Oooh this is a little bit posh for us! Nov 2014

[purple myra]

Oooh this is a little bit posh for us!

CAST:
Me: Purple Myra, intend to remain 40 (until I hit 50 anyway), menial worker, OU student, chatterer, planner.




DH: Big Jake, quiet, unassuming, likes killing things, loves WTP, agrees with my plans.



July 2013 During our short but gorgeous 2013 summer Jake and I had a lovely (rare) day out together on our annual pilgrimage to Scone Palace and the Game Fair. On our return home it was clear that Jake was suffering from sun stroke as out of the blue he asked “Can you still get a holiday to Florida for £800?”….Oh how I laughed! Undeterred I was all over the t’interweb in a flash and gave him the sad news that even our beloved I Drive hotels were coming in at over £800 each Sad faces all round. It transpired that Jake “might have some money if I could get something cheap”. I slept on it.
Next day I checked, re checked and double checked lots of options before giving up any hope…..then I was bored again (not much happening on The Dibb or FB) …so a bit more looking and I was able to convince Jake that his £800 holiday could be achieved with a bit of tweaking (like adding two and a half grand to it!) For the same price as our usual I Drive hotel and our usual 14 day Disney Tickets plus a reasonable food kitty we could stay onsite at Disney with free dining! Desperate to strike while the iron was hot and before any glaring holes in my (mis)calculations could be found the deposit was paid. Teeny Weeny problem with the deposit….I had the money in the bank to cover it unfortunately that money was sort of earmarked for the month’s direct debits! A fabulous solution was found, I cashed in my Topcashback money and it would be in my bank before the alarm bells started ringing in the bank manager’s office – phew! A couple of other wee windfalls took the sting out of the total cost including a refund from my previous gas and electricity provider as I’d been paying far too much each month and had a nice healthy credit and of course the money Jake “might have”. On the 7th July 2013 we were all booked to fly from Manchester to Orlando for 10 nights at OKW with Disney tickets and free DDP. Yippee!

I was under strict orders that we were just doing a wee cheap holiday….of course! By the end of July I had booked the Radisson Blu at Manchester Airport for our overnight stay and parking – it was probably raining and I would have been bored! The confirmation email was sent on 28th July so I’d just been paid….money burns a hole in my pocket – FACT!

August 2013 End of August and somehow or other a booking confirmation arrived from Portofino Bay Resort at Universal (I’m sure it’s a coincidence that the email is dated 28th too) I believe a bay view room had been booked for one night…..yippee! The main reason for returning to Orlando was the Harry Potter stuff. I’d have preferred Disneyland but Jake likes HP…so I was doing it all for him
The next thing to be booked (and has since been cancelled) was a car for 5 days in the middle of our stay….it was cancelled and the money was diverted to Universal to change our one night stay in a bay view room to two nights in a garden view room – oops a daisy! Then the Radisson Blu was cancelled and rebooked, this time through Topcashback (got to get the deposit together for our next trip )….this was to happen again later in the year as I spotted that the price had gone down, every penny is a prisoner – remember this trip was being done on the cheap *ahem*.

Too many visits to a well-known Dibber had planted the seed of “a wee night in a nice DVC place”. Of course, you don’t really get a lot of value from a resort if you only stay one night…..by the time you get back from the parks and check in and get to bed you only really sleep in the room and you have to do the S,S & S and be out again for 11am. I wondered if TCD would allow me to push back my return flights by 2 days? Hmmmmm. A quick call to the Indian call centre resulted in my being resuscitated as the operator thought I wanted to buy Virgin Atlantic…ha ha ha….how I laughed!

December 2013 Using the new medium of Facebook to deal with customer services brought about a much more satisfactory response. The lovely Ashley promised to call me at the 11 month window for my proposed return flight….she did….it cost about £70 admin fee….I booked! Just the small issue of mentioning it to Jake *gulp*. Sooooo there we were, potentially homeless in Orlando for two nights! I wonder if someone will be kind enough to rent me some points? Some extra work in the run up to Christmas generated another wee windfall so that paid for enough points to book 2 nights in a theme park view studio at Bay Lake Towers.

2014 Each month one or other or us (sometimes both of us) would make a contribution to the holiday – I know we would have earned interest on the money if we’d put it in the bank blah blah blah…but if it hadn’t been paid to TCD it would have been spent, simple as that.

January 2014 On the 4th Jan I booked Universal 2 park tickets from Expedia through Topcashback (again) so we now had just about everything ticked off the list.

February 2014 With the balance reducing nicely I ordered Memory Maker – essential when travelling as a couple – someone has to take those romantic dreamy eyed shots. The confirmation email was dated 16th Feb….someone or something must have been getting bumped for me to have money in the middle of the month!

March 2014 At some point in March, some kind Dibber posted about the potential cashback windfall to be gained by signing up to online bingo sites….always looking for ways to boost my Topcashback fund I joined two bingo sites….and immediately won £505! I was shaking as I watched the winnings pile up. I got Jake to come and verify what I was seeing on screen and took several screenshots as I didn’t believe it could be legitimate. Within ten minutes I had withdrawn the winnings and I had to wait four days before it appeared in my bank account. As this was “free” money I transferred it to my FairFX card as soon as it had cleared into my account….this was going to be for “special treats” on holiday. Within a couple of weeks the first treat was booked, Sunday Gospel Brunch at HOB…..I am really looking forward to this, Jake isn’t so sure but I know he will love it.

May 2014 As my 180 day mark arrived I got a little bit excited on MDE and somehow managed to book MVMCP despite saying we wouldn’t do it again, OK that was treat number two from my bingo win…..TCD took their own sweet time linking my accommodation so I had to wait until day 178 to book the bulk of my ADRs.

