A Year Without Walt Disney World? No Way! A Nov 2018 PTR

[PhoenixStrength]

A Year Without Walt Disney World? No Way!

Welcome! If you've ever read one of my previous PTRs or TRs, welcome back, it's been a while! If not, then as well and hold on tight!

For those that don't know me, and a refresher for those that do, my name is Stephanie and I live in Maryland with my husband George, who is whom this upcoming trip will be with! I'm lucky that my husband was bit by the Disney bug on the first trip I took him on when we first started dating and now he loves it as much as I do! I’m an Office Manager for a mosquito-control service and I really enjoy my job! George is currently working as a manager at a pizza company and does not much enjoy his, so he is in the process now of interviewing for a new job now.

Here is a recent picture of the 2 of us, from last week actually while seeing Cirque Du Soleil's Crystal (which is excellent by the way so if it comes to your area you should see it!)



My love of all things Disney started as a kid, seeing every movie and watching Disney channel all the time! My first trip to Walt Disney World was in 1997 at the age of 13 and I’ve been one other time as a teenager in 2001 and then another 9 times as an adult so this upcoming trip will be my 12th! George went once as a kid (about 5 or 6, he’s not sure) but didn’t remember much about it, though he does remember being terrified by Alien Encounter! He went for the first time with me in December 2014 and loved it! We went back for 2 weeks for our honeymoon in 2016 and a quick weekend trip last year, and we also went to Disneyland together in October 2016. Oh, and I didn’t count it in my trip total but we also did a quick side trip for an afternoon to Disney Springs this past December after disembarking from our Carnival cruise because we cannot be in Florida and not visit some part of WDW!


In addition to loving Disney, we also love our 2 cats! We have Sweetie, a 12 year old female tabby that I rescued from a life outside in December 2006 (years before I met George!). She’s incredibly affectionate and opinionated, much like me! She was supposed to just be a TNR (trap, neuter (spay in her case) and return) that I had been seeing in the woods behind my house. She was not friendly AT ALL when I first caught her, in fact I called her Sweetie as an ironic thing to call her! She was supposed to go back out right after her spay but she had a gash on her head and, as luck would have it, a blizzard also happened the day after I trapped her. I wound up deciding to keep her in my bathroom for a week to let the wound heal and the weather to improve, and the day before she was to be let back out she decided to go from attacking my legs when I walked in to rubbing all over me, so she stayed!





Our other “daughter” is Pandora, a 2 year old Siamese whom we adopted from a rescue in October of 2016. Poor girl was given to the rescue at 7 months old, already very pregnant. Thankfully her and her kittens did well at the rescue and I found her at Petsmart one day while getting pet supplies for Sweetie and our kitty Turk, who passed away last year. George has always wanted a Siamese and we had been talking about getting another cat so I put in an application and was approved and picking her up within hours! She is quite affectionate but is also a wild child and loves to play by pouncing on anything, often her less-than-thrilled-about-it sister, Sweetie.




I think that’s about it for us! I’ll be back very soon with the trip plans and how the planning itself has gone so far!


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[PhoenixStrength]

Links

The story of how this trip came to be!

 

[PhoenixStrength]

The story of how this trip came to be!

I guess I'll start with how I got the title for this PTR! Last year we took just a quick weekend trip to WDW: flew in Friday afternoon, AK on Saturday, Epcot on Sunday for F&W, flew out early Monday. By far the shortest WDW trip I've done, first one for less than a week. It was fun, but way too short, so DH and I decided our next trip would be long enough to do every park and have rest days too, so probably 2 weeks. We knew it would probably be a couple years before we could make that happen (more on that in a bit) but we thought we were okay with that. We figured we would go in 2020, maybe late 2019 for our next trip.

So, why did we think we had to wait? Without getting too much into our financial situation, DH and I accumulated a decent chunk of credit card debt in 2015 and 2016 due to health issues, unexpected job loss, and other sudden costs that popped up. Oh, and DH had laser eye surgery in December of 2017 too, which did not help but was necessary due to eye problems he was having. We were making progress already, but decided to batten down and not have any extra expenses, like a vacation, so it could be paid off quicker. Hence why this year was going to be the year without a Walt Disney World trip.

Then, good things started happening! DH and I both left our jobs early this year for higher-paying jobs that let us pay down our debt at a much higher rate than before. We started talking about taking a small vacation, though not to WDW, later this year and then taking our 2 week WDW trip as our next vacation in a year or so. We mentioned several options, threw around beach vacations , New England road trip ideas, maybe New Orleans....and then realized we were kidding ourselves and looked into a short WDW trip instead!

Actually, in all honesty, we really did research all of those ideas and found it would actually be cheaper to go to Walt Disney World than any of the other ideas we had. Who knew? We are still finishing up paying off our debt so we decided it would just be another quick trip, though it is a little longer than last year's whirlwind weekend trip.

My lunch break is over and my boss expects me to do some work today, so I'll wrap this up for now. I should be back later today with the actual plans for the trip itself!





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[mickeystoontown]

Ummmmmm, why didn't you tell me that you have a trip booked and had started a pre-trip report. Now I'm going back up to the top and see the actual dates.

**Edited: I've gone back and read the two updates. If I am looking at your ticker and my ticker, there's a possibilty that we'll be there at the same time. Maybe we will finally be able to say hello to one another.

 

[PhoenixStrength]

Ummmmmm, why didn't you tell me that you have a trip booked and had started a pre-trip report. Now I'm going back up to the top and see the actual dates.

**Edited: I've gone back and read the two updates. If I am looking at your ticker and my ticker, there's a possibilty that we'll be there at the same time. Maybe we will finally be able to say hello to one another.

I probably should update this again, it's been over a month and I still haven't posted my plans at all. Life has been crazy!

I do believe I saw on your TR that you are leaving the day before we arrive. We are arriving November 26th in the late afternoon, so looks like we will probably miss each other again!

 

[mickeystoontown]

Dang it! We arrive on November 15th and leave the morning of the 24th. We juuuuuuuuuust miss one another.