Cast of Characters:
Me: 36, school speech pathologist, Disney fan, enjoys the Harry Potter books, my biography doesn’t really change from trip to trip
Nick: 35, my husband, now selling Fords to commercial accounts at the same dealership where he used to sell Toyotas to us regular people, because his biography changes all the time. Enjoys big roller coasters and sleeping on vacation.
So…last year, Nick lost a LOT of weight. Like almost 100 pounds. With the weightloss, we decided it was time to take that trip to Universal Orlando, especially with another park being added in a couple years to drive up the prices further. I wanted to see the Harry Potter stuff, Nick wanted to see if the coasters were as good as he remembered. He was last at Universal in about 2006. I did half a day at Islands of Adventure in 2012 (and a family trip with some time in both parks in 2004). That’s the extent of the Universal history for the two of us.
Towards the end of last year’s insane school year (which may have been surpassed by this one…), we got a handle on exactly what we wanted to get out of this trip, and got some things on the books. And then we changed some of those things MANY times, because inflation started to hit hard, a dog died, we got another dog, Nick needed wisdom teeth removed in two separate surgeries (yeah…) and well discounts. At one point I held like 4 different hotel reservations for the same 4 day period as I weighed my options.
As the countdown got smaller, I booked and rebooked rental cars almost daily, playing the price drop game. I did the same with hotels, as Rakuten offered better cashback, and as some serious cashback offers popped up on my credit card. We debated exactly how we were going to spend our non-Universal time, and less than 2 weeks before go-time, added a day at Epcot. It was a trip that was very much in flux to the end.
In the end, our plans were as follows:
Sunday February 26: Fly nonstop with Southwest from MHT-MCO on the 7:30 am flight. Check into Universal’s Portofino Bay Resort, explore the resort a bit, have dinner at CityWalk, and call it an early night.
Monday February 27: Start the day at Islands of Adventure, end the day with the Mardi Gras parade at Universal
Tuesday February 28: Check out of Portofino. Hit whatever we hadn’t done yet in the Universal parks. Eventually make our way to our final (or so we thought) hotel of the trip: Towneplace Suites Flamingo Crossing
Wednesday March 1: Breakfast at Trattoria Al Forno at Disney’s Boardwalk followed by some non-park time at Disney Springs and Trader Sam’s
Thursday March 2: Epcot for Flower and Garden Festival
Friday March 3: Sea World
Saturday March 4: Fly nonstop with JetBlue from MCO-BOS. Originally this was an evening flight, but on Christmas Eve, JetBlue eliminated my nice early evening flight and stuck us on one with a 38 minute connection in DC…in March. So I had to change flights…and we ended up with a late morning nonstop home. Or did we?
The day before the trip, I did 24 hour check in. Being vacation week travelers and late buyers of EBCI (well…like November because I wanted my card reimbursements to reset), we had been granted something like B12 and B13 for boarding positions. I took advantage of a different card reimbursement benefit (know your benefits, people!) and snagged the one upgraded boarding, I could, for Nick, thinking he could save me a seat. He got A12, I believe. Then we ran around…packing, doggy behavior class, dropping off Snow the wildman golden doodle at the pet resort and Gizmo the cat-dog at my in-laws, passed off my spare key to my mom, the car transporter and eventually settled in to watch the final Harry Potter movie and watch the snow fall, knowing we’d have to be up earlier than anticipated the next morning, because where did this snow come from?! It’s barely snowed all winter, until this week!
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