[DollyDimples]

Why now?

As I said earlier we knew after our 2005 trip that we would be back to Orlando but that we would want all our children to be tall enough for all the rollercoasters. Roll on lots of years and DS is our only child and he was getting close to reaching the magic correct height. We had a bit of a discussion and considered going in 2018 and ended up pushing the date to 2019. This was for a few reasons, firstly would DS be quite tall enough, secondly we would both have had our 40th birthday but then, Star Wars might be open by then (we were having this discussion around the end of 2016 when the date was just a straight forward 2019), it would give us an extra year to save and finally DS would be in his summer holiday between Primary School and Secondary School and it just seemed right to do a holiday that we had waited so long for at such an important change point for him.

How long?

As I mentioned before our only previous trip was for 14 days. We knew that we wanted to Do almost the whole shebang (hence the title of this report). The only main attractions which we aren’t fussed about are Discovery Cove and Legoland. Discovery Cove just seems like a lot of extra money on top of the other park tickets and Legoland we have been to Legoland and Windsor a few times and DS has loved it but has now outgrown it a bit. This left us with the following on our list:
Magic Kingdom, EPCOT, Animal Kingdom, Hollywood Studios, Typhoon Lagoon, Blizzard Beach, Islands of Adventure, Universal Studios, Volcano Bay, Seaworld, Busch Gardens, Aquatica and Kennedy Space Station.

So 13 places in total! We knew if we really wanted we could get round them all in two weeks but we also knew that sometimes things don’t quite go to plan, the parks are bigger and busier than when we went 14 years ago and also we are 14 years older and will also have a child with us this time. All this quickly made us realise that we needed to go for three weeks rather than two. This also made the next choice for us.

What Time of Year to Go?

DH is a teacher so whether we would be tempted to take DS out of school to allow is more flexibility on the time of year to go or not doesn’t matter. The only time DH can be off for 3 weeks is during the school summer holiday so that was that decision made. DS and DH both finish up for the summer holidays at lunchtime on Friday 28th June and DH goes back to work on Monday 19th August. So those were the dates that we had to work between. We tend to go away closer to the start of the holidays (before the English School Holidays) as availability and prices tend to be a bit better for us in those first couple of weeks. As DS finishes primary school this year we were unsure if we would be doing anything with his friends on the last day of school (we still are) so we decided that we set a departure date sometime between Sunday 30th June and Sunday 7th July.