The planning started early in 2008, a trip to Walt Disney World to celebrate my 40th Birthday, but first we needed to plan the trip and to invite the guests, because what's a birthday trip without guests. Hmmm….who to invite? Well our friend Sue was also celebrating a 40th Birthday this year and she and her husband Mike seemed like likely candidates. Then there were our friends from NY, Liz and Julian, and would you just go figure it, Julian was turning 40 this year too. Ok, now that we had a few people to celebrate with, what were we going to do on the trip? Carol, my wife, said “plan it anyway you want, hey, you’re the one who’s getting old!” Did She just say I was getting OLD! Well OK then, to me that sounded like, “the sky’s the limit, cost is no object, you deserve anything your heart desires.” (Not quite sure that was what she meant, but hey, she's the one who called me OLD!) I decided to look into a land and sea trip. We would use our DVC points for the land portion and then book a 3 day Disney Cruise separate. OK, we have the plan, now we need to decide on the when.
Since Carol can’t travel till after April because of work, May would be the earliest we could go. I picked the week of May 11, started checking out availability for DVC resorts and pricing out the cruise, wow, some great availability and the cruise prices were pretty cheap. I wanted to stay in a veranda room (Carol said to plan it and why hold back) since we had never stayed in one before. So I started floating the dates. Seeing as we are what my friend Sue calls, D.I.N.Ks (Double Income No Kids), it seems that I had chosen the week of Mothers Day. So, what to do, what to do? We decided since the prices were so good and the week seemed to be really slow, we decided to work around it. Carol and I planned to celebrate with my mother the weekend before and the weekend after to celebrate with hers, with seven kids her mom wasn’t even going to notice we weren’t there. (LOL) Sue decided that they would come the Monday after; seeing she felt that it was not a good idea to drop a 3 and 10 year old on her mother’s door step on Mothers Day. Liz and Julian were only planning on coming on the cruise, so they were in with the date. WOOT WOOT! The trip was really starting to take shape.
Now there was some other incidental planning in there, a few invites (Bill!) who were not able to make it, booking airfare, rental car, ording T-Shirts but we were definitely on our way to what hopefully would turn out to be a truly Magical Birthday Trip at Walt Disney World. Since the plan will be revealed as I post the daily adventures, I will leave the details in the posts to follow.
