Pixie Dusted Honeymoon August 3rd - August 10th, 2009 PTR - PassPorter - A Community of Walt Disney World, Disneyland, Disney Cruise Line, and General Travel Forums
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Pixie Dusted Honeymoon August 3rd - August 10th, 2009 Pre-TR
Cast:
Me (Missy, 27) - Been to WDW twice. Once at age 3 and once in 2000 with the family. Never been to AK or DHS, but LOVES MK and EP!
DH, he will be then yay! (Nate, 26) - Went to WDW in high school with his family over Thanksgiving. Never been to AK. LOVES EP and the rides at DHS.
Travel:
August 3rd - August 10th, 2009
We leave MSP at around 7am on August 3rd on a non-stop flight arriving at MCO at around 11am.
Leave MCO at around 5PM on August 10th making it back to MSP by around 8PM.
Using DME and the Disney buses. No rental car.
Accommodations: CSR! We're excited about this as it looks like a beautiful resort.
Those are the basics. I'll post more about the initial planning.
NOTE: Tried to change the color of the text, but the color chooser isn't working. Any ideas?
Got the color figured out thanks Colexis Mom! I like when the TRs are in a different color. Helps identify the authors stuff.
Before I get into the initial planning process let me start by explaining why I'm writing a TR cause some people in my life seem to think I'm crazy for doing it.
Reason #1: I've been reading quite a few TRs on the boards and have found them helpful. I feel like I should give back.
Reason #2: I think my honeymoon is something I should remember. This will also give me something to read when I'm old and senile and have nothing better to do. Note to self: must keep a back-up copy somewhere in case the interwebs come crashing down. It will also be useful if in the future they can just implant the TR in my brain so I don't actually have to read it cause I'm lazy like that and probably won't be able to read when I'm old and senile anyways as eyesight tends to go around that time.
So now that my justification is over with on to our planning.
Way back in November we started to talk about where we wanted to honeymoon. We tossed around tons of ideas and were considering some kind of tropical island somewhere as that's what the bridal magazines say you should do. The more we thought about it the bigger pain we thought it might be to try and leave the country right after the wedding. With passports needing getting and longer flights for a girl who gets crabby on planes it started to look like a bigger hassle than we wanted our honeymoon to be. So we started talking about places in the US that we might want to go. There were a lot of places that we thought would be nice: Grand Canyon, Niagara Falls, northern MN (plus it would save us TONS of money). But each time we talked about where we wanted to go we kept going back to the trip we took to California in 2006 and what a great time we had.
A little about our 2006 CA trip: We were in CA for about a week. Visited LA and San Diego seeing a bunch of different sights and spending a day each at Disneyland and Sea World. It was a wonderful trip and after we kept talking about how much we enjoyed Disneyland and how we wished we had more time there. We turned into giddy little kids. It was so much fun and we have wanted to go back ever since.
Since we kept mentioning Disneyland and how much fun we had when there I suggested WDW. We both liked the idea and decided to think about it. After a few days of "thinking" we both agreed that we were going to honeymoon at WDW. I started reading as much as I could find about WDW as the last time I was there I only went to 2 parks and my parents had planned the entire thing. Besides I'm a little OCD when it comes to vacation planning. So I got a few books on WDW (including the PassPorter) and started drafting up tentative activities.
The first thing we had to decide was if were going to visit non-Disney area attractions/sights. This was a tough decision as reading about all the stuff to do on WDW property I thought that we could easily be busy for a week! However, I'm a HUGE fan of (OK DFi says I'm obsessed with) fish though and being that close to Sea World I was definitely going to want to make a stop there. And then there's the Ocean, which I would love to go and visit since here in MN it is too far away to go to for the day. So that was that we would spend most time at WDW, head to Sea World for a day, and then to the Ocean for a day.
Those plans only lasted about a week. I kept reading about WDW and really felt that I wanted to see/do WAY to much to squeeze into 5 days. So we would either extend our trip or cut out our off property activities. We looked into extending our trip and found that it would cost more money (go figure) and we would need to take more time off work. In the end the wedding messed up the option of extending our trip. We were going to be fairly broke after the wedding and were already planning on taking the week before the wedding off for preparations and a little over a week after the wedding for the honeymoon. That left us (well DFi anyways) with little vacation hours left. So no extra time in Florida That meant having to give up Sea World and the Ocean. We'll miss you. However, it also meant we didn't have to rent a car, which would save money! And we wouldn't have to drive while on vacation. No getting lost and arguing. No having to drive on roads with more traffic than we were used to. So I guess it has it's perks. Besides it gives me a reason to push for another Florida trip to get to go see my fishies!
