Little man's 5th Birthday Trip

[Pinkpoochie]

So we are about the embark on our first family trip to Disney, so thought I would do a belated pre trippie report ( since we have been back over a week ;-) )

Our family consists of me, Emma 40, Iain Darling husband 41, and our son Little Man who will turn 5 whilst we are on holiday. We have travelled to the Caribbean and other areas for the last 14 years and have visited, Cuba, Mexico, Dom Rep, Cape Verde, Porto Santo and Cape Town. My DH and I visited Florida in 1999 with his family, although I remember very little about the trip to be honest!

After being ill in DR in June 15, I returned from holiday feeling cheated and still poorly, so I was keen to book our next trip. Initially I looked into Fuerteventura, for Feb half term but after some research decided that the weather was too inconsistent and didn't want another disappointing holiday. The next consideration was Cuba again, LM has never been and really wanted to go on a speedboat like Nan & Grandad! Unfortunately flights to Cayo Coco in Cuba are only once a week, so it was either 7 days or 14. I didnt want to go that far for 7 days, and didnt have enough leave for 14. I happened to get an email from Tripadvisor with some flight prices which prompted me to look at Orlando. I knew I only had enough leave for about 9 days, so had a play with the Skyscanner calendar and came up with a direct flight from Man - MCO the week before half term, returning on 18th giving us 3 days to recover from the jetlag before heading back to work/school. I had done a bit of flight searching when I booked a trip for my DH 40th the year before, but flights were coming in at around £1800 back then. So much to my surprise, I was stunned to see that for the 3 of us direct with VA the price was £1100. Not 100% sure if this was a good price, so I put a message on tripadvisor forum and the response was an overwhelming "I hope you have booked it!" I text DH to see if he was up for it, and he said "Book it if its what you want to do" lol typical man! So that is what I did. Booked the flights with Budgetair, £700 cheaper than booking direct with VA. I was a bit dubious about booking because I had never heard of them, and expected to be stung for luggage fees or something at a later date. However, we had no issues at all. Once we got a reservation number we logged onto VA website and booked our seats in the bubble. Once I saw our names in black and white on VA website I relaxed and looked forward to the planning.

I am definitely a holiday research freak, and will find out everything I want to know before I arrive in my destination. Where to eat, best places to stay, and activities etc well this trip to Florida fed my holiday research appetite for the next 6 months. As I said earlier I had visited Disney 18 years ago before we were married. It was a multi generation family trip with people aged from 12 to 75, and we flew via Canada with a stop off at Gander. It was a difficult trip as it was almost impossible to please everybody, with people wanting to do different things, but sharing one minivan meant we had to everything together for the whole 2 weeks! Maybe this is why I remember hardly anything about it, your mind blocks out trauma doesn't it! Lol I remember we did the first week in Orlando and crammed everything into 6 days, then 7 days near Tampa in a extended family members villa where there was literally nothing to do, so we were bored. This time we would do everything our way!

We planned on keeping the trip a secret from our 4 year old until the day of the flight. However, he was so excited that he was going to Cuba, that he never stopped talking about it. He loves his beach holidays, so I began to get a bit worried about telling him we were doing Disney and there wouldn't be a beach. 2 weeks before leaving we decided to drop the bombshell, so we didn't have a tantrum at the check-in desk. His initial reaction when we told him that there was a problem with the Virgin Plane we were going on, and that it wasn't flying to Cuba, "well which plane are we going on then?" We explained we weren't going to Cuba, but going to Florida to see Mickey Mouse. He looked horrified "I don't want to go to Florida, I want to go to Cuba and go on a speedboat" haha! Of course it literally took 2 minutes for the realisation to hit home, and he was super excited to find out that he would be having a birthday breakfast with Mickey Mouse!

So during my endless days and nights of researching I stumbled across this website called The Dibb... Other crazy holiday planners just like me! Perfect! The site has been invaluable in planning the holiday of a lifetime... Thank you to everyone who answered my queries in the run up to the trip!

[Rac20]

What a beautiful photo. Looking forward to hearing about the rest of your trip.

[debsym62]

I will look forwards to seeing more of your trip.

[Guest]

We go in 7 weeks and this will be our first time. Our wee boy will turn 5 when we are there too. Do you have any tips or recommendations you can share?