A MAGICal Journey Back To Where It All Began - DCL WBTA & WDW - September 2015 - UPDATED 17/08/2015

[NatsyNoo]

Hello lovely people! It's Natsynoo here, back again to share the planning of our next big adventure with you!

I'm Natalie, and myself and my hubby Matt simply love going on adventures! It used to be just Florida (hence why we got engaged and married there!), but we have now broadened our horizons and are travelling beyond Florida (although we try to include a little Disney wherever we can ).





IMG_5710 by nataliepope183, on Flickr

We sailed on last year's WBTA, and had such a blast, we simply had to book again, so whilst on board, we rebooked for the 2015 WBTA!

IMG_5743 by nataliepope183, on Flickr

And thankfully, after much convincing, our lovely friends whom we spent a lot of time with last year, Kim & Ross (Kaboomba on The Dibb) are joining us too!

20140917_105521 by nataliepope183, on Flickr

We have booked a Cat 9B and have currently been allocated stateroom 2078. The booking has cost $1717.20 for 2 adults for those interested in cost, and we'll be sailing away for 11 nights on Saturday 19th September 2015. We simply cannot wait! I'll share more on our costs a little bit later!

IMG_5893 by nataliepope183, on Flickr

Our destination on the cruise will be Miami. Well, it would be sacrilege not to whiz up to Orlando for a cheeky few days, wouldn't it?! So we dock in Miami on 30th September (after 11 nights on board, stopping at Madeira and Castaway Cay on the way!) and then will drive up to Orlando.

Our current plan is to stay at the Hard Rock Hotel for one night and spend the remainder of that day as well as the next in Universal/Islands of Adventure to see the new WWOHP (plus they are Matt's favourite parks), before heading over to WDW on 1st October, where we will be staying at the Beach Club for 5 nights before flying home with BA from MCO. I'll go into the detail of that a little bit later though!

Coming soon
Cruise Plans
Orlando Plans
Costs

I'm planning to update this pretrippie as our plans progress, so please do read along with me!

See ya real soon!

[NatsyNoo]

Back to the cruise, we are planning on doing much of the same as what we did last time (trippie in my signature)...sunbathing and relaxing by day, before going to Showtime and Trivia before dinner, and then going to see the adult entertainment.

Many cocktails of the day and Bahama Mamas will be had...

IMG_5344 by nataliepope183, on Flickr

IMG_5307 by nataliepope183, on Flickr

...we'll laugh a lot, hopefully get some cracking suntans and fully rest up before the 6 days of madness in Orlando.

Oh, and eat LOTS of AMAZING food!

IMG_5318 by nataliepope183, on Flickr

IMG_5351 by nataliepope183, on Flickr

IMG_5318 by nataliepope183, on Flickr

IMG_5230 by nataliepope183, on Flickr

IMG_5350 by nataliepope183, on Flickr

IMG_5232 by nataliepope183, on Flickr

IMG_5233 by nataliepope183, on Flickr

IMG_5123 by nataliepope183, on Flickr

Current plan is to go to Palo on our own twice (once for dinner, once for brunch) and then seeing if we can get another brunch reservation on board with Kim & Ross. Fingers crossed!

In Madeira, Kim, Ross and we will get the chairlift up the Monte before catching the toboggan back down (we only have half a day there so not much time to do a lot more than that!).

On Castaway Cay, there is talk of the 5K first thing before having a very chilled day before getting back on board. I am thinking about booking the jet skis for Matt and I as he's never been on one before, but that will depend on the pennies!

Back on board, I definitely want to do towel folding again, as that was heaps of fun last time, and also, Kim and Ross will no doubt escort me to some of the crafting classes that I missed last time as I was too busy being a sun goddess!

IMG_5586 by nataliepope183, on Flickr

I have also signed up to an afternoon tea session on a Facebook group, not because we'll be hungry, but because I'm intrigued about how DCL does afternoon tea, and at $8 each, I thought it was a bargain! I'm also thinking of doing a mixology/tasting class, but not sure which yet. Maybe champagne? I'll see as time goes on!