With all that decided it was time to decide if we should use a TA or not. I'll put that in another post.
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Now that we have an idea as to where we want to go for our honeymoon it was time to decide exactly when to leave and if we should use a TA or not. Our wedding is on August 1st, 2009 so it was a question of if we wanted to take our honeymoon immediately following the wedding or delay it a bit. We knew August was going to be HOT and CROWDED so delaying the honeymoon seemed like a good idea. Except for our conflicting work & school schedules which make travel after late August difficult. Since we would only be able to delay our honeymoon by a couple weeks we thought it better to just go right after the wedding. With a day of sanity (Sunday) between the ceremony day and our departure day.
So the hot weather and crowds may not be ideal, but we were used to vacationing in summer months and during spring break so the crowds would probably be "normal" to us. And the hot weather may take some getting used to, but it's hot all over the country that time of year I'm sure we can deal. It was hurricane season that we were most worried about. That's where the TA debate came from.
I am a planner who likes to be in control. The best thing to happen to travel is online booking, IMO. I like being able to do my own research, look up costs, play with different options, etc. All of which I can do from home on my computer in my PJs. And the fact that I can book my trip myself gives me a sense of it actually being taken care of. I guess I'm just too controlling. I planned our CA trip in 2006 without a TA and enjoyed every minute of it! For this trip DFi suggested that we look into a TA as we had enough to plan for the wedding and we wanted some expert opinions about the hurricane season and how worried we should be. Now DFi's dad uses a TA for business and so we decided to go with her. We talked to her and she advised that we just get travel insurance and go ahead with our planned travel time. Then we had her get us a quote for the honeymoon. We didn't give her any information other than the travel dates and that we wanted to stay on Disney property.
She came back to us with a quote for a 7 night stay at AKL. We saw the price and our jaws just about hit the floor. She said that AKL was very popular with the honeymooners. (It does look like a lovely resort BTW) I hadn't looked much into hotels at WDW at the time so I wasn't aware of the price. When we stay at hotels for vacation we tend to stay at cheap places as we don't spend much time in the room. So after receiving that quote I looked at the Disney website and studied the hotels and put together some packages myself. We couldn't afford to stay Deluxe as the wedding has put a huge dent in our available funds, but we could afford a trip if we stayed moderate or value. So DFi and I talked and went back and forth between moderate and value. We could save money and go value or live it up a little and stay moderate. We ended up deciding on staying moderate as we only honeymoon once.
So we gave the TA the new information and she got us a new quote. This time the price was better, but seemed a little higher than what we had on the Disney site. So we asked and she said that she had booked us in a king bed room not the double beds like we had chosen online. We decided that for a room that we wouldn't be in much we could live with two double beds vs. a king to save a little more cash. It was our honeymoon. We could snuggle.
Now it was time to choose a resort. I read about them, looked up pictures online, and even posted a message here on the boards asking opinions on the moderates. POFQ seemed to be the most recommended as it was romantic. But we looked at pictures and everything online and we just weren't impressed. I don't think we like that style at all. And we're not the ultra-romantic types anyways. POR gave us kind of the same vibe as POFQ. Maybe when we're there we'll stop at these resorts and check them out. Could just be internet mind games and we would actually like them, but without being there all we had was the internet. So we narrowed it down to CBR and CSR. Both seemed like nice resorts. We just kind of preferred the theme of CSR. Not sure why, but we both just liked the pictures better. And the added amenities seemed like a perk. Although we probably won't be at the resort enough to notice them.
So we got everything booked and it was all looking good. Except for the little mix up with park hoppers being charged, but not on our invoice. It got corrected rather quickly though. All in all the TA experience was OK, but there was a $25 per person charge for something I could have, and likely would have preferred, to do myself.
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After we booked we talked a lot about what we wanted to do while on our Honeymoon. Since we both loved Epcot we knew we would want to plan at least 2 days there. And it seemed like the MK would need 2 days as well. So we figured we'd spend 2 days at EP, 2 at MK, 1 at AK, and 1 at DHS. We also figured we would have time the day we get there (at around 12 PM) and the day we leave to go back and do our "favorites".
After the amount of time to allocate to each park was determined we could start looking at where we wanted to dine. We have the Disney Dining Plan as I thought it sounded nice to have the dining pre-paid before the trip. One less thing I have to worry about coming up with money for. We didn't do much planning on QS meals as no reservations are needed so we assumed we would just wing it when it came to those. We'll have my trusty PassPorter book with us in the parks so that shouldn't be that hard.
