The Welsh Pirates invade the Wild West. July 2009: PTR - updated at 1 day to go ...

[TotallyAngelic]

The Welsh Pirates invade the Wild West. July 2009: Pre-trip Report - 15 Days to go!

(some pre-trippie information comandeered from my previous trip report ..... basically because it is still valid and it saves me coming up with something new - apologies to those who are unfortunate enough to have read both!)

I have debated long and hard about whether to write a pre-trip report for this trip to Disneyland Paris, or any trip report for that matter, as I constantly wonder who in their right minds would want to wile away their precious hours reading my endless waffle, but then I realised that having spent so many happy hours (days, and probably even weeks) reading all the wonderful trip reports posted on the DIS, I should really make the effort to reciprocate.

It is remotely possible that the endless waffle I produce may ultimately be of interest and amusement to some, and may even be useful to other intrepid travellers from the UK, bored individuals with too much time on their hands and insomniacs. I have myself learned so many invaluable tips and gained so much advice from reading the trip reports of others. If nothing else I can use it to create a record of what will hopefully be another magical trip to Disneyland Paris.

I really shouldn't be writing a trip report at all for this trip, considering I am still in the process of writing my trip report from my last WDW trip and my first Disney Cruise which actually happened last October - and it has already taken me 8 months to get to where I am with that one. This is mainly because I am hoping to win the award for the most long-winded DIS trip report of all time, and although my aim was to finish the unfinished trip report before starting the pre-trippie for this next trip, I have failed miserably, time is ticking on and that just ain't going to happen. So - with two trip reports on the go at the same time - I will continue.....

Before I start this endless waffle, which as I mentioned earlier some readers may find is a marvellous cure for insomnia (along the lines of “start reading this and find yourself falling asleep in seconds”), I suppose it makes sense to introduce the crazy crew who you will be sailing with and give you some details of the trip.

We are a family of 6 from Wales in the UK, although only 4 of us are embarking on this trip.....

Firstly there is myself, the writer of this epic Sarah, aged 44 (yikes), midwife, mother and total Disney nut. I love everything Disney, but have a particular obsession with Pirates of the Caribbean (both the rides and the movies). I collect Disney Pins, mainly POTC related, and I only ride indoor coasters!

The other family crew members are:

DH Tony, aged 46 – extreme coaster freak, Disney addict, can eat for the UK and loves everything about Disney - especially the food.

Sarah and Tony

and 2 of our 4 wonderful kids:

DD 1 Taryn, aged 18 – Disney and Tim Burton addict. Loves movies, musical theatre, drama, writing and art. Loves any excuse to dress up, especially Halloween. Doesn’t do extreme rides. Starting Uni in September to do an Illustration degree course and would love to one day work for Disney!

DS 1 Dan, aged 15. Self confessed computer geek and YouTube movie maker. Nintendo player and Tim Burton fan! Doesn’t like heights. Loves going on Disney holidays but has no time for anything with Zac Efron or Miley Cyrus in it.

On this trip we have press ganged some crew members to come along with us, and they are:

Matt - aged 18, Taryn's boyfriend of 2 years. First trip to Disneyland Paris. A rock god who loves Aerosmith.

and our very good friends:

Andy and Jackie, and their 3 lads Josh (17), Jake (15) and Max (11), who also accompanied us on a previous Halloween trip to Disneyland Paris back in 2006.

We are also meeting up with our friends Verity (VerityChambers on DIS), Simon and their daughter Evie for a meal at Cafe Mickey!

So now down to the very important details re. when and where:

The Trip:

July 20th – July 23rd: A wonderful 4 days in Disneyland Paris.

Flights: from Manchester with FlyBe (free with airmiles!)

Accomodation: The Cheyenne!

and the reason behind my title - obvious really, but as we dress up as pirates at every opportunity (by that I mean Halloween parties, Disney Cruises, Fancy dress parties) and we love the Pirates of the Caribbean (films and the rides) and on this occasion we are invading the Wild West by staying at the Cheyenne, it just seemed to flow.

Here we are in our pirate costumes:

Back Row: L - R: Dan, Louise (not on this trip) and Taryn
Front Row: L - R: Sarah and Tony

Sarah and Tony

As I write this first intallment we are exactly 15 days from our date of departure, and the excitement is really starting to build ......

 

[tennisfan]

Sounds like you will have a great time. Love the Pirate photos

 

[Verity Chambers]

ROTFL Sarah, I can't believe you are writing a pre trippie today, *** that's just what I'm in the middle of doing! Great minds .....!

