londontime
DisDad #818. London. Deputy Mayor of Bricksburg.
- Joined
- Jan 10, 2016
Chapter 1. Are we really going again? The background....
OK Guys, here goes. This is my first trip report. I'm one of the English Disdads, so apologies for all the U's where they perhaps shouldn't be, the gentle jibes at anything (our love for the US knows no bounds), and I'll do my best to keep the measures imperial rather than metric. And I'm going to set a challenge. You have to read it in your best English accent. You can pick the character. Lord Downton. Mary Poppins. Pretty much any Disney Villain for the last 50 years. My accent is much more common than all of these, but hey, we've got to at least try and keep up the standards for her Majesty. And I don't mean DW, who is infinitely posher than me, and is convinced I am teaching the kids how to not pronounce H's, T's, or not move their lips whilst speaking. Try it. Add a bit of Dick van Dyke and you'll be talking like a Londoner in minutes.
So, to the family unit. There's me (nice to meet you all/y'all), DW (the saintly Mrs Londontime), DS (George, 5) and DD (Arabella, 3). We live in London, just on the outskirts. We love all things Disney, and we are lucky enough to have Annual Passes to Disneyland Paris. More about that if I manage to get through one trip report.
Vacations. Our kids seem to think that vacation is a rough translation for "going to america", and in the last 3 years this has further translated into "going to Disney". We had to point out on a map that planes actually can travel east from London, and there is a huge world to the right of our house that is amazing. However due to various circumstances, most of them lame excuses, this will be the third time in the last 3 years that we end up in Orlando.
So how did we break the news this time? We went for a random Sunday morning, when the kids got up for their traditional English breakfast of Superman Badge shaped pancakes (youtube is a wonderful thing) with Canadian maple syrup (we need to keep at least some trade links going, and our young ones are keeping the Canadian economy nice and buoyant, as well as the british dentistry profession). We thought pictures would probably be more impactful than words, definitely at 7am, so, the night before, we created this.....
.....and got George to read it out to Arabella.
So the planning was on. When can we do dates? When does our work schedule allow? Are our friends going to disown us for turning into Disney geeks? 2 weeks on property or 1?
We had scoped out potential stays on property by surreptitious use of ADR's in 2015, and Kath fell in love with the Grand Floridian, where we had breakfast at 1900 Park Fare. We zipped onto the Virgin Atlantic website, priced it all up, and a few eye-watering pieces of number-crunching later, there were 4 of us booked into a week long stay at the GF starting Aug 13, with a week to fill on a beach somewhere. Did I mention that the numbers were eye-watering?
Seriously. I haven't cried like that since the kids were born or the Sopranos finished.
Then we started talking. We both work, and our parents are really supportive in helping out with the childcare, with my mum picking up at least a couple of times a week from school. So we started to talk over a glass of wine about how nice it would be for the Grandparents to see the kids experience Disney while they are still fit enough to appreciate it. This was a reasonably long conversation, so at the the end of the second bottle of wine, we texted the picture above with an invitation to join us. My mum obviously took ages to consider the financial implications of our offer to join us, and texted back within about 38 seconds, which to be fair, was probably mostly taken up with her trying to type the response out and send 3 times while swearing at the iPhone. Technology and my mother are not happy bedfellows. I kid you not. She once took an iPhone back to the store, claiming that the screen wasn't working, and got all huffy (in a very British way), and the manager of the t-mobile gently explained to her she hadn't taken the wrap off the phone.
Kath's parents said they would love to come, but would make their own arrangements as they had air miles, and would probably join us out there. So we quickly progressed from a small family vacation of 4, to a full-on Von Trapp family jaunt of 8 (I'm not sure why I've referenced Julie Andrews twice in the first chapter), with split stays and different levels of requirements of park time and ride preference. And there was still the small issue that we now had to find somewhere to fill the next week. Which we will deal with in Chapter 2. I'll do my best to get this done before we get to Orlando this Saturday, and post the rest live (or as live as I can get).
