theDIBB - October 18 Its Meant To Be A Cheapie

Hi welcome to our Pretrip - didn't manage to write one last time, but I did at least manage to get to the end of the report. This one will be a bit shorter so here's hoping I can keep up.

We head off on Friday 12th and I've yet to tackle the packing... it's going to be a busy old week.

That's me (Anouska) and Daniel. I've obviously been on the wine or “pool juice” there.

This is Scott and Abbie.

We are flying from Edinburgh, via Gatwick to MCO with BA. We have a car too as we got a good price for a fly drive. The only downside is we need to get up at 4am as our flight is at 6.40am! We need to book a taxi to take us to the airport - we are only 20 minutes away.

Originally after booking the flights I had booked our whole stay at Cabana Bay in a family suite but after our summer trip we started tweaking as we wanted to have express passes for at least a couple of days so I started pricing up a few options.

I fancied club level after reading ScottishNellies trip report and after a bit of negotiation we agreed on 2 nights. So the plan is that we will stay our first night a the Holiday Inn Express by Seaworld as Scott had a reward night, 3 nights at Cabana Bay, 2 nights at Hard Rock Club Level, then 5 nights at Grande Villas at Lake Buena Vista. It seems a lot but we are pretty used to moving around after our last few holidays and I've got the knack of organising our stuff in packing cubes to minimise the effort once we are there.

I can't wait to stay here

And here...

And I'll be happy when we get to Grande Villas as I'll see my old pal...

That's right I'm a sucker for an American washer dryer.

We upgraded our summer Universal tickets to 3 park annual passes so we don't need to spend any money on tickets... so it's a cheapie really.

Well until we all felt a bit sad about not going to Mickeys Not So Scary Halloween Party... it was really expensive and last year we got tickets only for the price to come down after we bought them. I kept checking the prices, no signs of any reductions, booooo! I checked out as things as I could think of to see if I could get them with reward points etc but no luck. Then inspiration struck me, we have a wee coin bank on the kitchen windowsill and we put all our £2 coins in it.

He had a grand total of £250 tucked away and so we bribed the kids to some jobs round the house to earn another £70 between them and I coughed up for 4 adult tickets as Abbie is 10 now. We are going on the 18th and we can't wait - we had a brilliant time last year. I wonder if we will manage to score more candy than this?

Here it is all neatly sorted.

We won't be doing any Halloween Horror Nights as we are all wusses, this is much more our style.

We are looking forward to Volcano Bay, sampling the Club Level treats (of course I mean the free wine), a First Watch breakfast, hopefully a visit to Cracker Barrel, some shopping and hopefully lots of sunshine! We don't have too many plans beyond this other than to relax.

Fingers crossed I manage to post almost live! Thanks for getting this far, not long till Friday, yay!