PTR-Cheating on Mickey w/Harry!...OMG! Only a month to go!

[franandaj]

Oh I feel so bad for both of you, but you made the wise choice. Fran's infection looks so serious and painful. I hope the antibotics kick in soon.

Feel free to vent away, we can take it.

I think it's a great idea to use your points at Aulani and I bet you'll have a good chance of getting a reservation if you're a little flexible with dates. New units will be declared all the time as sales progress. You can always come visit us at Aulani in January.

Yeah, there was no way I was going to make her go and be miserable. Just thinking about how it works when we're on the plane. Getting up is a huge ordeal for her, so she takes the aisle and me the window. For me to go potty, I have to climb over her legs. The first thing I'll need to do is scrape her wound with my leg as I climb into the aisle, she will scream and the whole plane will hear it! Just that picture alone made me realize that it was totally impractical.

I started to think about all the other experiences and just couldn't see her making it through it. Maybe there will be an opening at SSR or OKW in Dec and we'll do our Xmas trip this year and our F&W next year. I'm coming to terms with it.

Well I calculate that if we can travel in the cheapest season, we can get a 1 br for 5 days at Aulani using a few of our real points and use up all the holding points. I want an ocean view room. However, I guess I should just check out anything. While sitting on our balcony it would be nice to have a glass of wine watching the sunset, but probably enjoying a glass of wine on the balcony anywhere there would be nice. I bet like BLT some of the rooms not in the Ocean View category, you can still see the Ocean.

 

[ACDSNY]

I saw a post earlier tonight where someone just booked mid Dec at Aulani so anything is possible. Hawaiian Airlines is having a sale too. It sure would be a relaxing vacation.

I'm sure you'll come up with Plan B soon and then you'll have that to look forward to.

 

[DisneyFirefly]

Oh, man... You guys are so doing the right thing by staying home and taking care of that infection. One of my residents had an infection like that (long story short, it's what prompted my leaving the company, since he had it for over a week and no one noticed until I came back to work after being out sick for a week). It cleared up after a few weeks, and I really hope it doesn't take that long for Fran to get better

 

[bangzoom6877]

I'm so sorry you had to cancel your trip. But you definitely did the right thing. Fran needs to get better, and the trip could make it worse. The last thing you want is to go to Florida and end up spending part of your trip with her in the hospital. It is definitely better to wait, even changing trip locations like you're looking into, and things will work out for the best. That way by the time you do go on your vacation, she will be feeling much better and both of you could enjoy it. And who knows...if you decide to go to Aulani, you may fall in love with that resort!

Vent away here...you need to get your emotions out too, and we're all here for you!

I hope Fran is feeling better!

 

[franandaj]

I saw a post earlier tonight where someone just booked mid Dec at Aulani so anything is possible. Hawaiian Airlines is having a sale too. It sure would be a relaxing vacation.

I'm sure you'll come up with Plan B soon and then you'll have that to look forward to.

I was amazed what I found out when I called Member Services this morning. For the first time! More to come on that later.

Oh, man... You guys are so doing the right thing by staying home and taking care of that infection. One of my residents had an infection like that (long story short, it's what prompted my leaving the company, since he had it for over a week and no one noticed until I came back to work after being out sick for a week). It cleared up after a few weeks, and I really hope it doesn't take that long for Fran to get better

I just hope that she does get better fast. We have 10 days now that we didn't have before, so who knows maybe we'll get the apartments rented and have some money coming in.

I'm so sorry you had to cancel your trip. But you definitely did the right thing. Fran needs to get better, and the trip could make it worse. The last thing you want is to go to Florida and end up spending part of your trip with her in the hospital. It is definitely better to wait, even changing trip locations like you're looking into, and things will work out for the best. That way by the time you do go on your vacation, she will be feeling much better and both of you could enjoy it. And who knows...if you decide to go to Aulani, you may fall in love with that resort!

Vent away here...you need to get your emotions out too, and we're all here for you!

I hope Fran is feeling better!

I think I cried it all out of me on Friday night and I seem to be over the depressed part. After all going to Disney is great at Food & Wine, but going to Disney is also great during the Flower & Garden Festival, off times and especially Christmastime (but not actually at Christmas).

Oh Alison


I am so sorry for you and Fran.

Just use this place to vent and hopefully we can cheer you up!

Thanks everyone! I'll have some news in my next post.





(But I have to go to the Grocery store first!)

 

[PrincessInOz]

Sounds like an "every cloud has a silver lining story" coming up.

 

[dgbg100106]

Sounds like an "every cloud has a silver lining story" coming up.

But only after the grocery store.

 

[ACDSNY]

Sounds like an "every cloud has a silver lining story" coming up.

