B&P's VR 11/10/2012 UK/AAP/UKDP Day 1 Arrival & Epcot 6/10

Lovely dress! You can't go wrong with Maggie and I'm a huge fan of tea length. How lucky that your local store had it in stock!
 
Your dress is so gorgeous! I just looked on the Maggie website cause that pic is too small and didn't show the details, but WOW :lovestruc I love it. I think it'll be perfect for your VR! I can't wait to see your accessories that go with it. :bride:

Danielle, Thanks! I have some pics on my phone of some of the details up close, I will try to get those up some time this weekend.

I LOVE that dress! I'd love to see pictures of the actual thing.

Thanks, Wendy! I fell in love online and it was even better in person. When I get back from my site visit, I plan on going back with my camera and taking real pics of it. I will post them as soon as I get them.

LOVE that dress!!! It's gorgeous!!!!

Thank you so much. I am so excited to have found it. I think it's perfect!

Lovely dress! You can't go wrong with Maggie and I'm a huge fan of tea length. How lucky that your local store had it in stock!

Thanks! Everything I have read about Maggie has been very positive, so I was pleased to have found one of hers. It was funny when I called the shop and asked for the Isadora Ann, the salesgirl said "Oh, the short one". She then told me that she didn't typically like tea length dresses, but that this one was so beautiful that she makes the exception. :laughing: I just think that tea length for our vow renewal is appropriate, so I am so thrilled to have found this one.
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Next up: Site visit plans for next weekend
 
DH and I are headed down to Disney on Friday for our site visit. We have already allocated all of Paul's vacation time for this year, so it is a super quick down on Friday and back on Sunday. We are staying at the Grand Floridian Sugarloaf Concierge (yay for AP rates :cool1:).

We are meeting Bill at Franck's at 1. (Diane is our consultant, but she is on vacation) We are going to see 4 locations in Epcot (UK Rose Garden, UK Lochside, France Courtyard and American Adventure Parlor). We are also seeing the Asbury Room and the Asbury Patio at the Y&B Club and the St. James room at the Boardwalk. We are scheduled for an hour and a half. Hopefully, I won't have too many questions that run over.

We will hang our at the resort for an hour and then head back over to Franck's to meet with Shelley from Impressions. I am really excited to meet with her. I have been emailing back and forth with her assistant about our theme (Rockin All Over the (WD) World) and Shelley already has some great ideas, including VIP Backstage Passes on lanyards for Save the Dates. I can't wait to see what she has come up with. :woohoo: After meeting with Shelley, we will head to Jiko for dinner.

On Saturday, (after breakfast at 1900 Park Fare) our plan is to head over to Coronado Springs and The Beach Club to take photos so I have some to use for our newsletters. We especially want to check out Coronado since neither one of us have been there. These are the 2 hotels we are offering in our room block. I have promised Paul lunch at Beaches and Cream (one of his favorites) and then we will head back to GF for some pool time and dinner at Narcoosee's.

Before we leave on Sunday, we plan to head to DTD for a little shopping. I love Christmas ornaments, so we are scouting out personalized ornaments for a favor. Have some lunch at either Wolfgang Puck Express or Raglan Road and then head to the airport.

Too short of a trip, but 48 hours in WDW is better than none. :) Any suggestions for our site visit are greatly appreciated.
 
Well, we are back from our site visit. We had such a good time! And productive too! Once I load up the photos, I will post a TR.

I know I still have a long time to go, but going down and actually seeing the venues makes it all very real. :cool1:
 
Ok, this is my third attempt this afternoon to write this, so hopefully I will get it posted. :lmao: The first time I accidentally hit the wrong button and it vanished. The second time our cat, Yaz, decided to walk across the laptop and hit something to make it all go away. :mad: If he wasn't so cute, he would be in trouble.

After a bumpy flight and morning (Paul wasn't feeling well and didn't know if he wanted to fly :sick:), we arrived in Orlando. We picked up our rental car and headed to the Grand Floridian. I had been able to get a great AP rate, so I had booked the Sugarloaf Concierge building. We had never stayed at the GF or concierge, so we were excited. :cool1:

When we arrived at the resort, we were met right away by Sam, who told us that our room was ready (at 11am :yay:) and she would take us there. I had done online check-in, so we just signed the slip in our room. We were handed our keys and ready to go. It was awesome!

Our appointment with Bill was at 1pm, so we grabbed lunch at the Grand Floridian Cafe. If you have never eaten there, we would highly recommend it. The food, the service and the atmosphere were all fabulous.

We arrive at Franck's a little bit before 1 and Bill was waiting at the welcome desk. A few minutes later and we were off to Epcot. It was so cool to go backstage and see what is behind all the magic. :eek: Our first stop was the UK Rose Garden. This is our first choice for ceremony location and looking at it in person and in that light was amazing. It absolutely is where we want it.

Bill told us that we can set the chairs up on the lawn sections, which I think is perfect. I think that the regular chairs with the white covers with light pink and silver sashes will look lovely on both sides. We will then use the center portion for the aisle.

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We will use this space as an altar. I don't think that it needs much decoration, but I do feel that some pillars with arrangements on top are needed to set off the space.

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We also stopped at UK Lochside (for our dessert party) and the courtyard in France. We love Lochside and think that our guests will be blown away by the view of Illuminations. :woohoo:

We got back in Bill's car (so cool that he can park anywhere!) and headed over to the American Adventure Pavillion to see the Parlor. We were really excited to see this space since both of us love colonial American history (I even have my degree in it), so we thought it would be perfect for us. We went up to the third floor in the secret elevator and when we fell in love instantly. We found out that we get the whole floor, which is great and it has it's own restrooms (rare in Epcot).

This is the parlor room. I love the furniture, but I think we are going to have it removed and put our dining tables in this room.

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This is the other side

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I absolutely love this little balcony/landing and hope that we can work it out that we get introduced from here.

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This is the hallway downtown to the Thomas Jefferson dining room (which I just didn't get good pictures of), but our thinking is that we would set up the buffet in the dining room (maybe), but definitely set up the dance floor in there.

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When we came back down in the elevator found out that not only is it secret (located behind paneling), if you go out the other side it actually opens up to the outside courtyard. :cool1:

We then left Epcot and travelled to the Boardwalk. I wasn't sure if we should really take the time for this stop, since I really had no interest in The St. James Room, but Diane thought it was a good space and we should see it. So happy that we did. We loved it!!!! :love: What a great, intimate space. We instantly decided to hold our welcome dinner here. Paul really loved the ability to open up the doors to the patio.

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If we weren't going to look at 2 spaces at the Y&B Convention Center, we probably would have told Bill we were all set. Our first stop was the Asbury Patio, which is where I am planning on hosting a ladies luncheon/tea there the day before our ceremony. What an absolutely perfect and lovely location. My plan is to do the Mad Hatter table decor and the centerpieces and think it will be stunning. Doesn't even need any more decor.

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We then looked at The Asbury room, which is what I thought we had wanted. It is a very nice room, but it seems cavernous compared to the St. James room and AAP. Glad we found a different direction to go in. It was also your typical ballroom space, which since we did that the first time, we really didn't want to repeat it, if at all possible. I won't take up the space with the pictures, since we probably won't be using it (unless we have to). :rolleyes1

Bill then drove us back to Franck's. We had about an hour to kill before we met with Shelley from Impressions, so we headed back to Sugarloaf for a snack. They put out an afternoon tea and it was great. Jam tarts, scones, some fruit. Hit the spot.

We walked back to Franck's and Shelley was there a few minutes later. We talked about our theme "Rockin All Over the World" and she suddenly had a million ideas. Her first was to do Backstage Passes on personalized lanyards as Save the Dates, which we love. We are going to ask our guests to bring them to Disney with them because we are going to hand out pins to everyone at each of our events. :yay: We fell in love with this idea!!! We also came up with assigning a character to each guest (we have less than 40 invited) and giving everyone their character pin. Now we are having a blast coming up with who is what character (and finding them on ebay! :rolleyes1)

We also talked to Shelley about the actual invites, enclosures and such. We definitely want a pocket (which will be pink), a layer of silvery gray and then a cream rectangle printed with pink glitter ink. Since Shelley has access to the entire Disney art library (wow!), we are going to have Donald & Daisy in wedding attire on the invite. Each enclosure will also have a different character on it (TBD). We talked about a bunch of other things too, but it was a blur. :confused: I am sure it will become clear later on.

When we were done with Shelley we headed back to the GF. We had some apps. and a couple of beers before heading back to the Grand Floridian Cafe for dinner. After dinner we were so tired that we just passed out.

Thanks for reading along so far. This one was a LONG one, but it was a really busy day.

Next up: Day 2 and lots of shopping!!!
 
those locations are fabulous!! they're so rare and i haven't seen many pix of them, but they are alllllll great!! almost time to book!! i can't wait to see more about your trip!!
 
those locations are fabulous!! they're so rare and i haven't seen many pix of them, but they are alllllll great!! almost time to book!! i can't wait to see more about your trip!!

Thanks, Deena! 2 weeks from today is my booking day. I assume they don't book on Sundays, maybe they do. :) I will be Disney busy that day since it is also the day we can book our excursions and special meals on our Mexican Riviera cruise this October on the Wonder. :banana: About a week to go for you!! Woohoo!

We came up with 2 qualifications for our sites...they had to be very Disney and they had to very different. I think we are hitting the mark on every one. :woohoo:

Hoping to get Day 2 up tonight. It was heavy on the shopping. :cool1: Which I have been doing a lot of lately and need to update that too. I am going back to look at Isadora Ann with some jewelry tomorrow, so hopefully will be able to get up some better pictures of my dress too.

Those are so gorgeous! Thanks for all the awesome pics!

Thanks! We love our sites. I am so glad we decided to go down since the sites were so much better in person. Really helped solidify what we wanted and how it would all look.

It's funny. Now when I go looking for VR stuff I always try to remember to take a good photo so I can post it here. That is bad. :eek:
 
Thanks, Deena! 2 weeks from today is my booking day. I assume they don't book on Sundays, maybe they do. :) I will be Disney busy that day since it is also the day we can book our excursions and special meals on our Mexican Riviera cruise this October on the Wonder. :banana: About a week to go for you!! Woohoo!

We went on the same cruise in April; you are going to love it! If you haven't already, be sure to look up your cruise on the Meet Thread on DIS so you can meet up with other people on your same cruise and hopefully participate in the Fish Extender. So fun! :banana:
 
We went on the same cruise in April; you are going to love it! If you haven't already, be sure to look up your cruise on the Meet Thread on DIS so you can meet up with other people on your same cruise and hopefully participate in the Fish Extender. So fun! :banana:

Thanks, Mindy. We are really looking forward to this cruise. We booked it almost 2 years ago when we did our first one (Eastern Carribean). We love the Fish Extender!! Our meet thread so far is a little slow, but hopefully it picks up soon.

We actually have 5 cruises booked through October 2012. We are doing a 3 nighter on the Dream in November, another 3 nighter in April for my birthday and back to back weeks on the Fantasy in October 2012 for our 10th anniversary, which we get to spend on Castaway Cay and have dinner at Palo! :banana:
 
After a much needed good night's sleep, we headed to 1900 Park Fare for one of our favorite character breakfasts. We also love the Chilled Strawberry Soup from the buffet so much that we plan on serving it at our reception. The breakfast did not disappoint. The Mad Hatter was fantastic! Sorry this photo is so big.

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We scrapped our original plan of heading to the Beach Club and Coronado Springs to take photos to show our guests, since those are the resorts in our room block. Instead we decided to head to DTD to start shopping for pins for our guests. We had been coming up with ideas of who should be what character, so we were anxious to get started. :)

We drove to DTD and started at the World of Disney. I will be honest, this store typically overwhelms me, so we have to get to it early in the morning or skip it. We picked up a few pins (Alice, Cheshire Cat, and Marie) and a few other things (but not VR related).

Our next stop was Arribas Brothers. I love walking through here, but typically don't buy anything. That totally changed this time. We poked around for a few minutes and then Elena asked if we were looking for anything in particular. I love Daisy Duck (and Donald too), so was hoping for a combo piece to use as a cake topper. I didn't quite get it, but I did get these.

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They look better in person, but I am hoping that they can be put together and maybe surround the bottom with some flowers. I think Donald and Daisy will like them when they come to visit our reception. :rotfl2:

As we were checking out, I came across their selection of toasting flutes. For our original wedding, we did not do special flutes, so it was something I was possibly thinking about this time. When I saw these and Paul was wowed by them to, so we got them.

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The Minnie flute will have my name engraved on it with the date and Mickey will have Paul's and the date. They are being shipped, so as soon as they come, I will post pics of the real flutes when they arrive.

We then went to the pin store and bought a bunch more pins for our guests lanyards. We also checked out the Christmas Store. I can do major damage here, but I was on a mission to look for potential favors. Paul and I have a personalized ornament for every anniversary, so we plan on giving out an ornament as a favor. I was thrilled to find out that the 8 packs of small Mickey head ornaments can be personalized. :banana: Woohoo! I will order those and have them shipped when we go down for our PS.