 

[stargatebarbie]

What a wonderful family of pirates yo ho yo ho have a great time ,we are going the same sort of dates but next year so i will love to hear all of your waffle (and there is 12 of us)

 

[buttercup1982]

Love the pictures! great pre trippie! Looking forward to your TR

 

[mummybear]

Love your pre-trippie. I really hope you do a full report when you get back. Mainly, as I too am a waffler of words, and like to read aswell

Have a great time

 

[TotallyAngelic]

Sounds like you will have a great time. Love the Pirate photos

thank you - we had them done on the Disney Magic!

ROTFL Sarah, I can't believe you are writing a pre trippie today, *** that's just what I'm in the middle of doing! Great minds .....!

Great minds - strange coincidence!

What a wonderful family of pirates yo ho yo ho have a great time ,we are going the same sort of dates but next year so i will love to hear all of your waffle (and there is 12 of us)

Thanks. You may regret saying you would love to hear all my waffle - I can waffle good style!

Love the pictures! great pre trippie! Looking forward to your TR

Thank you.

Love your pre-trippie. I really hope you do a full report when you get back. Mainly, as I too am a waffler of words, and like to read aswell

Have a great time

Thanks. I will try and produce a trip report, although I can't guarantee when I will finish it - actually with only 4 days to write up I should be able to manage it ok.

 

[Dianetigger]

A wonderful pre-trip report, we are going on 22nd July so I'm guessing I really should maybe think about doing my own pre-trip report.

 

[cannp123165]

Sounds like you will have a great time, Sarah!

 

[TotallyAngelic]

A wonderful pre-trip report, we are going on 22nd July so I'm guessing I really should maybe think about doing my own pre-trip report.

Yes you most definitely should.....

Sounds like you will have a great time, Sarah!

We will certainly try our hardest to do that Caroline!

 

[TotallyAngelic]

.....or the evolution of our Disney / Florida obsession

(this installment is again stolen from my last trip report, but as it still holds true I thought I might add it here to give any new readers a bit of background information - those of you who have read my last trip report, feel free to bypass this post!)

Grab some popcorn folks this might be a long one!


Our story begins way back in the distant mists of time, when a trip to Disneyland Paris back in 1996 with my two then very young children and my parents, initiated my love affair with Disney theme parks. I have never been anywhere with so much magical atmosphere, amazing entertainment, and something just totally wonderful which I could not put my finger on

Our story jumps forward a few years to 1999, when Tony and I were planning to get married and had reserved a couple of weeks in June for our honeymoon. Then I made the decision to go back to University and train to be a nurse, and we decided to put our wedding plans on hold for 3 years. However, in the meantime, my parents had booked to take my two children, Taryn and Daniel (then aged 8 and 5), to Disney World at the same time as we would have been going to be away on honeymoon. We still had the 2 weeks booked, so decided surreptitiously to book 2 weeks in Florida and meet them there as a surprise for the kids. I soon as I got off the plane in Florida I fell in love…with the landscape, the atmosphere, the people, everything …. That first trip we concentrated on Disney parks, and as far as I was concerned, the magic wand waved once more and I was well and truly hooked.

Unfortunately financial restraint restricted our holidays during my nurse training, and we had only managed a 2 night trip to Disneyland Paris with our 4 children in 2000 (my family had now doubled in size since meeting Tony in 1997).

This is what they looked like back then - outside Pirates of the Caribbean in Disneyland Paris:

Before long it was 2002, I was a qualified nurse and we began planning our wedding and honeymoon! When we started thinking about honeymoon destinations at the beginning of 2002, the only acceptable choice for this special holiday for me was Florida, but I felt guilty planning a trip to Florida without the kids, so we decided to go twice…..Orlando in April with all the kids, just as I finished my course in way of celebration, and then again, but this time to the Florida Keys, for our honeymoon in the October.

The April trip was unfortunately only for 10 days, and because we had recently been to Disneyland Paris and with limited time we thought we might just concentrate on Universal Parks with Busch Gardens, SeaWorld and Wet and Wild. This we did, and although we had a great time, I missed the Disney magic.

In 2003 I returned to University to train to be a midwife, and holidays were once again put on hold for a while. Fast forward now to 2004, and I started to think about a celebratory trip for when I finished my midwifery training in spring 2005. What better place for a celebratory trip than Florida - the lure of Disney was too much for my feeble mind to overcome, and despite considering a number of options, Orlando won through and we spent a wonderful two weeks in a villa and had an amazing time in the Disney parks, and a perfect day in Discovery Cove.

