2 weeks peace for our neighbours

[Guest]

Hi all, having spent weeks and weeks reading all the pretrip reports and the trip reports, i thought i would try and do ours.

Our party includes;
Dave, DH, aged 44, chief financer for our trip and a disney fanatic, probably more excited than the kids. has spent hours and hours watching disney planner dvd and has phoned the travel agents so many times he has his own directline to them. DH was the instigator for this trip after asking the kids if they wanted to go! errr doh... which child wouldn't want to go! Just DW to persuade now, which as you see wasnt too hard!,

Tina, DW,aged 40 (only just), chief organiser for this trip, who agreed to this trip after an whole minute of canjoling from the kids and 30 seconds from DH.

Charlie, DD1, aged 11, preteenager, perfect child providing she
can eat very very often!, she is due to start secondary school in september and will be there for a whole 2 weeks before we whisk her away to florida, well thats a good start for a new school... not!, the only time we are going to have problems is if she is tired or hungry.

Joshua, DS1,aged 10, who is a very happy boy providing everything
is going his way!, his only interest is what he can have, watch out the lego shop cos he will be armed with his own spending money and this is where it will be spent, every last cent and probably more.

Georgina, DD2, aged 8,who is a mini mommy, when she's good, she's
very very good but when she's bad, run for cover!, she is extremely bossy and will be trying to organise who sits where on the plane, who sleeps where in the villa, even down to who sits where on the rides, watch out disney CM's, she is the most bluntest, straight talking child you will ever meet.

Jake, DS2, who is daddys little shadow, and is always very happy
providing he can have whatever his eyeball see!, as the baby of the family he has been spoilt a lot more than the others and seems to get away with a lot more, he can also turn the tears onto order.


After going to DLP 4 times DH decided to take the plunge and ask the kids if they would like to go disney USA, which of course when they had finished jumping up and down and yelling yes it was time to work on mommy after all DH needed my help to budget this trip so they have got to take me havent they? So after a resounding yes from all parties we decided to start looking into prices etc, and we managed to book a trip to florida for 2 weeks including direct flights with virgin, okay its only economy but hey thats fine with us, hire of a private villa with a pool for the grand price of £3900.00, we decided that cos the cost of the holiday was sooo good we would add the car hire too, another £511.00 and what the hell we may as well have the insurance as well, theres another £40.00, by now the budget of £4000.00 is well and truly shot... so after selling our 3rd car for £5,200.00 we paid this off in full straight away, yay for us... well we only need 2 cars dont we? So there we are on the 13th October sitting in a travel agents handing over nearly all the cash we had got for selling our "spare" for a fortnight in florida, everything seems to be going great doesnt it... oh c**p i spoke too soon...

The beginning of november DH came home from work looking very glum, yes in his had was his redundancy notice, luckily it didnt take effect until june so at least we had a lot of notice, then horror of horrors I had my employment contract cancelled (posh way of saying i got the sack lol), the reason you ask? well having 4 kids all of school age head lice had been a real problem and i was having to treat my kids hair every week and was still finding 1 or 2 in their hairs every week, so off i trundled into school to ask them if there was a problem with nits this year, the answer no more than usual, so where was they coming from? Yes you guessed it i was bringing them home from work, one of my colleagues had a head full of nits and i was bringing them home and passing them on to my kids and they were taking them into school, ohhh the embarassment... therefore, i did what any self respecting person would do and sent my colleague a text to tell her she had visitors and would she check her hair as i had kids at home and didnt want to bring them home, the words horse, stable and door come to mind, and for this little escapade i got fired. Now i must tell you i worked in a doctors surgery!

So there we are the holiday booked and paid for and DH had his redundancy notice and omg the embarassment i got fired, how would we afford the rest of tickets and spending money?

Well after discussing for some time how this was going to be possible i decided that as i havent got a job now, i really wouldnt need my car and would sell my lovely sports car and settle for a much older car with more than 2 seats in it, so after clinging to the bumpers as the new owners drove my "pulling car" up the road, DW suggested that we head off to the nearest disney shop and purchase our 14 day disney park tickets, so there we was stood in a disney store just after christmas with the sales on, well what was a girl to do? so i done what any self respecting person would do, i grabbed a basket and started filling it, well i needed a little treat didnt i and i had to get the kids in the mood with a little disney! DH stood at the checkout going purple in the face, I couldnt tell if this was from the heat in the shop or the amount of cash i had just spent lol, we asked for the passes and where told to go and see the supervisor at the end of the shop who told us if we came back tomorrow she would do us 14 days for the price of 7, yay us... we were saving a fortune and coming back tomorrow, so a quick look around the shop to earmark what i was going to buy tomorrow and we headed home. Now i'm sure DH is a mind reader cos at 8.00 am the next morning whilst i was still in the land of nod he sneaked back to the disney shop and purchased our tickets, another £1200.00 well spent.

