Honeymoon Plans
Okay! So, plans for the wedding trip/honeymoon/extravaganza (I don’t know what to call it haha I don’t like the term wedmoon!! I’ll just call it the wedding trip I think) are coming on well!!
So!!! Let’s start with our flights, even though they were one of the last things we booked!
Flights
Due to the insane direct prices, we will be flying indirect. We’re literally saving like £400 each on what direct flights would have cost so it’s definitely worth it!! We’re flying with Delta but I believe it’s a Virgin plane, 9.25am from Heathrow to Atlanta
Saturday 15th October! We’ve then got a 4 hour stopover - it was really important to us that we had a good stopover time as we’re both panicking about changing planes and I’ll have my dress etc so we just didn’t want to rush. We’ve heard Atlanta is a brill airport for shopping etc in anyway so hopefully we’ll be able to kill that time quite quickly! I’m always happy to browse American shops so I’ll be in my element
We then get on a plane to Orlando at 6pm, and arrive in Orlando at 7.30. We’ll have cleared immigration so hopefully we’ll be on the Magical Express in no time
Yay!! Our flight home (boooo) is on Saturday 5th November, so 3 glorious weeks in the magic
We’re flying home via JFK so it will be exciting to see a different airport! Stopover is only 2.5 hours on the way back as I read that you probably won’t need as long. So that should be good! We were chuffed with the price we got for our flights, we were willing to go with whoever was cheapest and this Virgin/Delta combo had a long stopover and gets us to Orlando early, so it was the clear winner!
Accommodation
Onto the fun stuff!! So, as we have AP’s for this trip (and our Christmas one!) we couldn’t book a dealio with the free
DDP. We did price it up as we love the convenience of the DDP but it was just so much more, plus we’d be stuck with tickets we wouldn’t actually be using. So it seemed slightly pointless haha! So we decided to rent DVC points, buy a Tables in Wonderland card and just pay as we go. I actually do think this is a better option for us as we aren’t big dessert eaters and would much rather get starters if we’re going out for a nice dinner. Plus TiW gives us 20% off including alcohol so that is a WIN!!
In terms of deciding where to stay, we narrowed it down quite quickly. The first thing we decided on was staying at the Grand Floridian. DREAM!!! Staying here the night before of the wedding was pretty much essential to me; I’d always imagined my getting ready photos to be at the GF in the beautiful rooms, plus the convenience of staying here when you’re getting married at the WP. Unfortunately the GF is CRAZY MONEY so we opted to rent DVC points instead. It’s actually quite tricky to rent DVC points here as it’s so new that it’s a really in demand resort, BUT we had a secret weapon!! Our lovely friends Ian and Victoria are owners at the VGF, and they very very very kindly offered to let us use their points so we could book it earlier than other people who don’t own there. YAY!! So Victoria booked us all!! We’ve opted for a Studio (I did want a 1 bed but just couldn’t stretch to it) and we’ve also gone for 2 nights, as didn’t want the hassle of having to move rooms etc the day of the wedding. Eeek, stressful!!!! If I remember correctly Victoria had a proper mare trying to book the GF for us (and them, they are staying there for 5 nights from the day they check in until the day after the wedding) as people are doing this ‘walk through’ booking to get their rooms more easily!! Grrrr!! She did eventually manage to get us 2 rooms booked though - initially garden view which was a little bit more expensive, but has since managed to get us just standard
Phew!!!! Bless her, we literally would be so stuck if it wasn’t for our amazing friends!!! So that was that.
Errrr, how beautiful!!
2nd hotel!! We both really wanted to stay at a hotel in the Boardwalk area as we just love that whole area and being able to walk to Epcot during F&W would just be amazing. So that was an easy decision! We decided to stay here for the last part of our trip, after our cruise, when the majority of our guests have gone home so it’ll just be us. So we’ve got 7 nights at the beautiful Boardwalk Inn Villas!!!
For the first part of our trip, i.e. before the wedding, we weren’t overly fussed where we stayed and it was mainly money driven!! We did want Animal Kingdom lodge after the wedding but unfortunately studios were fully booked
So we went with our back up of OKW, which we had already booked for the first 3 nights of our trip. This is fine, I would have loved to rock up at AKL after the wedding but we’re not exactly hard done by are we haha!! We are super excited to stay at OKW, the studios look massive! And I love the little shopping/dining bit, it looks so cute!
Finally, we’ll be ending our honeymoon in style with a cheeky 1 nighter at the Grand Floridian, a gift from Disney’s Fairytale Weddings for meeting our room block minimum
YAY!!