All 6 of us in Discovery Cove:

It was during the planning for this trip that I experienced a life-changing event: during my villa investigations I posted on a villa forum asking about busy days in the parks, and a very kind person, who will never know the impact they have had on my sad little life, recommended that I visit a website known as the DIS, and the next thing I remember it was a few weeks later. I was coming round from the anaesthetic after major surgery to separate me from the computer! Tony, thought I had gone stark raving bonkers… constantly talking about the DIS and DISers and becoming obsessed with countdowns and priority seatings, spending every waking hour superglued to the internet!


2005 also saw the first of our trips to Disneyland Paris at Halloween, with a very enjoyable evening spent at the Halloween Soiree in full pirate costume! On this trip I made the wise decision to purchase annual passes , and not only did this make financial sense, it also raised the temptation bar a few notches – with conversations along the lines of “ well why don’t we pop over to Disneyland Paris, after all, we have those annual passes and we really should make good use of them ” cropping up every time we had some time off from work. Needless to say there followed a series of trips to Disneyland Paris that year, Christmas 2005 (well, it would be lovely to see Disney at Christmas before the kids are too old….. silly not to really, what with those annual passes and all), July 2006 (well, it would be great to see the fireworks and stay in the parks until midnight…..silly not to really, what with those annual passes and all), Halloween 2007 (well, we had such a good time last year, and Mickey in his wisdom had decided to extend our annual passes at no extra charge for another year….silly not to really) and July 2007 (for the same reasons as 2006, before it gets boring!).

It's amazing how you can even visit a Disney Park 5 times in 18 months and it just never gets old - there is always something new which catches your attention and the Disney magic is always there

Returning from that trip starting me thinking about future trips, and an idea which had been simmering away in my Disneyfied brain for some time - I wanted, no - rephrase that - I needed to go on a Disney Cruise! To cut an incredibly long and protracted story short (full details - well almost - available on link in my signature) we booked a Disney Cruise and it was the holiday of a lifetime last October (well not quite holiday of a lifetime as we have re-booked another one and I'm sure there will be many many more to come... anyone know how many holidays of a lifetime you can actually have). We spent a week at WDW and then 7 wonderful nights on board the Disney Magic, followed by another 2 days in Orlando - it was truly fantastic.

Deflated and depressed we returned home to face the UK winter, and as far as I was concerned the only cure for those two nasty afflictions - Disney Withdrawal Syndrome and the Post Disney Depression - was to while away the hours pricing up Mediterranean and Transatlantic Disney cruises for 2010. Eventually we settled on the Transatlantic Cruise and booked it for September 2010. This time it would be just DH and I, with no kids, as the eldest three would be in University and poor old Dan didn't fancy being stuck with parents for 2 weeks on a Cruise ship, so it would be just the two of us!

With the cruise booked for 2010, we entered 2009 with no holiday booked for this year, and the plan was to spend time visiting friends and camping while saving like crazy for the Disney Cruise and possibly another WDW trip sometime in 2010 to keep Dan happy. But you know what they say about the best laid plans of mice and men .....when the mouse is called Mickey and the "men" are Disney obsessed Welsh pirates.....and lets just say that when Disneyland Paris came up with the magical phrase "40% discount" our future was sealed .........

 

[TotallyAngelic]

So basically the 40% discount deal sealed our destiny ....

I began to cost the trip and for the 4 of us it was working out really cheap - £600 for all 4 of us for 3 nights and 4 days in the parks. Although I would have loved to have stayed in the Sequoia Lodge, we opted for the Cheyenne because of the sleeping arrangements, plus we had never stayed in the Cheyenne before, and I was looking forward to the Wild West theming.

I had recently converted all of my Tesco points to airmiles, after coming to terms with the fact that I would never earn enough ClubCard points to cover a trip to Orlando, but using airmiles for free flights to Paris was a distinct possibility, and I was able to book 4 free flights with Flybe from Manchester using the airmiles.

It was after I had booked everything that Taryn, with immaculate timing as always, began to drop hints about her boyfriend Matt coming along with us, as he had been saving money hoping to come away with us if we had decided to go away this year. It would obviously not be financially viable for Matt to be in a room on his own, and we could not get 5 in one room, so we decided to see if our friends wanted to come along too, that way Dan, Matt and Dan's friend Jake could share a second room, and Taryn could stay in with us, while our friends and their other two lads shared the thid room.

We finally had a plan, so I booked a further two rooms on the last day of the 40% discount offer (although they did extend it after that) and booked Matt a free flight using my airmiles.

