The 30th Birthday Bash Pre-Trip Report - September 2019
 

Hi everyone!
It’s about 6 months until our next trip and seeing as though I finished the 2018 trip report the other week, I thought why not start the next one! We fly out Saturday 31st August and come home Thursday 12th September.
If you wanted to read the 2018 one, it’s here

On to the cast list then;
Me (Lucy)



27 when we go, slightly obsessed with planning and organising with an added obsession with American food. This is my 3rd trip to the Sunshine State now!

Chris



My lovely husband, he turns 30 whilst we’re there, which is the whole point of the trip really! I think this is about his 8th visit to Florida! He’s very excited to be having his birthday whilst we’re there and he has his whole day planned out! And no, sadly that hat didn't come home with us :tongue:

This year our friends are coming with us, Josh and David. Me and Josh have been best friends since forever and him and David have been together for about 4 years now.



Josh (Right)
Also 27 when we go, never been to America before, loves anything to do with Jurassic Park.
David (Left)
28 when we go, also never been to America before, loves Harry Potter and How To Train Your Dragon.

The Plan:

No Disney this year, although we do have tickets to MNSSHP and we will be visiting Disney Springs a few times. We do have tickets to Universal and HHN, Josh is particularly looking forward to this.
So Chris’s birthday is the 2nd September which is our 2nd full day there and we have tickets to Wild Florida that includes the airboat tour, we’ve booked an early-ish morning slot for this and then will spend the rest of the day there. Chris then wants to eat at Homecoming at Disney Springs in the evening.

Asides from that, we have a beach day booked in, but I haven’t decided what beach yet, shopping will definitely happen and lots of sunbathing and chilling in the pool.

Accomodation:

We’re staying at Disney Sunset Lakes villa which belongs to the lovely Dibber Asher. We can’t get over how beautiful the villa is from the photos, so we’re very excited to see it in person! :spin:

Flights:

We have a BA fly drive booked, flying from Gatwick to Tampa. Chris is happy to drive from Tampa over to Orlando and it really helped bring the price down, car wise we have a Ford Escape or equivalent.
Both me and Chris really wanted to fly with Virgin, but unfortunately their fly drive price was £4000! As BA came out at £2000 for the 4 of us, it was a no brainer :thumbs-up

Airport plan:

We’ll be heading to Gatwick on the Friday, thanks to Josh’s dad Gary who’ll be giving us a lift down. Plan is to leave ours about 1pm, reach Gatwick roughly about 3:30 (if all goes well on the motorway).
We wanted to get down to Gatwick a little earlier then last year as by the time we got there last year and dropped the bags off and checked into our hotels, we were eating dinner quite late and the whole evening just seemed quite rushed.

We’re staying at the Hampton by Hilton, I think Chris had reward points or something and I just want to make my own waffle for breakfast :d:
We’ll also be eating dinner in Giraffe as we had a great meal here last time.

I think that covers everything, we’re kind of hoping it’s a bit of a laid back trip to celebrate Chris’s birthday which he's very much looking forward to, Josh and David are looking forward to our Universal days and I’m looking forward to not going to work for 2 weeks and getting a tan :D

I’ll update if we have any changes to our plans, but for now thanks for reading!

Update 24/03/19

Just a teeny tiny update; we've paid off the villa and our HHN, MNSSHP and Kennedy Space Centre tickets.
Forgot to mention in the pre-trip that we are also going to Kennedy Space Centre, it was something Josh really wanted to do and me and Chris were gutted we forgot to buy a SpaceX t-shirt each last year, so it was definitely on the plan.

That may well be it for updates, I did make a 100 day countdown last weekend to go up in the kitchen sometime in May and we also started a little weekly countdown on the whiteboard in the kitchen, 23 weeks as of yesterday :D

I might update again, I might not, but thanks for reading anyway :)

Update 08/07/19

Wow - I can't believe it was March I last updated this, it's crazy how fast this year is going!

So only a couple of things now, the countdown in the kitchen is down to 8 weeks and 53 days!

All the tickets have been delivered in the post and linked on the appropriate apps, so glad that has been ticked off.

Slight change on getting down to Gatwick, I previously wrote that Josh's dad Gary was going to give us a lift and pick us up when we got home, however he's unable to get the time off when we get back to come get us and we don't know anyone else nice enough to do the job.
So, we had a little play around in the car, I meant with the suitcases ;) , we figured if we put one of the back seats down we can get all 4 suitcases in the boot and one shoved on the folded seat. We know our car on the other side is bigger so no problems there!

Asides from that, this will be the last update before we go, so it'll just be a case of keeping your eyes peeled for the full report when we're back! :D

Sounds like a fabulous trip. We've stayed at Sunset Lakes twice now, and are going again in September/October. We love how easy it is to get to everything - especially Walmart! There's a new Aldi opened up quite close too. I'm toying with HHN tickets, we have a really busy trip planned, so not sure if I can fit it in!.:wave:

It’s our first time at Sunset Lakes, but last year we stayed in Lindfields so it’ll be nice knowing where everything is to us.

Maybe you could squeeze in 1 night? 😉😁

Definitely going to try - toying with going the night we have planned for RPR.:thumbs-up You'll definitely know your way round if you've stayed at Lindfields. We're staying at Lakeside Haven (Dibb villa) - the view onto the lake is just beautiful. I would love to take first timers - they will have the most amazing time. :spin: You'll be in Orlando during Magical Dining Month - might come in useful for a birthday treat ;) especially if they do the Seaworld deal again. :grin:

Yeah we’re quite excited about having first timers with us and just seeing their reactions to everything.
I had no idea Orlando had a magical dining month, I might have to do a little reading about this 😁