SO, as I feel this is getting confusing, here is the line-up of our 3 week trip
21 glorious nights all over WDW
15th October - Old Key West for 3 nights
18th October - Grand Floridian for 2 nights
20th October - Old Key West for 4 nights
24th October - CRUISE!!!
28th October - Boardwalk Inn for 7 nights
4th November - Grand Floridian for 1 night
Phew! Quite the line-up I think you’ll agree! I booked all our stays through David’s DVC and I couldn’t recommend them more; we possibly paid a tiny bit more than if we’d gone through a Dis'er or an owner on another forum but because it’s our honeymoon we just really wanted the peace of mind of having it all booked
They’ve been fantastic - super helpful with all the questions I had etc, and when I noticed Ben wasn’t on one of the OKW reservations when I linked it to
MDE they sorted it out immediately
Brilliant! As an added bonus, all our accommodation is paid for! We didn’t really have a choice haha as the DVC owners required immediate payment, but it’s a good feeling nonetheless
Night before hotel
So there is one final element of the hotel line-up! A couple of friends of ours who are coming to the wedding have very kindly paid for us to stay in a hotel at Heathrow the night before we fly - how cute is that!? They had flight reward points to us as they stressed to us haha, but what a sweet gesture! So we are booked into the Sheraton Skyline hotel at Heathrow which looks AMAZING!!!!! Can’t even wait to stay here!!!
We’re planning to book a car to pick us up and drive us to the airport as it works out about as much as the train, but it’s wayyyyy less faff
I’ll feel like an actual celebrity getting picked up in a car from our flat haha! Exciting
Depending on if we can use holiday, we’ll either go after work or hopefully take a half day and go about 2pm, but I’ll have to see what happens with my holiday
Cruise
Okay, now we’re getting onto the good stuff!!! As I think I shared ages and ages ago (like last year!!) we’ll be going on our first cruise as part of our honeymoon, a 4 night Bahamian extravaganza!!! We depart on the 24th for 4 incredible nights
We can’t even WAIT for all the food, the entertainment, exploring the beautiful shop,
Castaway Cay, cocktails, Disney movies on demand, staring out at the ocean from our balcony... it’s going to be so so amazing!!
I’m trying to do as much research for our cruise as I can. I think we’ll have too much going on in the run up to the wedding to be able to participate in a fish extender, but there are other bits we’d like to do. We’ll be booking a Palo dinner, we’d like to do a cocktail making class, and we were looking at a food tour on Nassau but I think now we won’t cause it’s a bit pricey. We haven’t got high expectations for Nassau based on reading other trippies, but we’ll def get off the boat and have a wander as we have a sea day anyway, so plenty of time to explore the ship. Saying that I think we’ll likely get back on pretty sharpish as we hate being harassed by vendors etc!!
Obviously Castaway Cay will be amazing too
We’ll be going to the adults beach and just sitting down, chilling, snorkeling...our CC day will be like a proper honeymoon day haha, if we’d gone somewhere like a beach break for 2 weeks! Which we’d never do. We’d be so bored. BUT, 1 day of peace and tranquility in the midst of a pretty full on honeymoon will be just the ticket
So yeah, we’re beyond excited for this portion of our trip!!
Restaurants
Ahhhh restaurants. The highlight of any Disney trip!!! I've recently finished making our ADRs and we got pretty much all of them, I'll do another update with exact timings etc
We didn't make a huuuuge amount of ADRs to be honest. Following on from our Christmas trip, we really enjoyed the more relaxed approach we had to dining, meals etc, and we’d like to take a similar approach for this trip. Obviously we are doing meals, but we don’t want to go too crazy with the spending. I know it’s our honeymoon and we should splash out, but we literally have already splashed out so much haha!!! We don’t want to spend for the sake of it, and we actually really enjoyed eating CS meals for dinners etc and spending more time in the parks. We also found that on our 2013 trip we spent crazy amounts of time on busses travelling between resorts to get to meals. While this is fine once in a while, we definitely don’t want to be doing it every night. We’re planning to do only 1 or 2 signatures, a few TS, and then kind of wing it the rest of the time with CS meals. We also want a fair few evenings snacking round the F&W festival because we just loooveeee doing this!!!
I think the thing is, we don’t want to have sit down meals just for the sake of it. We actually really enjoyed the flexibility of eating breakfast in our room so we’ll def be doing this again. I think this way we’ll also enjoy the meals we do have more, because there will be fewer of them and we can really appreciate them
With all that being said, this is our rough restaurant plan so far...not 100% set in stone!!