This cruise cannot come by quick enough!

[NatsyNoo]

The beauty of disembarkation day when you have onward travel plans is that you can get off of the ship pretty early in the morning, provided Customs & Immigration don't slow you down! My plan is therefore to disembark as soon as we've finished breakfast (hoping for early seating for breakfast, or otherwise, we'll go up to Cabanas) before catching a taxi/transfer of some description over to Miami airport, where we'll pick up a hire care and drive up to Orlando.

We're going to share our road trip with Kim & Ross since they are heading up to Orlando too, so we'll drop them off at their Disney hotel, before driving across to Universal where we're planning to stay at Hard Rock Hotel for 1 night to benefit from the good ole FOTL passes. I'm hoping we'll be in Orlando and checked in by 1pm, so after a cheeky lunch stop in Citywalk (Panda Express I'm coming for you!), we'll head into one of the parks, probably IOA, for the afternoon.

In the evening, we're going to meeting Kim and Ross again for dinner at Cheesecake Factory at Mall at Millenia, before saying farewell for the final time for this trip.

The next day, we'll use early entry to WWOHP to finally see the new Diagon Alley area, before finishing off the bits and pieces that we want to do in the Universal parks, and late afternoon, we'll head over to WDW for 5 nights at the Beach Club.

HRH is already booked with Travel Republic for £180 for the night, secured with a £1 deposit for now; and Beach Club is booked already! Thanks to Marlouwrig for renting the DVC points to us! We're so lucky to have secured a studio in BCV as it's Food and Wine so I thought our chances would be slim!

I'm very excited to be staying in the newly renovated rooms. There's lots of piccies of them here! Don't they look beaute?! I can finally take Matt to Stormalong Bay and we had some of our wedding photos taken at the Yacht & Beach Club, including inside Beaches & Cream, so the resort holds a special place in our hearts!

Anyway, back to it, our plan this evening is to go to Downtown Disney for a wander and grab some dinner at Wolfgang Puck Express, but we're really still in the early stages of planning and of course, we don't have any park hours yet, so depending on what tickets we end up with, and how the park hours look, we might end up heading into Epcot, as we don't have a lot of time in the parks, and it's our first time at Food & Wine, so we need to squeeze every minute we can out of the park!

The next four days will be dedicated park days. As things stand, thoughts are as follows:

2nd October – Magic Kingdom
3rd October – Hollywood Studios with afternoon at Epcot (so much has closed at Hollywood Studios now so once we've done the bits & pieces we want to do, we'll head out)
4th October – Animal Kingdom with afternoon at Epcot (Animal Kingdom never really takes us much beyond lunchtime so again, we'll use the extra time in Epcot)
5th October – Magic Kingdom (2 full days as this is the park we felt we did least justice in 2012 and we want to make sure we do it properly this time!)
6th October – Epcot for the morning followed by lunch at probably Via Napoli, and then we'll head over to MCO for our flight home, which is at around 8.30pm so we will have a good amount of park time available

As far as ADRs are concerned, at the moment, we're thinking:

Tusker House character breakfast
Via Napoli
Le Cellier
California Grill (we had our wedding meal here so it's a must do!)
Beaches & Cream
Ohana

We will more than likely buy the dining plan as it means we don't have to worry about the cost of most of our meals when we're there (Via Napoli & Beaches & Cream we would always pay OOP for anyway, and we will probably also pay OOP for Tusker House too).

I am also very busy pulling together a list of 'must have munchies' that we will try and make our way through. Well, the list is already quite big so we'll do as much of it as we can! Lol.

We're not yet sure on what tickets we'll get. Initialy it was 5 day MYW without hopping but to get the most of our time, I think we'll need to include hopping. However, if the price works out not too much different, I might still go for the Ultimates as we would get admission everyday that way. We'll see I guess!

