This is my first attempt at a trip report. I have no illusions that it will be anywhere close to as funny or insightful as some of the others Ive read, but if youd like to tag along and see how we spent a 4 night trip in the World, continue reading.
We probably need to begin prior to us even arriving in Orlando. Most of the time I never balance our checkbook. I just go out to the bank website, look at what they say my balance is, verify which checks havent cleared yet and if our numbers are close I call it good. A couple weeks ago I was doing my pseudo balance of the checkbook and the bank was saying our balance was ~$300 too much for what I thought we had. So I dug out the last 4 months or so statements from the bank and started doing an actual balancing. About 20 minutes into the fun I discovered that I had subtracted a $300 payment twice. WooHoo for us, $300 free dollars.
Fast forward a week and the President of our company gave his state of the company speech for 2005. Part way through the speech he announced our bonus plan was going to be 2% higher than we had expected. Double WooHoo. Thats a good thing with a DS starting college this fall. Its also a good thing with an upcoming long weekend out of town.
That day (Feb 24) my wife and I were having lunch together. We both work at the same company (which = double dippin the bonus!), so we have lunch together most of the time. Yes, I know what youre thinking; dont we get sick of all the togetherness? Well no, Id really rather spend time with her than anyone else in the world. Anyway, enough of the sappy stuff. We were having lunch and discussing our upcoming long weekend to celebrate our 21st anniversary in the Great Smoky Mtns. Laurie is very good at dropping subtle (and not so subtle) little hints to get my creative vacationing juices flowing. So of course, with the previous few days financial surprises she has some hints to drop; Ok maybe all it took was one hint. And it was just a little off hand comment, almost under her breath you know, if we dont turn left at Knoxville our car will eventually end up somewhere near the happiest place in the world.
Well that started the wheels a spinnin. How much would it cost compared to the weekend we had already planned? What time would we get there if we drove straight through (its a 17 hr drive)? When would we have to leave to drive home? Could Grandma come a day earlier to stay with the boys? Would the boys disown us for not taking them with us, even though we took one of them to the F+W in Oct (the 17 yr old wanted to stay home and go to school. Where did we go wrong?) and are taking both of them, plus one girlfriend with us in June? I looked at Laurie and told her to not even think about it. Of course I was thinking about it in a big bad way. We started throwing around answers to some of those questions and she says I thought we werent thinking about it. The rest of lunch is mostly us going back and forth with how fun it would be to go, but how we shouldnt.
Now shouldnt really doesnt mean anything to us when it comes to taking a trip to WDW. WE LOVE THE PLACE. Laurie and I have already been to WDW 3 times in the past 10 months with another trip scheduled in June and a return trip to the F+W in Oct. So even though we left it at shouldnt, once back at work I started the internet surfin. Or should I say burnin? Or should I say, Im not going to earn my pay this afternoon? Its a good thing I work so hard the rest of the time or Id feel guilty about not accomplishing anything for an hour and a half. How much could I get the room for with our AP discount? Could we find a reasonable flight this late in the game, because we pretty much decided that driving was out of the question for what would amount to 3 days at the world?
AP rooms available at PO (both Riverside and FQ), CSR and CBR for $122/night. Ok, thats doable. Call the wife and divide and conquer the flight search. Hey, theres an Airtran flight from Detroit, non-stop for $290 RT. Not bad. Call Grandma, would you be willing to come down a day early so we could do something really crazy? Sure! Things are starting to fall into place. Ok, do we really want to do this? You only live once the wife says. Thats it, were going! A couple last things to do, call a towncar to pick us up at the airport and cancel our Smokies reservations and were going where its warm and the Mouse is king!
Ok, I lied a little. Once that final decision was made there was no working for the rest of the afternoon. You have to check out the Disboards and see if there are any final tips or tidbits to be gleaned, dont you? A little Disboard surfin and I discover that one of our favorite posters on the Dis is going to be there the same time we are. A quick exchange of emails and we discover they have set up a mini Dis-meet at the Rose and Crown for Friday afternoon at 3:00 with 2 other Dis-loonies. Count us in! It will be great to finally meet some fellow Disers. I call Laurie and ask if we should plan any ADRs, look at any attendance levels to plan our park days, anything like that? NO! Lets just wing it she says. You dont know how hard that is for me. Im a planner. And for most trips to the world it works great. The parks we go to are lower in crowds, we get to eat at some great restaurants and everyone is glad I plan. But this trip were going to just go with the flow, even though its against every molecule in my being.
