theDIBB - The Long Overdue Mother and Daughter Trip - July 2019

It’s the day before Disney day!

Obviously I am ridiculously excited…..but also slightly apprehensive.

The reason I’m excited is obvious, it’s nearly time to go to Disneyland Paris! The apprehension stems from the fact that Gerard is livid that he is not coming with us. I can completely understand, I’d be livid too if I was being left behind, but this is strictly a girls trip and I spent most of the day in the run up to collecting Chloe from work assuring him that his time to go back would come, in the hope that it would make leaving easier.

Although that said, it's possible that the cat was the most upset that we were leaving him behind...

Gerard and I spent most of the day watching Disney films, we watched The Little Mermaid, the remake of Beauty and the Beast and got part way through watching The Lion King 3 (or 1.5 depending on when you bought the DVD).

In between watching films I managed to finish packing, Chloe had left her bag with me before she headed off to work that morning and I was due to collect her when she finished at 3pm.

2.45pm rolled around and I packed up the car, said a tense goodbye to Gerard, in the end he was ‘ok’ not great, but not as emotional as he was back in January when I went to DLP with the Glowtini Girls.

I stopped off en route to fill the car up with petrol to avoid motorway prices and pulled up outside Chloe’s work just after 3pm. She was ready and waiting to jump into the car….and we were off!

The traffic up to Ebbsfleet was very slow in places, particularly where they are doing the smart motorways works and the speed was limited to 50mph, but with our playlist of BTS (ask your children ;)) and Disney songs the time passed quickly and we finally arrived at the Gravesend Central Premier Inn around 4.50pm.

The lady at reception was really lovely, she complemented me on my tattoo and welcomed us back on finding that this wasn’t our first stay. Having already checked in online all we had to do was sign the slip, and let them know my car registration number, then we were given our room key. I asked for a few more tea bags and cartons of milk as there are never enough in the room 😉

Off to our room we went! Slightly disappointingly we had been allocated an old style room (back in January we’d got a refurbed room) but I love a Premier Inn regardless of what style room you get!

Our room had possibly the smallest TV I've ever had in a hotel room :pgig:

Given that it was around 5pm we still had lots of time to kill before our dinner reservation which was at 6.30pm, so we popped the telly on (finding a bit of Glastonbury coverage) and kicked back on the beds.

After a little while I unpacked the few things we would need for that evening and remembered that I had a little surprise for Chloe, something that her Aunty Anna had kindly brought back from WDW for her….

She absolutely loved them! The colour was perfect on her!

I then remembered that she had painted her nails especially for DLP and made her let me take a photo of them, they were too good not to share!

Just before 6pm we decided we’d done enough lying around and thought we’d head over to the Beefeater to see if they could seat us a little early.

We waited a little while to be seen at the dining check in area, but once they did they said it was fine to sit down earlier than our reservation.

The restaurant felt busy, we had a very large table nearby, so it was quite rowdy which I was surprised about given it was a Sunday evening.

We perused the menus for a little while and I decided I would treat myself to a gin (I’m very new to gin, so this was brave of me!) we also decided on our starters and mains and placed our order with our server.

I'd gone for the Warner's Rhubarb Gin but our server popped back a little while later to say that they didn’t have any of the ginger beer that my gin was supposed to be mixed with, that was ok though as I prefer to have it mixed with lemonade anyway.

For our starter we'd chosen the garlic bread to share

And for our mains I’d ordered the Roast Vegetable Linguine with added Salmon, and Chloe ordered the Smoky Paprika Chicken.

While waiting for drinks we set to with our planning for the week!

Drinks and garlic bread arrived

What we hadn’t bargained on with the garlic bread was it being ENORMOUS!

As you can see we were beaten :pgig:

We then waited quite a while for our mains to be brought out, I also noticed at this time that a lot of tables where people had left since we’d arrived weren’t being cleared and were left dirty for a long time, a couple hadn’t even been done by the time we left. Our server also looked rushed off her feet and I suspect she had too many tables to cover. The table next to us were getting quite irate that they hadn’t had a second drinks order taken and that their starters were taking a long time to arrive.

Our mains arrived after not waiting too long.

Both were great, although mine came with a chunk of garlic bread instead of the flatbread strips, Chloe joked that it was the rest of the garlic bread that we hadn’t managed….I think she might actually have been right :pgig:

Once we’d polished off our mains I was definitely feeling too full for a pudding but Chloe still had room and fancied the Rocky Road Sundae. So now it was our time to wait……and wait…..and wait, we kept trying to catch our servers eye as she passed so that we could order pudding but kept failing. Finally though I managed to get her attention and we ordered the sundae, along with another diet coke for Chloe as they are on free refill and she could take it back to her room after dinner. By the time we ordered pudding I’d also decided after waiting this long that I might be able to help Chloe out with her sundae so we asked for 2 spoons. Probably a good decision too on seeing it when it arrived!

So with our meal finally consumed I managed to ask for the bill (took ages again!) I settled up and we waddled back to our room, thankfully only a few feet across the car park!

Back in the room we very quickly changed into PJ’s and crashed on our beds. At 8pm I spoke to Gerard who was fine on the phone, he and Daddy were on their way back from going out for dinner so he was happily telling me all about that and about them going to the beach that afternoon after we'd left.

We popped the telly on and decided to try some Love Island….now don’t shout at me, I have never seen the appeal and I’m afraid that after the episode we ‘tolerated’ I still don’t see the appeal :pgig:

After a cup of tea and some time catching up on social media it was time for lights out and Chloe and I got to sleep shortly after 10pm :zzz: