The Wedding Was Great, but now for the Disneymoon! An October 2012 PTR -Updated 10/3!

[RachVH]

Hello everyone, welcome to my first PTR! I have been lurking for weeks to plan this Disneymoon, but I wanted to join in on the fun and start my first PTR. But wait, I am getting ahead of myself.

First, the cast:
This is me, Rachel:

And yes, that is totally what I look like, every day, in real life! Ok no, but we just got married, and they are the best pictures of me (probably ever) so I am using them everywhere.

Here is my DH, Ryan

We've been together for about 10 years, but we just got married on March 17, 2012. He's a professor and so it kind of limits when we can go away, hence the 6 month delay between the wedding in the honeymoon. But this way, we'll be in WDW for the Food and Wine Festival!

The details

We will be arriving in FL on Friday, October 5, 2012 and flying home on Sunday, October 14, 2012. We will have 6 day park hoppers, and will be staying for 6 nights...... here!

Neither Ry or I have been to Disney in over 10 years, so we are so excited. We POFQ based on the reviews of being a small moderate. I know it has its good points and its bad points, but I am really looking forward to staying there. The other 3 nights of the trip will be spent as follows: one night at Universal so we can go to Harry Potter, and 2 nights over in Safety Harbor (near Tampa) to visit some of our relatives.

Well, I think that's enough of an intro so I will leave it hear to pick up later for more details on our itinerary!

Fun Disney Themed Wedding Gifts
Day 1 and 2 Itineraries
Day 3 and 4 Itineraries
Why We Won't Be Seeing It's Tough to be a Bug
The Disney Box
Tickets...We got Mickey!
Day 5 and 6 Itineraries
My Planning Binder
What should we eat while in the world?
Day 7 and 8 Itineraries
Disney crafts and park bags and pins, oh my!
A question of ears...
39 Days to Go? Time for some (more) shopping!
19 Days to Go! And ch-ch-changes!
Day 9 and 10 Itineraries
Two Days to Go! Last post of the PTR?

 

[Merida]

I love reading about Disneymoons! Subbing in.

And your wedding pictures are gorgeous!

 

[RachVH]

I love reading about Disneymoons! Subbing in.

And your wedding pictures are gorgeous!

Welcome and thanks for joining me! And thanks for the compliment on our pictures, I have to give the credit to our amazing photographer, he was incredible!

 

[drlaurafsu]

Just waving HI! Sounds like a lovely trip. Can't wait to hear more about your plans. This is our first year working around school schedules and its been a challenge, but thankfully we have fall break. I would hate to try and go to Disney during "normal" break times.

 

[ladytink75]

Hope you don't mind me hopping on also I just LOVE reading about Disneymoon's. My trip falls almost right in line with your Disneymoon. Can't wait to hear all about your plans for this trip

 

[RachVH]

Just waving HI! Sounds like a lovely trip. Can't wait to hear more about your plans. This is our first year working around school schedules and its been a challenge, but thankfully we have fall break. I would hate to try and go to Disney during "normal" break times.

Hello back! Fall break is not the perfect time to go, because obviously the Monday holiday means that it is a little busier than the rest of October, but obviously it is still better than the middle of summer! The only other time we could have gone was actually right after our wedding, but that was spring break for my DH and thousands of college students. Definitely not the atmosphere I wanted for my honeymoon.

 

[RachVH]

Hope you don't mind me hopping on also I just LOVE reading about Disneymoon's. My trip falls almost right in line with your Disneymoon. Can't wait to hear all about your plans for this trip

Of course I don't mind! It's been so fun finding other people who will be down there the same time as us.

 

[RachVH]

Ok, and now for some fun stuff. Ry and I are both huge Disney freaks, and this is well known by most people. How well known? Well in addition to getting us an awesome new vacuum (which we were super excited about as we have a dog who sheds A LOT) his siblings put together and adorable gift that they gave to us at the rehearsal dinner. Want to see what was inside? I can't remember in what order we pulled everything out, but here are the contents of the gift:

We are saving these to use at some of our dinners at WDW.

They also gave us new Disney pajama pants! These are mine:

And these are Ry's

The gift also included these amazing bride and groom caramel and chocolate covered apples, but those got eaten soon after we returned home.

We were both so touched by the gift. Ry and I met on the first day of college, so I have known his family for over 10 years now, and it is still strange to think of his younger siblings as "grown ups" even though the two youngest will be a junior and a senior in college next year. To me they are eternally 8 and 9, the ages that they were when I met them.

Anyway, in addition to the awesome gifts from his siblings, we also got another gift from Ry's best friend and his wife:

So, nope! Nobody has any idea about our obsession with Disney.

Next Up: Our planned itinerary and ADRs!

 

[usd2bmd]

I'm here to read about your upcoming trip too. Funny that when my husband and I got married we thought about going to Walt Disney World for our honeymoon, but didn't. I grew up in a large family so vacations from upstate New York to Disney World were not an option. the First time we went was when our daughter was 6 and we've been hooked ever since. My daughter has even stated that she wants her honeymoon to be in WDW. Now she just has to marry someone who either loves Disney as much as she does or loves her enough to go to make her happy.

 

[RachVH]

I'm here to read about your upcoming trip too. Funny that when my husband and I got married we thought about going to Walt Disney World for our honeymoon, but didn't. I grew up in a large family so vacations from upstate New York to Disney World were not an option. the First time we went was when our daughter was 6 and we've been hooked ever since. My daughter has even stated that she wants her honeymoon to be in WDW. Now she just has to marry someone who either loves Disney as much as she does or loves her enough to go to make her happy.

Your daughter sounds like my kind of girl. Someone recently asked my DH and I how we decided to go to Disney. My standard response is that we're just not "sit on the beach people," but recently he answered the question by saying that when we started talking about taking a honeymoon I said that I would like to go to WDW, and that my parents had gone on their honeymoon there (2 months after the park opened in 1971!) and he said "sounds good!". His going along with my ideas will be one of the themes of this PTR (and our relationship in general ).

 

[drlaurafsu]

We had a somewhat non-traditional honeymoon too. We went to Paris (which is fairly traditional) but we went in January. We got married on New Years Eve so we arrived in Paris on Jan 2nd. Not too many tourists then.

We saw a different side of Paris. Notre Dame covered in snow. No lines at anything. Lots of yummy french onion soup. Mmmmm...

We are going back this year for our 10th anniversary. Leaving Christmas day and returning New Years Day.

Be sure to save some money in the budget to get some wonderful Disney holiday ornaments...especially a 1st Christmas together or a Disney Bride and Groom ornament.

 

[RachVH]

So before I go into our itinerary, I thought I would give you a little background into my planning style. I am totally a type A personality, and like to know all of my options thoroughly before I make a final decision. I recently planned our entire wedding of 150 people and designed the programs, menus, invitations, Save the Dates and the entire scheme myself. After seeing all of the work I put into everything my mother asked “what do people do when they have these huge extravagant weddings?” My response “Um…they hire people to do all this?”

Anyway, it was in planning the wedding that my DH and I learned that the way we plan things is that I do a ton of research and narrow the 15-20 options for everything down to my top three and then he has input on those. Well, he has input if it is something he cares about. If it isn’t a decision he is invested in he just lets me handle it. In fact, when I asked him how involved he wanted to be with the Disneymoon planning, he said “I kind of figured it would be like the wedding. I show up at the time you have told me in the outfit you picked out for me.” Of course he was kidding, mostly.

