DREAMing of Our Magical Mystery Cruise - Updated 04/23/2015 About This Page:

[Lumieregirl]

DREAMing of Our Magical Mystery Cruise

Hi, Passporter friends! Welcome to my Magical Mystery Cruise and after only 9 years on Passporter, my first TR . I’ve actually started several, some half in writing and some only in my mind , but here we are finally for real. OooohAaaa. Impressed? (I ask you to please bear with me while I learn how to resize and upload photos. I’m a little anxious about that …)

Pre-trip Part 1: We will go somewhere, sometime

Cruisers:
Me: planner, keeper of anxiety, and Disney-obsessed. 4th time cruiser, and first cruise on the DREAM
DH: traveler, keeper of calm, likes Disney enough & loves me. 3rd time cruiser, and first cruise on the DREAM

Dates: July 30 through Aug 3

Destination: 3-night cruise on the DREAM, pre-cruise stay in St. Augustine , Florida, and (hopefully) post-cruise stay at Disney’s Hilton Head Island Resort.
Us: Married without children, DVC members since 2011 – I plan every tiny detail of every trip. DH asks me if he needs to pack a dress shirt or not. Okay, it’s not THAT bad … but close.

Title: A story unto itself. Last summer when we were on our trip to Aulani, we received the first of 2 emails from DVC offering relatively last-minute deals (usually around 6 weeks out) for Disney Cruise sailings. These are date-specific cruises, and you have to be ready to pay in full right away (with cash, not points). We of course were unable to take advantage of it, but DH mentioned we should try next year. I poked around and saw some posts over on www.dvcnews.com where folks had expressed they were unable to take advantage because they already had plans. I also asked about it here on Passporter. Check out the overwhelming response: http://www.passporterboards.com/foru...ry-cruise.html
We realized the only way to use this deal is to plan NOT to have a plan. So, we’d save our $ to go “somewhere” during 2014 “sometime”. For us, being on the ship is such a great feeling, we aren’t too concerned about where she goes. So, our 2014 vacation plan was … unplanned. DH, being a Beatles fan, dubbed it the “Magical Mystery Cruise”. So, there ya go. :

Neurotic planners out there know this was torture. I over-research everything. I can’t help it. I consoled myself that we’d be saving some $. Also, perhaps some of my neurotic researching would be simmered-down. Rather than reading over every single option to Castaway Club members to book at the specific date, I’d rather be asking “Um, whatcha got left?”. This would go for Palo, Remy, and shore excursions. Yikes. Of course that didn’t stop me much, but some I suppose. I couldn’t check the weather for our dates, at least.

Now, I’ve been on one 3-night cruise and I swore never again :… it went by in a flash. I held firm to the 4-night minimum, and that was the plan ever since last summer until just a few months ago. Fast forward through some home repairs, car repairs, and dental work, and let’s just say my attitude was starting to change . We went back and forth and considered putting the whole thing off a year, but ultimately decided that even 3 nights is a nice little getaway, and we’d been dreaming of it all year, so we’ll take just 3 nights if that’s what DVC would offer us. I fought this quite a bit but the more and more I went over the budget, especially tacking on transportation expenses, and play money “drinks, excursions, souvenirs, etc”, I began to realize if I could spend the 3-night relatively anxiety-free, (see the “A” word … yeah, you’ll see a pattern with me and that word), or the 4-night always thinking about $ in the back of my mind. And less face it, that’s not really “vacation”. :

So, I put DVC as a VIP on my email so when the offer came, it would pop up immediately, and we waited, and waited some more. April … nope. May … nada. June … um, hello DVC? Yoo-hoo! Silence. I looked at the dates again of previous offers and it looked like around 50 days. So, we worked up our own calendar and realized if nothing came by late June, then we’d need to just book something ourselves. Our August calendar was beginning to fill up, and having not thought it out really, I’d bought concert tickets for Aug 14, making that entire week unworkable to travel to FL and back.

In early June DCL announced special rates for some cruises for this summer on their own site. Since the last reasonable date we could book was approaching (3rd week of June to sail early Aug), we finally conceded that DVC had indeed forgotten us , and priced out the DCL dates, and settled on the July 31 sailing on the DREAM. This is the first time either of us has been on one of the new ships. That in itself is super exciting ! We decided on an inside stateroom since the cruise is so short, we’ll barely be in there. I’ve saved myself the over-analyzing of staterooms, as this is a GTY reservation, so Disney will put us where they put us.
And, in a wild first turn of events … I’ve handed over port plans to DH. For me, being on the ship is awesomeness, and whatever we do I port is just gravy. This is a double-edged sword as it does make me a bit anxious not to be in control, but it’s kinda nice not having to worry about it.

So, in early June we settled on our date. DH had to find out if he could move some work stuff around to get the dates off, and we’d wait to book until June 20, just in case DVC came around.

June 20 would be a super-fun happy day when I’d book our Disney Dream Magical Mystery Cruise !!!!

Up Next: June 12: I’ve never heard a noise like THAT before