My list looks like this:

MK - Crystal Palace x 1 (B)
AK -Tusker House x 1 (B)
HS- Sci-Fi x 1 (L)
Artists Point x 2 (D)
Cape May Clam Bake x 1 (D)
MK - Be Our Guest x 1 (D)
Epcot – Tokyo Dining x 1 (D)
Epcot - Hacienda San Angel x1 (D)
1 x spare TS meal to be used on arrival day

Treat number 3 came along less than a week later when Wild Africa Trek was also booked…..the treat fund was running low now but a week later I had also booked KTTK. By the end of May I was seriously procrastinating when I should have been studying, this resulted in me needing new suitcases! Dh didn’t agree and I was encouraged to join him in the loft looking at an array or suitcases and holdalls. I picked two, lugged them down stairs……then…….

June 2014 I decided the selected suitcases were totally unsuitable and I was just going to take the two small Tripp cases I’d bought from work (bigger than cabin cases but smaller than a regular 2 week’s holiday type case). This would entail some strict cutting back on the clothes we were going to take. I decided that 4 ‘bottoms’ and 6 ‘tops’ would be enough as we did have onsite laundry facilities. Then I accidentally skived off work for ten minutes and ordered two new large Tripp cases which were less than half price on Debenhams’s website, it would have been rude not to! New cases with larger capacity also meant there was no longer a restriction on the amount of clothes so that meant I had to order two more pairs of trousers. I did a bit of studying in an effort to save a bit of money! As a reward for the studying I decided to persuade work to give me one of the medium sized Tripp cases that they had bought in as a sample…… The two large ones I had bought from Debenhams were “grape” and the smaller ones I already had were “red” so obviously that made them unsuitable! After a week of negotiations I managed to secure the medium one from work in return for a £10 charity donation (this was double the cost of the small ones I already had but still a huge bargain).

July 2014 Struggling for things to book or plan, I ended up buying the 3 day photo connect for Universal/IOA and booking and cancelling yet another hire car! ESTA was completed at around 90 days for no other reason than I was bored!

August 2014 At the beginning of August I noticed that TCD had already linked my park tickets so I was a little bit excited! I booked the 3rd September (60 day mark) off work so I could pre-book my airline seats and my FP+. A thread on The Dibb about fastpass security saw me booking this too…just because! August also brought bad, but not entirely unexpected news, I was being made redundant as the R&D facility I worked in was having all funding withdrawn and the doors were closing. The holiday was never at risk, it had been paid off a couple of months before and both DH and I had pretty much all the spending money we were planning to take (I was also going to get an enhanced severance package). There was nothing much to do at this stage apart from twiddling my thumbs until FP+ day…..oh and maybe look for a job! Well, all that was true until a fabulous Dibber posted on FB that MoneyCorp were doing a good rate and also offering a discount code…..$900 more dollars (in cash) promptly purchased. 30th August and I could finally say “That is it now”….no more spends required and everything is paid for…………or maybe not!

September 2014 saw me having a “wee look” at the option of taking the train rather than driving to Manchester, a bit of tooing and froing with a couple of experienced Trans Pennine Express Dibbers on FB and I had booked first class seats from Edinburgh to Manchester Airport for little more than it would have cost in standard class. Of course no car now meant I could cancel the parking I had booked at the Radisson Blu so that would offset the cost of the train fare. A slightly slippy finger moment meant that when I cancelled the parking I accidently upgraded our room to a Business Class one! This was 100% the fault of a Dibber who posted photos and a great review!
A week later and I realise that the “night before” our train trip down to Manchester would be hallowe’en……now Edinburgh is famous for its ghost tours but who would fancy a late night getting the train home from Edinburgh the night before getting it all the way back again to start our Edinburgh to Manchester Airport journey…..Only one solution! I booked a night in an hotel for “the night before the night before”….another wee bargain booked with Hotels.com through topcashback. We will spend hallowe’en in Motel One (diagonally opposite Waverley Station) Edinburgh

That is definitely EVERYTHING booked now...

[Guest]

Looking good Missus... who would have thought,Myra the planner! You're going to have an amazing time. Now no more booking things,pack your fancy bags if you get bored! x

[Guest]

You sound just like me... I'm always saying it will be a cheap holiday (and never is!)

[pmac]

Sounds great Myra, looking forward to reading your trip report.

[WileyCoyote]

Sounds great,you have some really lovely treats in there, it's going to be a blast. Love OKW so much, v envious. Won't be long now till you are packing those new cases !

[Disney_time]

Fab free trippie. You're going to have a lot of fun. I too like to be organised, though am a bit behind you at the mo. (mental note to stop dibbing and start looking up tours & activities to book)

I fully understand the "wee cheap holiday" because just like you we are also having one. After all, we were there last year and we are only going back because we didn't manage to fit in everything that Fort Wilderness Resort had to offer, right?

So we are having a whole week at Portofino Bay, 8 nights on Disney property, with free dining and flying home in business class and that is nothing to do with anything. The fact is that our out bound flights with Thomas Cook were very cheap and that was the first thing we booked. So that means that ours is a wee cheap holiday, doesn't it?

[purple myra]

Disney_Time... that definitely qualifies as a cheap holiday

Wiley Coyote, I'm really excited about staying at OKW

thanks for the comments folks, I've been adding bits and bobs to this as a Word document since we booked. It always amazes me how these thing just evolve!

[MrsBC]

Great pre trippie, and wonderful to hear how to get such a fab trip so veeeeery cheaply

[Clare]

Sounds like it's going to be a great trip Myra

[Ms Finkelstein]

Looking good so far! Where did you book your trains with and if it's not too cheeky - how much was it (ball park figure)? PM me if you would prefer.

We're planning on driving, but if train is cheaper then... (and I can never find cheap train fares).

Di x