So thats the flights, villa, car hire, insurance and disney park tickets got, so far so good, now what else could i sell to raise much needed funds?

DH then decided to check the kids passports were going to be okay, and yep you guessed 3 of the passports expired in october, 1 week after we arrived back, so we needed 3 new passports at a cost of £150.00. Time to sort out the garage and start selling on ebay, what a great idea, a motorbike stand £78.00, old laminate flooring £120.00, psp games £38.00,yippeee we had the cash for the passports, so off they went and just 5 days later we received 3 brand new shiny passports. Yeahhhhh we can all go now, just needed to do the esta forms and print them off, no problem at all eh? no we had run out of ink in the printer so another £30.00 for ink cartridges.

So here we was the end of january and thinking we were doing absolutely brilliant cos we had paid for the cost of the holiday and got our disney park passes and we all had valid passports, we just didnt have any holiday clothes, or spending money and had still to sort out how to get to the airport and back again.

Now normally i wouldnt shop at next cos the kids grow so quick, but hey I had an account with them (from years ago), it had a nil balance and they had a sale on... cue online shopping spree... and i must point out at this stage i was hyperventilating at the thought of new clothes... yippeeeeee... of course i went over the top and spent a whopping £850.00 but i havent spent anything since on holiday clothes so it probably worked out cheaper that way, just got to pay it back now lol.

We had also been looking into how much a taxi would cost us for airport transfers and had been quoted £200.00! OMG a minibus would do not a bloody limo, as long as i didnt end up pushing it up the m54 i'm not bothered what we travelled in. This was a no go, After surfing the net for 3 weeks we managed to book a meet and greet for £72.00 good result...

So with the flights, villa, car hire, insurance, passports, holiday clothes, disney park passes and transport to and from airport sorted and paid for, we set about raising funds for spending money, can you see what we are missing yet?

DD1's birthday in march and she had decided that rather than spend £100 (our birthday limit) on presents for her, could she have £50. on presents and the rest in dollars, yippeee she got $110. in total


DS1 birthday in april had seen DD1 with her dollars and decided to do the same, yipppeee another $110.

DD2 birthday in may had seen the other 2 with their dollars and hey presto she decided to to do the same, yippeee another $110.

DS2 poor little man his birthday isnt till october... so we got him $10 in $1 nominations and he thinks he is rich lol

So there we were just hitting may and we were struggling by this point to raise any spending money for adults, we had worked out that we would need $2000 just for food and drinks for the fortnight for all of us, and we would want at least another $2000 for soveneirs etc.

Now at this point i really thought the family curse was going to come back and get us yet again!, let me just explain that in the last 5 years we have had a premature birth (me), we were stitched up with a huge mortgage and ended up going bankrupt and lost our house and cars and lived in a caravan for 5 months with the premature baby (social services would have had a party had they known), lost my mom to cancer, had 3 cancer scares myself, lost my dad to cancer 18 months after my mom, endured a massive family fued (to date still nobody speaking), mother in law had a stroke due to her being a alcoholic and had the pleasure of her living with us in our council house for 6 months, before being successfully deposited back at her own home, DS1 was involved in a horrific dog savaging and spent 2 weeks in hospital having plastic surgery on his face, and having his head and his arms and armpits sewned back together, and now with me being fired and DH redundancy notice things didnt look good... Had we sacrificed nearly everything for nothing?

Well the gods were looking down on us and decided that yes we probably did deserve a break at this point so hey presto late one saturday night, another disturbed night with me panicking on how to pull the rest of the money off, my darling little dog, jessie decided she would help us in her own way, with a little help from DD1's dog, alfie, both pure yorkshire terriers, and produced for us 4 beautiful healthy puppies, now i know that this probably sounds terrible but god what a lifeline for us, 4 puppies worth £300 each,omg we might actually be able to do this. yippeee... we're still going, we will be able to eat and drink, no soveniers as yet but hey we can eat...