Wednesday arrives (yep, just 5 days later), we get the kids off to school. HS Senior out the door without hardly stopping to say good-bye yeah, hes ready to go away to college, and 8th grader, who is mommas little sweet baby .you can guess how that went .boy did we get the guilt trip laid on us. We pack and leave for the airport a couple hours later.
One extremely smooth flight later were landing in Orlando. Our towncar turns out to be an Escalade..very nice. 25 minutes later were checking into POFQ. No line and 10 minutes later were unpacking our bags in room 1208. WERE EXPERIENCING THE MAGIC!
WARNING: FOR THOSE OF YOU PUT OFF BY EXTREME DRINKING, YOU MIGHT WANT TO SKIP TO THE END.
Its about 6:30 and were getting ready to head to DTD for the evening. Laurie asks if I think she needs a light jacket for the evening. Im a terrible one to ask that. Im always warm. I dont wear a coat until its close to freezing. I wear shorts almost year around. In the month of January there were only 5 days I didnt wear shorts. And were in northern Ohio. Ok, I know we had a very warm (for us) January, but you get the picture. I tell her well be inside at the Adventurers Club most of the night so I didnt think a jacket would be necessary. You will be hearing this discussion again. 3 more times actually. Yep, well be there 3 more nights. You see where Im going?
We take the boat to DTD and head over to EOS for a quick bite to eat. We both have the Caribbean Jerk sandwich and I have some coleslaw and we each have our first libations for the evening, an Amberbock. Sandwich great as usual. Beer Good. Coleslaw worst in the history of mankind. We love the Earl and have made it one of our regular restaurants in the circle of gluttony, but never oh never get the coleslaw. If there was a contest for the worst coleslaw in the world, it would get the blue ribbon. From the Earl we head towards the AC. Im cold she says. Lets go in the World of Disney all I need is a tee shirt or something to cover my shoulders. We look around for a bit, but the place is a zoo and we cant really find anything there we like anyway, so on to the AC.
Down to the bar we go. Miller lites please. Beer Good. Too good. Is there a hole in my bottle? .its gone already. Well, heck with the calories .I want a martini. Laurie goes for another beer and I have a Bombay Sapphire martini. If youve never had Bombay Sapphire, try it, but be prepared, its very good and quite expensive. We have our drinks while participating in the official membership drive of the Adventurers Club. Is that martini gone already? Is there a hole in my drink glass? Give me another! Were here for a 4 night anniversary celebration and dont have to drive a car anywhere. I see difficulty in walking in our futures. Laurie decides she wants to join the fun and goes for a Cosmo. And so the night goes.
The AC is a blast as usual, but around 10:00 we decide to see what else is going on at PI. We walk down the street in our best sobriety challenged straight line and I hear Im cold. Into one of the PI shops we go. Laurie finds a Desperate Housewives tee shirt that will do the trick. On the front it says Im Desperate. The young lady behind the counter asks why this tee shirt? Ok, I know Ive had a lot of gin tonight, but am I really so bad that she would think theres some kind of meaning in an Im Desperate tee shirt for the little woman?
We head back out into the chilly 70 degree night air and make a bee line for the Rock and Roll Beach Club. On the way we pass the cigar shop. Ive never been a smoker and Laurie quit her 4 cigarette a day habit a number of years ago, but we stumble into the shop anyway. Up to the counter I go asking for advice on a cigar for a reformed smoker and a wienie. I get pointed to a shelf of cigars that arent too expensive. I mean, 8 bucks seems reasonable through my Sapphire induced haze. Should I clip it he asks? Why yes my good man. On to the Beach Club we go. Down to the dance floor go two 40 somethings to frolic with the gen xers. I dont care. One thing my kids have always liked about us is we have progressed rather nicely in our music evolution so we arent total nerds when it comes to current music. And weve instilled a real music appreciation into our kids. Their favorites are Stevie Ray Vaughn and the Beatles respectively. Anyway, 3 or 4 more Bombay Sapphire and Cosmos later and were dancin with the youngins. A couple of hours of dancing and we decide to head home so we can enjoy Epcot without too much of a headache our first full day at WDW. Of course we have to stop by Mannequins on the way out and take a couple laps around the spinning dance floor. Now theres a challenge. 7 martinis too many and a spinning dance floor is a recipe for disaster, but we navigate it without incident and head off to a cab for the short ride home back to POFQ. The evening ends like it does for most old married couples celebrating an anniversary .sleep. Just kidding, it ends like it does for most newly married couples were not that old and we are celebrating our Anniversary!
Up next: Day one at the World, or did we really not take a jacket two days in a row?