So with accomodation and flights sorted we started thinking about meals. I wanted to have a meal with our friends Verity, Simon and Evie who would be there for some of our trip, and we decided upon Cafe Mickey - a table for 13, and Verity made the booking direct with Cafe Mickey when making her half board arrangements. When travelling with our friends who are more "go with the flow" when it comes to meals, we are just going to choose where we eat at the time - I'm sure Annette's Diner will be on the list as it is a favourite of us all, but we will opt for the more casual dining on this trip with all the teenagers, who are more interested in the Parks and the rides and see the meals as a refuelling opportunity rather than an experience in itself.

So we now have 6 days to go, we have booked our transfers with RS Transports, and our friends have sorted out the airport parking (I hope). So now it is just a case of packing as much as we can into small bags which we can take on as hand luggage - as Flybe charge for all checked bags.

The excitement is building ..... and just one more thing ......we missed our SDD because DH and I were away on a weekend break visiting friends (including Verity, Simon and Evie ) , so belatedly I ask you to grab your dancing shoes and boogie on down for our SDD...

 

[Verity Chambers]

I am definately dancing Sarah!

 

[Lisa_C]

I'm dancing - though I will be already leaving when you are arriving!!

Still dancing though!

 

[ema74]

We'll be staying at the Cheyenne 18-21st of July!!!

 

[TotallyAngelic]

I am definately dancing Sarah!

wooooooo hooooooooo Verity - 5 days to go!

I'm dancing - though I will be already leaving when you are arriving!!

Still dancing though!

Hope you have a great time and that it doesn't go too fast!

We'll be staying at the Cheyenne 18-21st of July!!!

I wonder if we will bump into you between the 20th and 21st - we are quite a distinctive group - one of the guys is 6ft 7" and there are 3 scruffy long haired lads!

5 days to go and it suddenly struck me that I have no euros! So it might be a good idea to go and get some euros today for all the incidentals that I wouldn't use my trusty Nationwide credit card for. Don't really know how many I need though and I don't want to get too many - I am thinking cash for transfers on the way back, tips, snacks, and some shopping. Most evening meals and shopping I will use the CC. Any left over euros can be put towards spending money for the European ports on our Disney cruise next year, so it's no biggie if I get too many euros.

Still sorting out clothing and stressing over baggage allowances - sometimes budget short-haul is a pain in the proverbial. Car in for service and MOT today so basically I am house-bound so I should get on with something useful in the packing department! Wish me luck!

 

[cannp123165]

Not long now Sarah! :smile: I hope you have a great time! :smile:

 

[TotallyAngelic]

Oh no! Look what happened! I turned my back for a few minutes and 2 days crept away into the night - and I am disappointed to say that I am no further organised than I was when I penned my last installment - is this the moment for panic to set it - possibly! Still no euros safely tucked away in my purse and as today is Friday and we leave early Monday then it had better be today for euro purchasing - as it is the only bank / post office working day before we leave! (or does the PO open Saturday morning - maybe thats a little bit near the knuckle though for prr-holiday sanity to be maintained!).
Packing - I have a dining table full of clothing to be sorted out, but nothing is packed away in a bag of any sort - I feel a very hectic Sunday coming on as I write!

So what have I been doing for the past 2 days - a few weeks ago we decided to hold a fundraiser garden party / afternoon tea affair in aid of our local hospice - and we decided in our wisdom (debatable) to hold it the Saturday before we left for Paris, as by then I would be all packed, organised, sorted, happy and relaxed! HA HA HA - epic fail! So I have been spending every waking hour making cupcakes and sandwich cakes, and today on the agenda we have strawberry flans! Unfortunately it looks like I forgot to order the weather, and it looks like it will be a wash-out! What else could I expect from the wonderful British summer!

So before I rush away screaming, crying and pulling my hair out with extreme vigour, there is only one thing I can say to keep my sanity at this precisie moment - 3 DAYS TO GO!

 

[buttercup1982]

Good Luck!! and I'm sure you will be sorted in time!
On the plus side you won't be twiddling your thumbs waiting to go!

 

[TotallyAngelic]

Good Luck!! and I'm sure you will be sorted in time!
On the plus side you won't be twiddling your thumbs waiting to go!

Thanks! No I'm certainly not twiddling my thumbs - so far today I have been for a haircut, baked a vanilla sponge and a coffee walnut sponge, iced 24 cupcakes, made the jelly for the flans (waiting for it to set as we speak), been to the P.O. for some euros (at last), phoned the Nationwide and Abbey Zero - or am I supposed to call it Santander now - to make them aware that I am travelling abroad with the credit cards, don't want to have my card stopped in one of those wonderful Disney emporiums now do I?

The only thing I need some help with is the damn British weather
it's been bucketing down all day and we need to put up 2 gazebos for the garden party - everything crossed that it clears up later today.

Still no clothing packed - looks like a last minute Sunday job for sure!