Disney sit down meals
Olivia’s
‘Ohana
San Angel Inn
Beaches and Cream
Crossroads House of Blues
California Grill
Le Cellier
Raglan Road
Hoop de Doo Revue with wedding guests!! So excited for this!!
Possible Dining with an Imagineer
Counter service
Wolfgang Puck Express
Be Our Guest
Universal
Hard Rock Cafe (I literally think about the potato skins I had here on a daily basis - Ben isn’t so keen to go back as he thinks there are more exciting options, which there definitely are ahaha, so need to think about this!)
Cowfish?
15th - Arrival. No ADR- Giordano's or Goods to Go most probably
16th - Lunch at Be Our Guest with Mum and Dad, Olivia’s for dinner?
17th - Epcot all day so no ADR needed
18th - ‘Ohana for rehearsal dinner
19th - WEDDING DAY!!!!!!
20th - Chill day - Wolfgang Puck Express dinner
21st - Universal studios/dinner at Citywalk with wedding guests
22nd - Hoop De Doo with wedding guests (a recent addition!)
23rd - California Grill with Mum and Dad
CRUISE
28th - Food and Wine festival with wedding guests
29th - Crossroads House of Blues with Ben's Dad and Step-Mum
30th - Le Cellier
31st - Beaches and Cream
1st - Universal Studios so dinner in Citywalk
2nd - F&W snacking
3rd - San Angel Inn
4th - Check in to GF - dinner at Gasparilla Grill/wing it
5th - Leave
So having typed that out it appears there actually are quite a lot of meals hahah!! But as you can see we’ve gone for the cheaper 1 credit places rather than doing a lot of signatures. Well, 2. But still, that's less than we would normally do!! We will obviously also be doing Be Our Guest for lunch again as that was amazeballs
So that’s our honeymoon! We're also doing Marceline to Magic Kingdom tour which we're super duper excited about having done the
Yay!! I’ve really enjoyed sharing our honeymoon plans!
--------------------------------------
I actually lost my planning mojo a couple of days ago a bit (but it's totally back now!!!!!), as we sat down and went through every single thing we could think of that we’re getting/buying for the wedding and honeymoon and UK reception and put it all on a spreadsheet and totted it up...holy guacamole. It’s a lot! We have been so lucky however to have had help from both our amazing families, and saved so so hard ourselves, and although we’ll be a bit more short than we thought we would (thanks to the crappy exchange rate and Disney cranking their prices up!!!) I am so so happy and excited about our special day, and the amazing 3 week extravaganza we have planned
and I know it’ll be worth every single penny we spend!!! I also just want to say, as I see this a lot on the various wedding forums/groups/blogs I frequent - weddings are really important for some people and not so important for others, but neither approach is wrong! If you want to spend a lot of money on your wedding and honeymoon then GO FOR IT!! I feel like sometimes brides are made to feel bad for spending lots of money on their special day and it shouldn’t be that way! Our wedding is so important to both of us and while we haven’t spent crazy amounts in the grand scheme of weddings, it’s a lot of money for us! But I definitely think we’ll be the couple who have their wedding photos up all over the house! And for us, it had to be the wedding pavilion, not the local registry office. But there is absolutely nothing wrong with that for those who choose it!! Anyway I feel like I’m going on a rant but I just see this a lot and I hope anyone reading this hasn’t been made to feel bad about their choices.
Anyway, I read some planning journals on here yesterday and started crying at some of the wedding day recaps haha so I’m fully back in the zone
I just love reading about other bride’s experiences so much!! So it’s really good! Anyway, I just wanted to share as I’ve always been really honest on my planning journal and it’s just on my mind, especially with this honeymoon update! So I wanted to add it in as I’m sure a lot of Disney brides feel like this at some point on their planning journey. If you are feeling concerned about money or the planning, my advice is talk to your partner (Benj has been AMAZING at calming me down, pointing out that we don’t want to do anything differently, and reminding me how absolutely fantastic our 3 week trip and wedding is going to be!!!!!) and stay focused on your love for each other and the fact that it’s only money (!!), and in 10 years time you’ll look back and regret not doing the things you really wanted!!! Many past brides have said this to me and I’ve tried to keep it in mind as we’ve made planning decisions during our wedding planning journey - prioritising the things that are important to us and focusing our budget on them, and not stressing over the things we don’t need!!
Wow, speech. HAhaha sorry! Don't worry I'm back to my usual planning self now!!
xxxxx