We booked the trip in late February (well, our flights and room reservations anyway) and I started doing my research about ADRs and looked over our options for dining. I knew I wanted to do Victoria and Alberts, but I wasn’t sure about everything else. Ry and I decided that we just wanted to do breakfast in our room each day, and that as of right now character dining isn’t really for us. We love meeting the characters when we can, but we would rather try to do that in the parks. So we thought that we would do a "nice" dinner each night, but do counter service for lunch. We are also planning on ordering some groceries for breakfast in the room, and I will be getting a refillable mug to suppor my diet coke habit.

I counted back 180 days from when we were scheduled to arrive, which turned out to be…Easter Sunday. Lovely. So there I was at 6:00 a.m. on my laptop in my MiL’s house trying desperately to make dining reservations online, and the system wasn’t working. So I got ready for mass and called at exactly 7:00 and got everything that I wanted, except for Vicky and Al’s, which you have to call directly. They didn’t open until 9:00 a.m. so I went off to 8:00 a.m. mass and then called in the car on the way back. Luckily my in-laws already think I am crazy, so they weren’t fazed by this behavior at all. Spoiler alert: Even though I got all the ADRs I wanted, they were not all meant to be . More about that later.

Ok, with all that out of the way, here is our expected itinerary:

Day 1: Friday, October 5, 2012
We are scheduled to arrive in Orlando at 4:53 p.m. We are planning on renting a town car instead of doing ME, so I am hoping to arrive at POFQ between 6:00 and 6:30. We will check in, unpack and then grab the boat to DTD to do a little (window?) shopping and get dinner. The plan right now is to head over to the Earl of Sandwich, but that might change based on wait times and last minute decisions. From there we want to go over to the Polynesian to watch the water parade and wishes from the beach, possibly with a drink and an Aloha whip. I want to try to get a little “Disney” in right away without actually going into the parks. We will have 6 day park hoppers (I ordered them yesterday!) and I want to use them for 6 full days. After wishes it will be back to POFQ for possibly a late night dip in the hot tub, but probably just to go to sleep.

Day 2: Saturday, October 6, 2012 (First full day at Disney!)
We will most likely be doing Animal Kingdom this day. I checked out the estimated crowd levels on a couple of different sites, so I knew we would not be heading to Epcot for MK this day, though we will be heading to Epcot later on. I wish I could still tell you that our very first ADR of the trip would be for dinner at Bistro de Paris tonight, which is what we originally had a 7:15 p.m. ADR for, but it was not meant to be. Bistro is scheduled for renovations from the beginning of August through the end of October, so we were notified last week that our ADR was canceled. We were offered an ADR at Chefs de France at the same time, but it just didn’t have the appeal to me that Bistro had, plus I was so disappointed I knew I wouldn’t be able to give Chefs a fair shot knowing that we could have had Bistro. Instead, we will be having dinner at 7:00 p.m. at La Hacienda de San Angelo. I am expecting that it will be crazy at Epcot on this Saturday with it being a F&W weekend day, but we are going to try to see Illuminations this night too, if we can.

Ok well I think that is enough of our itinerary for one post, I will be back later!

Next up: Day 3 and 4 Itinerary and ADRs

 

[lbuzz52]

joining in. we will overlap a little bit- we are staying at POR. I love your gifts!

 

[RachVH]

joining in. we will overlap a little bit- we are staying at POR. I love your gifts!

Thanks for joining in! I am sure we will get over to POR for a little while at least, if only to check out the additional pools!

 

[InNeverlandWithPan]

Your trip sounds like it will be great! My best friend and I stayed at the POFQ last November for 8 nights and we LOVED IT. It is really small, was always very quiet/peaceful, and having the river/boat launch to DTD right there was really awesome. We were in building 2, and it was a great location. This was our view:

My fiance and I are also planning our Disneymoon right now. We are getting married in February though, so pricing for our time hasn't even opened up yet. I honestly am having the toughest time deciding where to stay... hoping to go somewhere new but there is a good chance we will end up at POFQ.

Hope the planning continues to go well, and congratulations! You were a gorgeous bride and have a very handsome groom!