But only after the grocery store.

In the meantime curious minds want to know are they going East or West?

 

[Leshaface]

Oh my gosh, I just got back from the coast not too long ago and saw your post.

Ugh, i'm SO SORRY that you had to cancel this trip. I know you were really looking forward to this trip, but you made the best decision.

Waiting patiently for your next post.

 

[franandaj]

So today was the day that I decided I better get on top of canceling things before it got way way way too close. My first call was to Member Services at DVC. Now they have this policy that if you cancel within 30 days of your trip, your points go into holding. You can’t bank them, they must be used by the end of your use year and can only book a reservation 60 days or sooner. I always play by the rules and knowing this was not excited about calling.

However, Fran likes to bend the rules for herself whenever it suits her purpose, so she gave me a script asking if there was any way to use our points from this trip towards the ones that we already have booked because of medical emergency, yadda yadda yadda. The CM asked if she could put us on hold and she would talk to her lead. Well lo and behold what pixie dust we had! They gave us the points back. They said it was a one time courtesy thing. I ended up calling MS four different times today! After we canceled everything, I asked about availability at Aulani in January. There was an ocean view from Jan 5-10 available! I hung up the phone and Fran picked up my cell phone and called them back.

She is so whacked out on morphine that she couldn’t even read them our member number, so she handed the phone to me. I booked for Jan 5-10 and started working on canceling our airfare with American. It was going to cost us $175 to get the points back as “points” or we could use them by January 10 2012, or lose them.

The next step was to cancel the hotel room at Universal. Turns out they were more than happy to move it forward to next October, so we picked some random dates, and we’ll change it when we nail down the exact dates of our trip.

Then I started looking into airfare to see if the Hawaii trip would work out. It would have cost us about $1500 total in airfare, cattle class, not first class, $1200 if we wanted to fly Delta to Honolulu. But I wanted to plan her first trip to Hawaii better than on the rebound and morphine! I wanted to include the big island and the Volcano, but that’s for another TR!

So I convinced her (not too hard, people on morphine are pretty pliable) that perhaps it might be the best bang for our buck to go back to WDW and see if they have anything available in early December. My plan was next year to skip F&W and go in early December to see all the Christmas decorations, Osbourne lights and resorts. So, I was able to find a week on American Airlines where we could get a nonstop flight out of LAX (just before midnight, gets in at 7AM not our normal 10AM flight) but I could get our normal 1PM nonstop departure coming home. Not ideal, but perhaps we could make it work. And if the pixiedust works out, we might actually get in our room before 4PM! Now the only reason that we fly first class is that we have so many Airline points from all our apartment rentals expenses

I called MS (third time today) and for the dates I wanted, they had a 1br for SSR the first night AKL the second night and the remainder for SSR. But she looked ahead and could get the whole week at SSR if I came in a week or two later. So I ran back to the living room where my computer was and found flights that were on different days than what the agent was offering, but met our non stop flight requirement, and she could find days at SSR that worked too! Yay! It was hard because my departure date is different from the check in date because of the red eye.

So then I felt I needed to run it past Fran (she won’t remember a thing), and by this time the agent is telling me that she can’t just hang around on the phone while we are debating. So we hang up. I’m showing Fran a calendar, when our concert is and she is fully confused, but I know I’ve worked it out, so she gives me the OK and I call MS for the 4th time today! After I go through the whole MS “script” and tell the agent my name, it’s the same gal I was talking to before! I thought I recognized her voice, but when I told her my name, she says, “I was just talking to you!” How random is that?

She was very helpful, after we booked eight nights at SSR she canceled all my dining reservations for the October trip and asked if I wanted to make any for the December trip. Crap! I’m way past 180 days! I hope I can get some decent ADRs! But as we were wrapping up the call (and I warned her in advance) the contractor showed up so that we could go to Home Depot and buy a toilet for the renovation of First street so I had to hang up. I would have given her good marks on the survey if I had time to take it.

I’ve canceled everything but the prepaid stuff. I figured I would be better off not to try and do that on a Sunday. That will be tomorrow’s day of hell. But I just searched every day of our trip for a reservation at ‘Ohana and there were none available during our whole trip. That’s the only one that I REALLY wanted to go to. So I’m going to put Via Napoli on our December trip and swap it out for the May trip. Phew! That was easy!

Anyways, the only cure for canceling a Disney Vacation is booking another, so I’ll live, it’s not the vacation I really wanted this year, but who can complain! Now I’m still going to Disney in the AP use year and we’ll have fun then instead of next week. Now I have to figure out the rest of our ADRs! And with only a little over a month out, I’ve got quite a challenge. I think I’ll tackle that in the morning!