Now DH's redundancy was within spitting distance and as he had only been there just under 2 years he wouldnt get any redundancy pay..., and then low and behold at the beginning of june he was informed that they would pay him 2 months salary in lieu of redundancy,... yippeeee we now had another £2000 for spending money, things are going very good, where's the catch?

Now as DD1 is starting secondary school and needed new uniforms, dictionarys, pe kits, we decided to start doing car boots every sunday to raise the funds to pay for these, what a little money earner, for the next 6 weeks DH was DD1 was up at the crack of dawn to get their little pitch in a field and managed to earn enough cash to pay for DD1 uniform and new uniforms for the rest of our kids. result!

So here we are now at the beginning of august with only 7 weeks to go and do you remember i asked could you spot what i had forgotten, well our planner has us going to universal studios and island of adventure! now you can guess... yes we had forgotten the flaming tickets... another £486.00, how the hell was we meant to raise that? Back into the garage and the shed to see what we could find to sell, hey whats that smack bang in the middle, yippeee, we dont need it this year (me), yes but we will need it next year (DH), we can replace it next year with a better model (me), we wont be able to afford it(DH), oh yes we will(me), well we better had(DH), yep the blasted trailer tent could go on ebay... yippeee no more camping for these troopers... £502.00 SOLD! Now we can go to islands of adventure and universal studios and with a little tweaking we even had enough for a night at premier inn the night before we travel, OMG this is really going to happen!


We are flying from manchester airport on the 25th september, OMG i can't believe its nearly here lol, We are going to try and do check in on line for our baggage, but as i have never done this before its anybody's guess as to whether i can actually do it lol

We are all really excited as our youngest son has never been on a plane before, (well he has but neither he or i realised it until 2 weeks after we got home lol, my little soveneir from spain, u know how it is, wet afternoon, dont speak spanish lol).

We have done a plan and posted on dibb, just for my own satisfaction really so i can see exactly what we have got planned and just so we can try and do some kind of budgeting for meals, drinks etc.

We have given the kids their own spending money which you can guarantee will be gone by day 3 and we will be hearing them fateful words "mom/dad can i have?" or DD1 "but i simple can't live without it".

So here we are with 4 weeks to go and the flights, villa, transfers to and from airport, overnight hotel for the day before departure, all passports sorted, 14 day disney park passes, 2 park 14 day bonus tickets for US and IOA, DD1 $230 spending money, DS1 $210 spending money, DD2 $205 spending money and DS2 $200 spending money and wait for it DW and DH $4000 spending money and $2000 money for food, drinks etc..

Now if anybody can think of anything that i may have forgotten please let me know..

We are all packed and ready to go , just in case the travel agent rings and asks if we would like to go now! not likely...

I will be adding to this thread on a weekly basis until take off!

Thanks for reading.

Less than 3wks left HURRAY, totaly worn out dvd planning from Disney, boohoo, but kids are so excited so done trips to East Mid and Bham Airports before they go back to school ( more for DH than anyone i think). Car boots have given me (sorry us ) a bit more spending money so look out for a mum with lots of bags lol. Keep going over plans and now put into my Disney bible along with details of villa ( we found out where t is ), but now have a hot line to travel agents as it seems everyday we are phoning to see if our tickets are here ( i know we are sooo sad).
Keep you all informed when they turn up as you will all be first to know ( you will here our screams ).

[evergreen]

great pre-trippie look forward to the updates,

[Sandra & co]

enjoyed reading, will check back for updates!

[ROO]

Look forward to the updates, certianly sounds like you have worked hard for this holiday.

[coulty47]

Hope you all have a great time , you sound like you have worked hard to get there. You actually go the day we get back to Manchester, we will try not to be late back for you..

[Lisa-72]

Wow, can't wait for the actual trip report now.

[Guest]

Wow! Fab pre-trippie! Can't wait until you do the actual trip report. How old is DS2? Bless him with his $1 notes.

[Guest]

Thank you very much to everybody for their positive comments of our pretrip report, DS2 is only 5 years old, as DH and DD2 done yet another carboot yesterday, we have nipped to the travel agent today and got another $135.00, the butterflies are enormous now, and i wake up every morning having spent the night dreaming about being in orlando lol

[Guest]

yes please, would you mind if you came back a touch early as im not sure i can wait much longer, we are all so excited, our cases are packed and every time we get any spare cash we all trundle down to the travel agents and exchange it for dollars, my DD1 went with £10.00 on saturday lol.

[Guest]

DH here, just got MORE dollars today, getting really excited and trying not to show it to the wife lol