UPDATE 22/05 - Kiewicz's Wedding/Honeymoon Nov 18 Pre Trip Report

[Chez161988]

Welcome to my first proper pre trippie (I never managed to finish my last one! ).

We still have 280 days to go but I’m far to excited to wait so thought I would make a start now! We started our countdown at 785 and a lot of things have changed since then so I’m just going to write the trippie in the order it happened.

Let’s start with the cast –
Me (Cherina), 29 will be 30 when we go. I’m a Disney obsessed childminder, who’s the main planner for all our trips although DF does help make some decisions!

Rich 29 will also be 30 when we go. He’s the laid back, just wants to have fun, love’s anything Marvel/DC and will help with some of the planning kind of guy (he’s especially good at making me see sense when I want to keep spending! )

This is us on our last trip to Disney in 2015.

And here’s the reason were going back!

Yes he actually proposed in front of the castle while we were there (Best day of my life! )….how he managed to keep what he was going to do such a secret for so long beforehand I’ll never know!

So abit of back story about how this trip actually came about…….6 months or so after we had left Disney we were sat in KFC one evening after we had been to the cinema and we were talking about ideas for what kind of wedding we wanted.

One thing we were struggling with was the fact that we have such a big circle of family and acquaintance’s/family friends that we felt we would have to invite to the wedding but that we wouldn’t really want to as we hardly speak to them. Rich came up with the idea that seen as we love Disney/Universal and Florida so much that why don’t we get married there, that way we only have to invite close family and friends and we get to get married in our favourite place! I didn’t need much convincing and thought it was a great idea so that’s how our November 2018 Wedding/Honeymoon trip came about.

So we will hopefully be flying out on the 4th of November 2018 and flying home on November 26th of November, so a total of 3 weeks there with the wedding hopefully at the beginning. We just needed to decide who we were going to ask to join us and decide exactly where we would be getting married.

The wedding details –

So it took us a few weeks to look into things and decide what we wanted and what we could afford. We realised quickly that although we would of loved to have been able to getting married at Disney itself that it just wasn’t something we could afford so we started to look at places off site.

We decided that as it’s hard enough anyway to plan a wedding never mind a wedding in another country that we would use a wedding planner. This is where we found Helen from Elegant Weddings of Orlando, Helen has been a god’s send, she’s be great answering all our question (and trust me we had loads! ), helping us decide what sort of package we wanted and where we wanted it.

In July 2016 we booked our wedding package and paid a deposit YAY!

So here’s all the details of the wedding that we have so far
Were getting married at Paradise Cove, for anyone that hasn’t heard of it its set on a lake about 10 minutes away from Disney. We both fell in love with it as soon as we saw pictures its honestly beautiful, we’re so excited to be getting married here.

We decided to just do a ceremony only package so we get private use of the area for a total of 3 hours. The wedding is going to be a 10am which will then be followed by photo’s, snacks for the guests and then a toast with the cake cutting.

After this we will be heading back to our hotel to change and the we’re hoping to spend the rest of our wedding day in Magic Kingdom, finishing the night of watching the fireworks. I’m so EXCITED!

We did want to have a wedding reception but we thought that we would enjoy being in Magic Kingdom more so we have decided to have a meal with all our guests the day after at Ohana if we can get a table big enough (Here’s hoping! )
WE ACTUALLY HAVE GUESTS!

When we first decided to get married in Florida we knew it would be a big ask for our family and friends and we knew that some wouldn’t be able to make it. We invited around 30 – 35 people, some we knew definitely wouldn’t come and others we weren’t to sure about. After giving everyone plenty of time to decide if they could make it or not we finally got our RSVP’s back and as of right now we will have 13 guest which is amazing, we couldn’t believe so many actually wanted to make the trip over to spend our special day with us.

I’ll introduce you to all our guest now
We have
My mum

She's in the middle!

My dad

My Sister Beth and her boyfriend Eddie

Rich’s Brother Ryan, Sister Laura and Laura’s Husband Sean

My Auntie Lil

My Auntie Anne and Uncle Stan

My god mother Julie and her son Jamie

My Auntie Pat

I think that’s everyone for now, we’re still waiting to hear from a few people!

Everyone is all coming for different length of time.

My mum, Auntie Pat, Julie and Jamie are all going for 10 days, they are arriving on the 1st of November until the 11th of November

Beth and Eddie are doing 2 weeks, there arriving on the 4th of November until the 18th of November

My Dad, Auntie Lil, Auntie Anne, Uncle Stan, Ryan, Laura and Sean are all just doing a week. They are arriving on the 4th of November until the 11th of November.

And as I’ve said were doing 3 weeks and using the last weeks once everyone has gone home as our honeymoon.

If you’ve made it this far you deserve a medal!

We’ve added a cruise!

Me and Rich were talking one evening about how tiring trips to Disney can be, we normally take a few extra days off work once were home to help us settle back in but because of how long were going for and because I have limited holidays with being self-employed we weren’t going to be able to do this this time so we decided (well I decided! ) that doing a 3-night Disney cruise at the end of the holiday would be a nice way to relax. I did take a few weeks of watching videos and reading trip reports before I managed to convince Rich that we should spend the extra £1000 on it though but he finally gave in in the end!