Thanks everyone for all your help and offers to let me vent and PMs. It’s only a vacation, not the loss of a loved one or something else irreplaceable. It’s traumatic but I’ll get over it. And the good thing is there are plenty more trips ahead. I need to focus on Fran getting better. Right now she couldn’t stay awake long enough to eat the Summer Salad I made for her, she didn’t even have her main for dinner. She is going to lose a lot of weight as she has not been able to stay awake long enough to each much of anything.

She will hopefully recover quickly and we will enjoy our trip to the holiday decorations and next year, I will get to enjoy all the delights we dreamed about this year. It’s all good.

 

[PrincessInOz]

Looks like you've got your WDW vacay worked out for Christmas THIS year....AND Universal (and another WDW)vacay worked out for F&W season 2012.

I reckon that's a good outcome! Well done on working it out with Disney AND Universal.

Good luck with the ADRs for December; and also for the prepaid stuff tomorrow. At least with the ADRs in December....with the new CC policy, there might be a chance of cancellations coming through at least 24 hours before the day on some of the more highly sought restaurants??


As you said....it is ALL GOOD.....and definitely a silver lining. Glad you worked it out to your satisfaction.

 

[dgbg100106]

Alison you did good!

I know it is not what you had planned but you are able to roll with it and that is a great thing!

Congrats again on getting two WDW trips and Universal Trip....

 

[Leshaface]

Geez, you are an amazing planner/researcher. Awesome job!

I'm so happy that you're having a positive outlook on this whole thing. So what are your exact dates for this trip?

 

[Hawleys]

Hi Alison,
Just wanted to stop by and give you a big .
Give Fran one for me too.
Glad to hear that you may be able to swing a December trip.
--Sarah

 

[ACDSNY]

Wow it looks like the East Coast won out, congrats on getting a new trip worked out. You'll love the X-mas decorations. For half a second I was all excited as your Aulani dates crossed over ours (Jan 6 -9th) until I kept reading and found WDW won out.

Wishing Fran a speedy recovery!!!

 

[bangzoom6877]

Good for you for being so diligent and getting things underway! I hope Fran is doing better.

 

[Leshaface]

Hope all is well Alison

 

[franandaj]

Looks like you've got your WDW vacay worked out for Christmas THIS year....AND Universal (and another WDW)vacay worked out for F&W season 2012.

I reckon that's a good outcome! Well done on working it out with Disney AND Universal.

Good luck with the ADRs for December; and also for the prepaid stuff tomorrow. At least with the ADRs in December....with the new CC policy, there might be a chance of cancellations coming through at least 24 hours before the day on some of the more highly sought restaurants??


As you said....it is ALL GOOD.....and definitely a silver lining. Glad you worked it out to your satisfaction.

I'm not complaining, but the ADRs are proving to be difficult. I'm ending up trying the Signatures hoping they're too pricey for many. This isn't all bad though.

Alison you did good!

I know it is not what you had planned but you are able to roll with it and that is a great thing!

Congrats again on getting two WDW trips and Universal Trip....

Thanks! Everyone keeps saying things happen fir a reason. Maybe this means that we will get our apartments rented sooner.

Geez, you are an amazing planner/researcher. Awesome job!

I'm so happy that you're having a positive outlook on this whole thing. So what are your exact dates for this trip?

We leave the night of the third and return on the 12th. That means we are gone when you leave. If you came down the night before I was going to suggest we go to dinner. Oh well, another time!

Hi Alison,
Just wanted to stop by and give you a big .
Give Fran one for me too.
Glad to hear that you may be able to swing a December trip.
--Sarah

Thanks! Hey, I just noticed your ticker, when are you down here next?

Wow it looks like the East Coast won out, congrats on getting a new trip worked out. You'll love the X-mas decorations. For half a second I was all excited as your Aulani dates crossed over ours (Jan 6 -9th) until I kept reading and found WDW won out.

Wishing Fran a speedy recovery!!!

That would have been fun if our trips overlapped, but when we weighed the costs. $1500-$2000 (just in airfare) vs. paid for! Well it was a no brainer!

Good for you for being so diligent and getting things underway! I hope Fran is doing better.

Thanks so much! Her leg is improving but the pain meds are driving ME bonkers. She talks making no sense. She sleeps all day. I have to wake her to make her eat. It's actually rather lonely.

 

[franandaj]

Hope all is well Alison

I guess as well as it could be. I find it hard to get motivated to get out of bed. We do need to get these apartments ready, but I'm apprehensive to blaze ahead without her being conscious. I can DIS on my phone, watch TV and sit with the kitties in bed, so why would I want to get up?

 

[ACDSNY]

DIS away and look at it as a mental health break, we all need one once in a while.