We decided that since we are going for our honeymoon that it would be nice to eat in the castle. This bumped CRT to the top of our list of dining locations. We also thought the Luau at the Poly seemed interesting. The biggest problem I had with doing both of those was that they are each 2 TS credits leaving only 3 extra TS credits for other meals. Choosing the last few TS eateries was kind of tricky as there are TONS of places we wanted to try. My DFi was insistent that we eat at Japan in Epcot. He studied Japanese in high school and even attended a Japanese camp a few summers. We ended up deciding on Teppan Edo after reading the PP and here on the boards. Then I insisted on Coral Reef cause we had already given up Sea World and I wanted to dine with the fish. That basically took up all our Epcot dining, which was a little disappointing as EVERYTHING there looks so yummy.
We read and re-read the PP to make our last TS decision. We ended up deciding on Crystal Palace at the MK. Nothing really appealed to us at either AK or DHS so it seemed logical for us to pick another MK location. We had also looked into resort dining, but already had the Luau planned and didn't want to spend too much time traveling from the parks to the resorts. Maybe on another trip when we've already experienced the parks and are sick of them (if that's possible). I did really want to try Tonga Toast at Kona so I convinced my DFi that we needed to go there for breakfast and pay OOP.
The plan was to wait for park hours to come out for August and then plan our trip, but I am impatient and couldn't wait until May 1st for the hours. So I took some advice from the boards and looked at 2007 & 2008 park hours and EMH matched the days of the week from my trip and gustimated the park hours and EMH for my trip. I took my gustimations and made this tentative plan:
Monday Aug. 3rd - Arrival day. Spend the day playing mini golf and shopping at DTD. We'll also likely have dinner somewhere in DTD. No ADRs so maybe we'll just end up with CS. Not sure yet. Then off to the MK for Wishes and Spectromagic (if they're happening).
Tuesday Aug. 4th - MK with dinner at CRT. We felt that we should spend our first full day at MK as it provides a good way to get "caught up in the magic". Guessing that this is a morning EMH. Not sure if we'll try this or not. We're not exactly morning people.
Wednesday Aug. 5th - EP with dinner at Teppan Edo. Maybe hop to DHS for Evening EMH if they are at DHS.
Thursday Aug. 6th - AK with Poly Luau at 8 PM. Maybe hop to EP for EMH after the Luau if EP has Evening EMH.
Friday Aug. 7th - DHS with breakfast at Kona. Maybe hop to MK for Evening EMH if MK has Evening EMH.
Saturday Aug. 8th - 2nd day at MK. We had originally planned on getting a massage at SSR in the AM, but after car trouble and a HUGE expense we are likely going to cancel the massage. Dinner at Crystal Palace.
Sunday Aug. 9th - Last full day. 2nd day at EP. Maybe hop to MK for Evening EMH.
Monday Aug. 10th - Leaving Orlando at 5:30 PM. Will need to catch DME bus by around 2 PM. Play in parks until around 1 PM or so. No ADRs just visiting our favorites again.
So that was my first attempt at planning out an itinerary. Then I was introduced to touring plans and read more on how EMH affects park attendance. I decided to swap our AK and DHS days as we had been planning DHS on a day with morning EMH. Touring plans did not recommend DHS on that day. We'll see as this might change with the release of park hours.
Speaking of park hours: I was all set to go over my plans once again this weekend with the August park ours being released on Friday, but NO HOURS! Still none as of today. I make my ADRs in the morning. I'm just going to go with what I have planned and hope for the best. I'm guessing that August hours will likely be cut by around an hour a day as that's what happened for July. I'm hoping that the EMH parks are the same as last year. Disney really needs to get it together and post park hours at least 1 week prior to the date guests can make ADRs. I'm writing a letter of complaint.
So tomorrow morning I'll be on the phone making my ADRs as clueless as everyone else who will be making August ADRs. Hopefully I won't have to cancel and re-book once the hours come out.
About This Page: 
(Nate, 26) - Went to WDW in high school with his family over Thanksgiving. Never been to AK. LOVES EP and the rides at DHS.
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That meant having to give up Sea World and the Ocean. We'll miss you. However, it also meant we didn't have to rent a car, which would save money! And we wouldn't have to drive while on vacation. No getting lost and arguing. No having to drive on roads with more traffic than we were used to. So I guess it has it's perks. Besides it gives me a reason to push for another Florida trip to get to go see my fishies!
on your upcoming wedding! I'm sure you'll have a blast at WDW for your honeymoon. Glad you decided on a resort.
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