mentioned earlier. It can only kiss the edge of a continent. A riverboat threads into it, down the middle of countries, tying up in a... town square, or at least close by, near enough to walk off the gangway and buy a waffle. This Holland and Belgium itinerary is one of the newest offerings from ABD, and it does exactly what Michael's describing. We went to Amsterdam, Ghent, Bruges, Gouda, Howdah, if you might recall from our last episode. Places no ship with a water slide will ever reach. So was it worth it for the woman who almost stayed home? Here's her verdict. And listen for the idea I mentioned at the top of the show. Because the biggest theme of this whole episode arrives first and quietest. Out of the mouth of the person, I least expected to say it. Speaker 4 (11:31) So, like I said, the excursions and the ABD guides were Disney quality, as always. Top notch. Just really enjoyed the time. And this is not a place that I maybe would have chosen to come to, you know, Europe for. But I'm so glad that we did because it was such a wonderful experience. And I just feel like smarter and like, like just, you know, I just, anytime that I can travel and learn about a different culture and a different country and how they live, I think it makes how I live in the United States better. Speaker 1 (12:12) So there you have it. The pool girl went on the trip. She didn't even want to take. and came home saying it improved the life she'd left behind. That's the sentiment that I was handed by almost every person I talked to on this trip. And just so you didn't miss it there, at the top of Tracy's answer, she mentioned those adventure guides again. Something we're going to come back and talk a bit more about at the end of the show. But Michael also brought them up. Speaker 8 (12:34) On the river cruise, we had five guides for, on this cruise, there were 119 people. And we actually did get to talk to each of them individually and felt like they got to know who we were, which I'd say that was probably the most surprising of thinking that they could manage. And it wasn't just us. It wasn't our behavior towards them. They were genuinely that way with everyone. I think the five of them each got to know all 119. individual people on the cruise there, or at least got to know the individual families that Speaker 1 (13:17) were on the cruise. Five guides, 119 travelers, everyone feeling personally known by the end of the week. So Michael's little aside, they knew all of us, isn't him being generous? Because that was our experience too. And the experience of almost everyone we've talked to who's done an Adventures by Disney trip. Keep those five people in the back of your mind. Again, we're going to come back to them a little bit later. For now, I just want to wrap up with Tracy's verdict. Again, the self-proclaimed pool girl decided to take a trip, not a vacation. So would she do it again? Speaker 4 (13:53) It's funny you should mention whether or not we'll book another ABD cruise because yes, yes, I think we will. And I will say, and I'm going to be really like 100 % honest here. Keep it or don't, whatever. Would I do it without friends? Maybe. But doing it with friends makes it 300 % better. So we will definitely be doing another ABD River Cruise. I mean, the nicest part about it is they take care of everything. We don't have to think about it. It's not like a Disney trip where you have to plan your fast passes and plan your, you know, all of the thing. When do I need to rope drop this day? Do I not need to rope drop this day? You can choose your own adventure. You can go on the excursions. You don't have to go on the excursions. You can eat the steak. You don't have to eat the steak. You can eat the chocolate, which I just did, or you don't have to eat the chocolate, but it, everything is laid out for you. It's planned. It's done. You, it's literally like zero anxiety, zero worry about what you're going to do and what the plans are. They're already done. So it makes for a really easy vacation. Speaker 1 (15:01) And there you have it. A resounding yes. We would do it again with friends. Spoiler alert. We have it on good authority. Tracy and Michael will be setting sail next summer on another European river with friends. Stay tuned. We'll be right back. Speaker 3 (15:27) All Speaker 1 (15:28) right, welcome back once again. We've arrived at act two. Would you like a bracelet? If Tracy is the traveler you have to gently coax out of her shell, our next traveler was apparently born without