 

[RachVH]

Day 3, Sunday, October 7, 2012
First Epcot day! I know Epcot is probably going to be crazy because of food and wine, but Ry and I are Magic Kingdom people, so we are saving our lower crowd days for that and HS. We are also less than thrilled about the current Epcot ride offerings. I rode Test Track right around when it first opened, and was totally under whelmed. I know this is a “favorite ride” but it just didn’t do it for me. For that reason, Ry and I were not disappointed at all to find out that it is scheduled to still be under renovations when we are there. Combine that with significant motion sickness issues for me, and that means that Mission Space is also out (yes, even the green side. If I am going to risk getting nauseated on our trip it is going to be for something worth it, like Soarin’).

We are not planning to ride Ellen’s Energy or seeing Captain EO or Honey I Shrunk the Audience, whichever ends up being played while we are there. So what’s left? Well, the previously mentioned Soarin’ which Ry has ridden at DL and is totally excited to do again, as well as Journey into Your Imagination (but probably just once), Circle of Life (maybe), Living with the Land, Maelstrom, Seas with Nemo, Spaceship Earth, Sum of all Thrills, and the Grand Fiesta Tour. We will probably also check out some of the films in the different World Showcase countries.

The goal for Epcot day is to have the majority of our riding done before the World Showcase opens. If my count is correct we have approximately 7 Future World rides, and we are eliminating two of the longer lines. We might grab fastpasses to do Soarin’ again, but most of the Epcot rides are not repeaters for us. Seven rides in two hours is probably a pipe dream, but if we can get over to the World Showcase anytime before one o’clock we should have plenty of time to hang out before we have to leave for our dinner reservations.

After we conquer Future World we will head over to the World Showcase to…eat! (And drink of course!) We plan on wandering around grabbing food and drinks and then just taking in the World Showcase sights and some of those movies. We are not even planning on eating a real lunch, just grabbing food and drinks from as many different F&W vendors as we can.

We have ADR this night at Boma at the Animal Kingdom Lodge, which I am SO excited about. This food seems to be right up Ry’s and my alley, so I am really hoping it lives up to my expectations.

After dinner we will hop over to… the Magic Kingdom for EMH! Because we are going in October there aren’t many EMH, but this Sunday night the MK is open until midnight and we plan on taking advantage of it. This will be our first glimpse of the castle of our trip, though we will hopefully be back the next morning for rope drop.

Day 4, Sunday, October 8, 2012
Hopefully we will be able to drag our behinds out of bed early after taking advantage of EMH at the MK the night before, because I want to get to MK for rope drop! I am expecting the Columbus Day crowds to be pretty significant, so I want to try to get as much as we can in before the crowds become unbearable and we head back to the room to rest. As I stated before we are BIG MK people, and love all the rides from the most thrilling to the cheesiest. Ry isn’t a huge roller coaster person (but he LOVES ToT, explain that one to me?) but he tolerates all of the Disney coasters well, mostly because compared to the ones at Cedar Point, OH they really are pretty tame (with the possible exceptions of RnR and EE).

Our MK favorites? Well, I love all of the mountains, Peter Pan, PotC, and the Haunted Mansion. Honestly in this park I am not sure of Ry’s favorites, I just know what he doesn’t want to go on. The skips for this park are the Tiki Room, Country Bears, Stitch’s Escape and possibly Tom Sawyer Island and the Liberty Riverboat. Everything else is going to depend on wait times. I definitely want to see Mickey’s Philharmagic, because I’ve never seen it before.

We probably won’t get to do everything in MK this day because of the crowds, and the fact that we will probably want to leave for lunch or just after because I know we will be tired from the EMH the night before and we want to be well rested for…

…our dinner reservations at Victoria and Albert’s! That’s right, tonight is the night that we will be heading over to the Grand Floridian for our 8:30 dinner reservation for Vicky and Al’s. We will be sitting in the main dining room and probably not do the wine pairings, but I am soooo looking forward to this food. They have told us to plan on 2 ½ hours or more for this meal, so we will be dragging our tired (but full) bodies back to POFQ after 11:00 p.m. Gotta get some sleep though, because there is more MK coming up!

