Many times I felt like fate was telling us to stay home, dont go, get on the phone and cancel the trip. In fact we did cancel it once. Who are we? Hmm, I guess I better start with us then I will add the supporting players as the story progresses.
Me Tracy, turned 44 during the trip, very overweight, good sense of humor, loves Bill, Ace, my son Josh, and grandson Josh fiercely. Yes, I said it I am a Grandma, he is absolutely adorable.
BF Bill, 43, very skinny, has Cerebral Palsy, fantastic sense of humor, loves all of us and anything electronic. He is wickedly intelligent, loving, and caring.
Ace turned 9 right before the trip, loving, kind, neurotic, skittish, and crazy. Oh I should mention he is a dog. A goofy, happy, lazy Jack Russell/Rat Terrier. You need to remember this picture for later in the trip, there will be a quiz.
Isnt he gorgeous? I think so. Yes Bill is kinda cute too
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Back to the story...
As I mentioned Bill has Cerebral Palsy. He cant walk, has a speech impediment, has balance issues, his right hand and arm dont work correctly and his arm doesnt listen to him very often, hence deserving the nickname of wild thing. Bill has several muscle spasms a day, it is something we deal with, but this summer something else was going on and it wasnt good. He was in extreme pain in his hip and it wasnt going away. He has a huge pain tolerence to if he says he is in pain it is bad. The pain became so intense he decided with a heavy heart that we needed to cancel our December 2013 WDW trip. It broke our hearts to do this for many reasons:
1) We LOVE WDW, it is our happy place, it is the place we both feel normal where people talk to us rather than stare at us or ignore us.
2) We had a couple DIS meets that we were really looking forward to and it was breaking my heart to have to miss them.
3) We wanted to go somewhere, anywhere we were seriously going crazy staying home.
We went to the doctor and he was diagnosed with arthritis and bursitis in his left hip. New medications were prescribed and Bill was not hopeful. Many meds do not work for him or not in the way they do for others. For some reason this combination started working and working well. So much so that he rebooked the trip behind my back. If you have read any of my other trip reports (links in my signature) you already know that Bill loves to do things behind my back. This trip was no different, but back to this story.
We were planning on seeing Tinker_Tam and family, the St. Clairs in WDW. They had many ups and downs on the road to our happy place. She will be writing a trip report as well and I will link it here so you can see what happened with them. We had met their family in 2010 in Disney and had stayed in touch ever since then. I adore her, we call each other DBFF Disney Best Friends Forever
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With the trip back on, we had to redo all the ADRs. Well not all of them, when I cancelled the dining reservations I didnt cancel Be Our Guest, I just couldnt and I am so glad I didnt. I held on to one little tiny bit of hope and tried to believe Jiminy Cricket when he says fate steps in and sees you through.
November 30th rolled around and it was time to take Ace to the boarders. He knew where he was going, he loves the place, in fact he ignores me looking out the window waiting to get there.
Then we headed to St. Louis. The hotel we stay at had gotten a remodel since we were last there. I seriously thought I might have taken us to the wrong place. This time we got an accessible room like we were supposed to, the wheelchair charged like it was supposed to, and we got to sleep at a decent hour. I kept waiting for something to go wrong, well it didnt - until the next day.
Next installment... This isnt right, something is wrong