So we’re headed to Nassau and Castaway Cay on a 3 Night Merry time cruise on the 23rd of November which means we will be flying home a day later on Monday the 26th of November…..I’m soooooo excited for this. If anyone’s been on one and has any tips let me know!

As much as we would of loved to have had a room with a veranda we just couldn’t justify the extra £500 they wanted so we have gone for an inside stateroom.

I can’t wait to be here!

Some Wedding Decisions

We’ve made a few choices that I thought you’d like to see.
Firstly we have chosen our wedding colours – we have gone for white, pale blue and grey, hopefully we’ll look something like this

We have chosen these flowers but in our Wedding colours.

We now just need to choose our ceremony words (We’re writing our own vows) and the music were walking down and back up the aisle to.


Update on our plans

Well we’ve added on some extra time to the honeymoon we’re now going on the 4th of November and coming home on the 30th of November, we’ve also changed our 3 night cruise to a 4 night cruise!

I was looking at cruise prices checking that ours hadn’t gone down (as you do! ) and I noticed that we could go on the 4 night cruise instead of the 3 night cruise for the same price and even better we could have a Oceanview room. I mentioned this to Rich and we both decided that it was a good idea. It did mean though that we had to add on 3 extra days at Disney (not that I’m complaining lol! ), unfortunately Port Orleans didn’t have any rooms left for these days so we have booked to go into the All Stars Sports Resort.

We’ve also upgraded our Quick Service dining plan to the Deluxe Dining play…..i know it’s a crazy amount of food but I really wanted to try a few sit down meals but we didn’t want to be tied down to doing 19 which we would have to if we went for the normal dining plan.

It’s cost £1400 to upgrade to the deluxe which is a lot of money but we have decided that we are going to use it to pay for our Ohana meal for our wedding reception. We have potentially 23 people coming to the meal which I worked out would cost us around $1300 without the tip so instead of just paying for this OOP we are going to use 23 credits on our dining plan so the $1300 we would have paid for the meal will now pay for the upgrade which means we only really paying about £400 for the upgrade which I think is definitely worth it.

I Hope you all managed to follow that!

Flights

Trying to sort flights out has drove me mad, because we are all flying home at different time its been really hard to get us all on the same flight out for a decent price….we’ve had to make some comprise.

It took a few weeks but we managed to get most of our flight sorted

Me and Rich are flying with Virgin on direct flights – we managed to get these for £455 each which we we’re both more than happy with.

Beth and Eddie are flying with Virgin too direct flight (on the same flight as us on the way out) – they managed to get these for £510 each.

My mum, Julie, Auntie Pat and Jamie are flying with British Airways – Indirect with a stop in Gatwick – They got these for £468 Each

We’re still trying to get flights for the others but we are finding this difficult, my Auntie Anne and Uncle Stan both struggle with walking now so ideally they really want to fly direct and on the same flight out as us so we can help with luggage. We can’t find that flight for less that £800 each at the moment which is just crazy so were going to hold off booking them for now and hope that they come down in price.

Thank you so much if you made it through all that…..I’m going wedding dress shopping this weekend so will hopefully have an update soon.

[DreamsOfOrlando]

Wow sounds like you will have an incredible wedding/honeymoon! How exciting! x

[Chez161988]

A quick update for you guys

We have done our Esta which have all been approved... I still get nervous doing them even though I knew they would go through fine.

I went wedding dress shopping for the first time yesterday, I was really nervous going for some reason but it went really well. The lady helping us from the shop was lovely, we we're there for about an hour and a half.

My mum, sister and auntie Lil came with me... mum and auntie Lil ended up crying a couple of times

I ended up finding 2 dresses that I love and i'm having a hard time choosing between them. There both off the rack and the shop are holding them back for me until next weekend.

No one I know uses the Dibb so I thought I would post a couple of photo's of the dress!

Here's the 2 that I couldn't decide on!

I think I'm leaning towards the first one to be honest, it made me feel like a princess

Anyway that's all for now, i'll update with some more details soon

[Chez161988]

Originally Posted by DreamsOfOrlando

Wow sounds like you will have an incredible wedding/honeymoon! How exciting! x

See more...

Thank you, were counting down the days now

[candycat75]

How exciting! Sounds great!

[Chez161988]

Just a quick update.

I've bought my dress, I went back to the shop and tried both dresses on again. I knew instantly that it was going to be the first one. I just loved how it felt and looked.

My lovely mum bought my dress for me.

My Auntie Anne came with me and she offered to buy my veil and tiara which was so kind of her. I never expected her to do that it was such a nice surprise.

I'll hopefully have another update soon about the ADRs we want to book, were just looking through all the menus at the moment.

Thanks for reading and here's a pic of the dress with the veil and tiara.

[xmelaniee]

You look lovely in your dress! Looking forward to reading more

[Goldia]

Oh wow! I'm only just starting to catch up on your plans. I was thinking you looked beautiful in the first dress and then you picked it! I hope you have an amazing wedding, how lovely that so many of your family will be able to come out to Florida. A good idea to upgrade your dining plan it sounds like you will have a fab meal at Ohana.

[mick]

You look lovely I did prefer dress one

Joan

[Chez161988]

Originally Posted by xmelaniee

You look lovely in your dress! Looking forward to reading more

See more...

Thank you x