Next up: Itinerary for Days 5 and 6

 

[RachVH]

We had a somewhat non-traditional honeymoon too. We went to Paris (which is fairly traditional) but we went in January. We got married on New Years Eve so we arrived in Paris on Jan 2nd. Not too many tourists then.

We saw a different side of Paris. Notre Dame covered in snow. No lines at anything. Lots of yummy french onion soup. Mmmmm...

We are going back this year for our 10th anniversary. Leaving Christmas day and returning New Years Day.

Be sure to save some money in the budget to get some wonderful Disney holiday ornaments...especially a 1st Christmas together or a Disney Bride and Groom ornament.

I love the idea of a Paris honeymoon. I've been twice, but it must be amazing (and empty) that time of year. You must be so excited for your anniversary trip!

And there is definitely money in the budget for a (hopefully) Mickey and Minnie 1st Christmas ornament, to go along with all of the other Disney themed ornaments that we already have!

 

[RachVH]

Your trip sounds like it will be great! My best friend and I stayed at the POFQ last November for 8 nights and we LOVED IT. It is really small, was always very quiet/peaceful, and having the river/boat launch to DTD right there was really awesome.

My fiance and I are also planning our Disneymoon right now. We are getting married in February though, so pricing for our time hasn't even opened up yet. I honestly am having the toughest time deciding where to stay... hoping to go somewhere new but there is a good chance we will end up at POFQ.

Hope the planning continues to go well, and congratulations! You were a gorgeous bride and have a very handsome groom!

Your statements about POFQ make me very happy because that is exactly why we are staying there. Small, quiet and peaceful. I don't anticipate spending too much time in our room, even if it is our honeymoon, but my worst fear is not being able to sleep our having a moment of peace because there are so many families around us. Not that I don't like kids, I love them! But maybe not on my honeymoon...

Thank so much for the compliment, especially the one about my DH. He is a keeper for sure!

Hope your wedding planning goes well; I really had a blast planning mine! (Well, right up until the end. Those last two weeks nearly killed me)

 

[lbuzz52]

i think that your Epcot schedule sounds perfect. you surely could knock all 7 out before 1. i can't wait for food and wine! I'm especially hoping that the soup from le cellier is on the menu again.

i'm curious to see what the crowds are like for you that weekend in general. when my kids fall break schedule (hopefully) changes with the restructure of the school system here, we should have a full week for future fall trips.

 

[RachVH]

So I meant to tell you all this when discussing our Animal Kingdom Day, but I completely forgot about it until I was discussing the fact that we are not planning on seeing Honey I Shrunk the Audience if in fact Disney decides to start showing that again.

One thing we will definitely NOT be seeing at Animal Kingdom is the It's Tough to Be a Bug movie. This has nothing to do with the fact that it is a 3D movie in general, but instead is because the movie includes a huge 3D creation of my worst fear. You see, I have a deathly fear of...

...praying mantises. I know, crazy right? These small delicate creatures will send me running as quickly as possible in the other direction. I really can't explain how terrified of them I really am, except to see that even seeing a picture of them gets my heart racing, so a gigantic 3D version would probably cause me to have some sort of mental breakdown complete with uncontrollable crying, shaking and possibly fainting. Even typing this up is starting to get me freaked out. The fear comes from a silly childhood trauma, the story of which I will tell you if anyone cares to know.

Luckily my DH is very aware of this fear, having been next to me in college when someone tried to show me a live one they found on their backpack, my response to which was to scream and run away (literally). He's even warned me when one of our favorite websites linked to a video of one without explicitly stating what the video was of.

Moral of the story being, no It's Tough to be a Bug for us.