Finally, I'm hoping to find a Memory Maker share that we can participate in. Otherwise, we'll make a call as to whether we think it's worth it on our own! We definitely want to re-create our four landmark photos that we did for the wedding...although how we'll now do that without the hat, I don't know (maybe the archway into the Art of Animation area?!









Our wedding trip was so busy we really didn't manage to do WDW justice and the (sad?) reality is that we don't know when our next WDW trip will be. One thing we are pretty sure of is that we would unlikely never dedicate our annual holiday fully to Florida again. Depending on how this trip goes, WDW would likely be a 5 day add-on to another trip wherever it would be in the USA or even the world. We just have so much that we want to see and our holiday time is so precious! That being said, we look back on our previous WDW trips with such fondness!

So that's it for now and as far as I've got with planning. I'll share our costs, munchies list and to do list at a later date!

See ya real soon!

[juliab]

Hi Natalie, I've just spent a lovely afternoon reading through your last trippie Your plans sound fab, sounds like a dream holiday to me. We are so hoping to go on a cruise sometime, so I hope you mind me following along to hopefully pick up a few tips from a veteran cruiser so to speak

Julia x

[NatsyNoo]

Originally Posted by juliab

Hi Natalie, I've just spent a lovely afternoon reading through your last trippie Your plans sound fab, sounds like a dream holiday to me. We are so hoping to go on a cruise sometime, so I hope you mind me following along to hopefully pick up a few tips from a veteran cruiser so to speak

Julia x

See more...

Hi Julia, thanks for reading! Looks like I've kept you very busy today!
The 2016 DCL Itineraries will be released soon so I'll let you know so you can have a look!
Cruising has become a way of life for us now, we just love them! Can't wait now! Plus we get to go back 'home'

[NatsyNoo]

Hey peeps, I've been doing some work on budgeting this afternoon, so thought I'd share where I'm up to so far with costs...

Flights to Barcelona with Monarch (extra legroom) - £135 (paid)
Flights from MCO with British Airways (M&M) - £560 (paid)
Cruise (booked onboard including perks) - $1717 ($1561 to pay)
Premier Inn (Gatwick) - hoping to book when the £34 rates are released
Airport parking - not looked at yet, hoping for around £60 mark
Transfer to Barcelona port - £30 (to book)
Hire car from Miami to Orlando - £50 (to book)
Hard Rock Hotel (1 night) - £181 (£1 deposit paid)
Universal 2 day tickets (£119 each) - £238
WDW MYW 5 day + hopper (£246 each) - £492
Beach Club (Studio booked at £7.50 per point) - £578
DDP ($60 per person per night) - $600/£400

The current $ rate is kind of killing us at the moment as we could knock several hundred £s from our balance list if it went back up to the $1.60/$1.65 mark. I'm hoping this is the usual new year blip and the rate will start to head up as we near the spring/summertime.

Anyways, that's where we're at so far!

[Lisa29]

Great start Nat! Your trip sounds amazing and one I would like to do one day.

We have our first cruise booked this year, 4 nights on the Dream, and I am so excited, I cannot wait!

Thank you for posting the costs so far. The WBTA is one that I would love to, and adding a few days at Disney at the end, so it is great to see the flight costs. I am hoping for a 2016 WBTA, which I may book to then try and defer to 2017.

The 5 nights at the Beach Club are such a bargain!

Looking forward to more.xx

[Guest]

Great pretrippie so far! Will look forward to reading more

[iheartwdw]

Wow, a Disney wedding must be amazing! We had our 'Disneymoon' there and that was brilliant so I can't imagine how fab a wedding would be there

We are off on our first EVER cruise this summer (3 nights Disney Dream), so I will be following your plans closely to try and pick up some tips from an expert!

Laura Xx

[Guest]

loved reading your plans! this will be my second disney cruise but first transatlantic and cannot wait! and looks like we wil be neighbours as we are staying in room 2074!