We probably need to begin prior to us even arriving in Orlando. Most of the time I never balance our checkbook. I just go out to the bank website, look at what they say my balance is, verify which checks havent cleared yet and if our numbers are close I call it good. A couple weeks ago I was doing my pseudo balance of the checkbook and the bank was saying our balance was ~$300 too much for what I thought we had. So I dug out the last 4 months or so statements from the bank and started doing an actual balancing. About 20 minutes into the fun I discovered that I had subtracted a $300 payment twice. WooHoo for us, $300 free dollars.
Fast forward a week and the President of our company gave his state of the company speech for 2005. Part way through the speech he announced our bonus plan was going to be 2% higher than we had expected. Double WooHoo. Thats a good thing with a DS starting college this fall. Its also a good thing with an upcoming long weekend out of town.
That day (Feb 24) my wife and I were having lunch together. We both work at the same company (which = double dippin the bonus!), so we have lunch together most of the time. Yes, I know what youre thinking; dont we get sick of all the togetherness? Well no, Id really rather spend time with her than anyone else in the world. Anyway, enough of the sappy stuff. We were having lunch and discussing our upcoming long weekend to celebrate our 21st anniversary in the Great Smoky Mtns. Laurie is very good at dropping subtle (and not so subtle) little hints to get my creative vacationing juices flowing. So of course, with the previous few days financial surprises she has some hints to drop; Ok maybe all it took was one hint. And it was just a little off hand comment, almost under her breath you know, if we dont turn left at Knoxville our car will eventually end up somewhere near the happiest place in the world.
Well that started the wheels a spinnin. How much would it cost compared to the weekend we had already planned? What time would we get there if we drove straight through (its a 17 hr drive)? When would we have to leave to drive home? Could Grandma come a day earlier to stay with the boys? Would the boys disown us for not taking them with us, even though we took one of them to the F+W in Oct (the 17 yr old wanted to stay home and go to school. Where did we go wrong?) and are taking both of them, plus one girlfriend with us in June? I looked at Laurie and told her to not even think about it. Of course I was thinking about it in a big bad way. We started throwing around answers to some of those questions and she says I thought we werent thinking about it. The rest of lunch is mostly us going back and forth with how fun it would be to go, but how we shouldnt.
Now shouldnt really doesnt mean anything to us when it comes to taking a trip to WDW. WE LOVE THE PLACE. Laurie and I have already been to WDW 3 times in the past 10 months with another trip scheduled in June and a return trip to the F+W in Oct. So even though we left it at shouldnt, once back at work I started the internet surfin. Or should I say burnin? Or should I say, Im not going to earn my pay this afternoon? Its a good thing I work so hard the rest of the time or Id feel guilty about not accomplishing anything for an hour and a half. How much could I get the room for with our AP discount? Could we find a reasonable flight this late in the game, because we pretty much decided that driving was out of the question for what would amount to 3 days at the world?
AP rooms available at PO (both Riverside and FQ), CSR and CBR for $122/night. Ok, thats doable. Call the wife and divide and conquer the flight search. Hey, theres an Airtran flight from Detroit, non-stop for $290 RT. Not bad. Call Grandma, would you be willing to come down a day early so we could do something really crazy? Sure! Things are starting to fall into place. Ok, do we really want to do this? You only live once the wife says. Thats it, were going! A couple last things to do, call a towncar to pick us up at the airport and cancel our Smokies reservations and were going where its warm and the Mouse is king!
Ok, I lied a little. Once that final decision was made there was no working for the rest of the afternoon. You have to check out the Disboards and see if there are any final tips or tidbits to be gleaned, dont you? A little Disboard surfin and I discover that one of our favorite posters on the Dis is going to be there the same time we are. A quick exchange of emails and we discover they have set up a mini Dis-meet at the Rose and Crown for Friday afternoon at 3:00 with 2 other Dis-loonies. Count us in! It will be great to finally meet some fellow Disers. I call Laurie and ask if we should plan any ADRs, look at any attendance levels to plan our park days, anything like that? NO! Lets just wing it she says. You dont know how hard that is for me. Im a planner. And for most trips to the world it works great. The parks we go to are lower in crowds, we get to eat at some great restaurants and everyone is glad I plan. But this trip were going to just go with the flow, even though its against every molecule in my being.
Wednesday arrives (yep, just 5 days later), we get the kids off to school. HS Senior out the door without hardly stopping to say good-bye yeah, hes ready to go away to college, and 8th grader, who is mommas little sweet baby .you can guess how that went .boy did we get the guilt trip laid on us. We pack and leave for the airport a couple hours later.