We had to go back to Arribas to pick up Donald and Daisy and while I was there I found some lovely pink glass beaded jewelry. They had earrings and a bracelet, but no necklace made up. I asked if they had anything and they said that based on the other 2 pieces they would do one custom made for me. It hasn't come yet, but I am really excited about it. I will post those too when they come. If they turn out well, I might wear them for our welcome dinner.

It was really hot out so we wanted to get done as soon as possible. We tried T-Rex for lunch (pretty good) and then we decided to hit our two resorts so we could be done with stuff we had to do. We headed to Coronado first and took a few photos (found other pins too!). Last stop was Beach Club and once we got all the photos we wanted, we rewarded ourselves with some ice cream at Beaches and Cream.

We needed a nap and to get out of the heat, so back to the Grand Floridian, where we promptly fell asleep for a couple of hours. When we did wake up, we decided that a long swim and a quick dinner at the food court was more along the lines of what we wanted that night than dinner at Narcoosee's.

We called it a night after the Electrical Water Pageant got rained out. Overall, a very productive, but incredibly hot day at WDW!

As always, thanks for keeping with me! Any and all comments are welcome.

Next up: Possible jewlery, looking for shoes and other finds.
 
I forgot to mention that today is the 11th anniversary of the day Paul and I met. Can't believe it has been that long and that we have gotten through so much. Wow! :love:
 
This will be quick, since we are away and I am on my iphone.

Before we left, I sent an email to Diane, our coordinator, confirming our sites in preparation for our 16 month window next Monday. She replied on Sunday by telling me that since our site visit was with Bill, that we would now be working with him. We really liked both Diane and Bill, but since we met with Bill in person, we have no issues, I guess. We ca also keep Diane, if we want that too.

Any thoughts? Thanks!!

I have an accessory update along with other stuff when I get home in a few days!
 
Hiya - subbing into your PJ

Lovely story on how you met and you deffinately deserve your VR after everything you've been through :goodvibes

I love your colour scheme, the colours will compliment each other perfectly.

Your wedding dress is beautiful and I think all your location choices are fab.

The Mickey & Minnie flutes are cute :lovestruc

Look forward to reading/seeing more x
 
Hmmm. I think it's silly that they're going to change your coordinator, regardless! But what can you do.

Also, I just read over your trip report--- love it! :D I'm so glad you like 1900 Park Fare. We're doing a morning-after breakfast there with our wedding guests, but I've never been there. Glad a fellow disbrides recommends it!
 
Hiya - subbing into your PJ

Lovely story on how you met and you deffinately deserve your VR after everything you've been through :goodvibes

I love your colour scheme, the colours will compliment each other perfectly.

Your wedding dress is beautiful and I think all your location choices are fab.

The Mickey & Minnie flutes are cute :lovestruc

Look forward to reading/seeing more x

Ruth, Thank you so much for the kind words and for subbing! :) We are very excited about all of this. We are having a blast planning on all the little details that having a Disney wedding gives you the freedom to plan. We were really creative the first time around and this time we are going all out! I have to catch up on your pj since your date is getting close. :bride:

Hmmm. I think it's silly that they're going to change your coordinator, regardless! But what can you do.

Also, I just read over your trip report--- love it! :D I'm so glad you like 1900 Park Fare. We're doing a morning-after breakfast there with our wedding guests, but I've never been there. Glad a fellow disbrides recommends it!

Thanks, Jackie! I am still confused as to why I got switched, but as long as it works out, I guess it doesn't matter. Our 16 month window is Monday and Diane told me that I would have my confirmation by Wednesday, so I better have it no later than Thursday morning. :rolleyes1 I will keep everyone posted.

Thanks for reading the TR. I didn't bother posting anything about our last day, since there wasn't much that was exciting. We did have a wonderful breakfast at The Grand Floridian Cafe. The Maple Vanilla French Toast was amazing! We are now thinking of having it for our reception, but I am leaving that up to Paul since he is the French Toast King. :love:

We love 1900 Park Fare. You will have a great time there! Have the Chilled Strawberry Soup! :cloud9: Again, something that will be at our reception.

Alright, I have got to get off disboards and work on my newsletters. I promised Shelley I would have them for her by next Friday. :scared1: Have to get cracking.

Accessory and other update coming tomorrow, promise! :laughing:
 
Bethie - Just dropping by to say I love everything. I an really looking forward to hearing more of your plans!! This is going to be a good VR!!!
 

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