OK Guys, here goes. This is my first trip report. I'm one of the English Disdads, so apologies for all the U's where they perhaps shouldn't be, the gentle jibes at anything (our love for the US knows no bounds), and I'll do my best to keep the measures imperial rather than metric. And I'm going to set a challenge. You have to read it in your best English accent. You can pick the character. Lord Downton. Mary Poppins. Pretty much any Disney Villain for the last 50 years. My accent is much more common than all of these, but hey, we've got to at least try and keep up the standards for her Majesty. And I don't mean DW, who is infinitely posher than me, and is convinced I am teaching the kids how to not pronounce H's, T's, or not move their lips whilst speaking. Try it. Add a bit of Dick van Dyke and you'll be talking like a Londoner in minutes.
So, to the family unit. There's me (nice to meet you all/y'all), DW (the saintly Mrs Londontime), DS (George, 5) and DD (Arabella, 3). We live in London, just on the outskirts. We love all things Disney, and we are lucky enough to have Annual Passes to Disneyland Paris. More about that if I manage to get through one trip report.
Vacations. Our kids seem to think that vacation is a rough translation for "going to america", and in the last 3 years this has further translated into "going to Disney". We had to point out on a map that planes actually can travel east from London, and there is a huge world to the right of our house that is amazing. However due to various circumstances, most of them lame excuses, this will be the third time in the last 3 years that we end up in Orlando.
So how did we break the news this time? We went for a random Sunday morning, when the kids got up for their traditional English breakfast of Superman Badge shaped pancakes (youtube is a wonderful thing) with Canadian maple syrup (we need to keep at least some trade links going, and our young ones are keeping the Canadian economy nice and buoyant, as well as the british dentistry profession). We thought pictures would probably be more impactful than words, definitely at 7am, so, the night before, we created this.....
.....and got George to read it out to Arabella.
So the planning was on. When can we do dates? When does our work schedule allow? Are our friends going to disown us for turning into Disney geeks? 2 weeks on property or 1?
We had scoped out potential stays on property by surreptitious use of ADR's in 2015, and Kath fell in love with the Grand Floridian, where we had breakfast at 1900 Park Fare. We zipped onto the Virgin Atlantic website, priced it all up, and a few eye-watering pieces of number-crunching later, there were 4 of us booked into a week long stay at the GF starting Aug 13, with a week to fill on a beach somewhere. Did I mention that the numbers were eye-watering?
Seriously. I haven't cried like that since the kids were born or the Sopranos finished.
Then we started talking. We both work, and our parents are really supportive in helping out with the childcare, with my mum picking up at least a couple of times a week from school. So we started to talk over a glass of wine about how nice it would be for the Grandparents to see the kids experience Disney while they are still fit enough to appreciate it. This was a reasonably long conversation, so at the the end of the second bottle of wine, we texted the picture above with an invitation to join us. My mum obviously took ages to consider the financial implications of our offer to join us, and texted back within about 38 seconds, which to be fair, was probably mostly taken up with her trying to type the response out and send 3 times while swearing at the iPhone. Technology and my mother are not happy bedfellows. I kid you not. She once took an iPhone back to the store, claiming that the screen wasn't working, and got all huffy (in a very British way), and the manager of the t-mobile gently explained to her she hadn't taken the wrap off the phone.
Kath's parents said they would love to come, but would make their own arrangements as they had air miles, and would probably join us out there. So we quickly progressed from a small family vacation of 4, to a full-on Von Trapp family jaunt of 8 (I'm not sure why I've referenced Julie Andrews twice in the first chapter), with split stays and different levels of requirements of park time and ride preference. And there was still the small issue that we now had to find somewhere to fill the next week. Which we will deal with in Chapter 2. I'll do my best to get this done before we get to Orlando this Saturday, and post the rest live (or as live as I can get).
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