One extremely smooth flight later were landing in Orlando. Our towncar turns out to be an Escalade..very nice. 25 minutes later were checking into POFQ. No line and 10 minutes later were unpacking our bags in room 1208. WERE EXPERIENCING THE MAGIC!
WARNING: FOR THOSE OF YOU PUT OFF BY EXTREME DRINKING, YOU MIGHT WANT TO SKIP TO THE END.
Its about 6:30 and were getting ready to head to DTD for the evening. Laurie asks if I think she needs a light jacket for the evening. Im a terrible one to ask that. Im always warm. I dont wear a coat until its close to freezing. I wear shorts almost year around. In the month of January there were only 5 days I didnt wear shorts. And were in northern Ohio. Ok, I know we had a very warm (for us) January, but you get the picture. I tell her well be inside at the Adventurers Club most of the night so I didnt think a jacket would be necessary. You will be hearing this discussion again. 3 more times actually. Yep, well be there 3 more nights. You see where Im going?
We take the boat to DTD and head over to EOS for a quick bite to eat. We both have the Caribbean Jerk sandwich and I have some coleslaw and we each have our first libations for the evening, an Amberbock. Sandwich great as usual. Beer Good. Coleslaw worst in the history of mankind. We love the Earl and have made it one of our regular restaurants in the circle of gluttony, but never oh never get the coleslaw. If there was a contest for the worst coleslaw in the world, it would get the blue ribbon. From the Earl we head towards the AC. Im cold she says. Lets go in the World of Disney all I need is a tee shirt or something to cover my shoulders. We look around for a bit, but the place is a zoo and we cant really find anything there we like anyway, so on to the AC.
Down to the bar we go. Miller lites please. Beer Good. Too good. Is there a hole in my bottle? .its gone already. Well, heck with the calories .I want a martini. Laurie goes for another beer and I have a Bombay Sapphire martini. If youve never had Bombay Sapphire, try it, but be prepared, its very good and quite expensive. We have our drinks while participating in the official membership drive of the Adventurers Club. Is that martini gone already? Is there a hole in my drink glass? Give me another! Were here for a 4 night anniversary celebration and dont have to drive a car anywhere. I see difficulty in walking in our futures. Laurie decides she wants to join the fun and goes for a Cosmo. And so the night goes.
The AC is a blast as usual, but around 10:00 we decide to see what else is going on at PI. We walk down the street in our best sobriety challenged straight line and I hear Im cold. Into one of the PI shops we go. Laurie finds a Desperate Housewives tee shirt that will do the trick. On the front it says Im Desperate. The young lady behind the counter asks why this tee shirt? Ok, I know Ive had a lot of gin tonight, but am I really so bad that she would think theres some kind of meaning in an Im Desperate tee shirt for the little woman?
We head back out into the chilly 70 degree night air and make a bee line for the Rock and Roll Beach Club. On the way we pass the cigar shop. Ive never been a smoker and Laurie quit her 4 cigarette a day habit a number of years ago, but we stumble into the shop anyway. Up to the counter I go asking for advice on a cigar for a reformed smoker and a wienie. I get pointed to a shelf of cigars that arent too expensive. I mean, 8 bucks seems reasonable through my Sapphire induced haze. Should I clip it he asks? Why yes my good man. On to the Beach Club we go. Down to the dance floor go two 40 somethings to frolic with the gen xers. I dont care. One thing my kids have always liked about us is we have progressed rather nicely in our music evolution so we arent total nerds when it comes to current music. And weve instilled a real music appreciation into our kids. Their favorites are Stevie Ray Vaughn and the Beatles respectively. Anyway, 3 or 4 more Bombay Sapphire and Cosmos later and were dancin with the youngins. A couple of hours of dancing and we decide to head home so we can enjoy Epcot without too much of a headache our first full day at WDW. Of course we have to stop by Mannequins on the way out and take a couple laps around the spinning dance floor. Now theres a challenge. 7 martinis too many and a spinning dance floor is a recipe for disaster, but we navigate it without incident and head off to a cab for the short ride home back to POFQ. The evening ends like it does for most old married couples celebrating an anniversary .sleep. Just kidding, it ends like it does for most newly married couples were not that old and we are celebrating our Anniversary!
Up next: Day one at the World, or did we really not take a jacket two days in a row?
, high of 83, low this evening 65. I dont know dearest, what do you think? I think Ill be ok. If I was any smarter Id know a set up when I see it 
.
And where was Laurie after the restroom break? Let me guess ... shopping. Please keep it coming! 
