Cast of characters:
Me: The 30 something birthday girl. SLP, Disney dork, resident trip planner
Nick: The 30 something husband. Passenger prince, humors my Disney obsession.
The very general idea for this trip probably started back in college when I decided that “someday” I was going to spend my birthday in Disney. Being a mid November baby working in education, this is not the easiest to do. I’ve been the weekend before my birthday a couple times, but never the actual day.
In the last year, I became particularly determined to pull this off. My birthday would be on a Sunday, so that made it doable. And after a few…rough…birthdays, and a few rough years in general, I became ok with the idea of taking a personal day to create a long weekend. My usual personal days are for things like furnace fixes, or poorly timed weddings, and I always neglect to use at least one. It’s time to do something for me. And…4 years ago, my grandmother’s funeral stuff started the day after my birthday and last year I was still struggling enough with bouncing back from (undiagnosed at that point) walking pneumonia that I couldn’t walk up a flight of stairs. So…time for an off the charts fun birthday!
Last spring when it became clear that I had the points for the flights, I got the flights and hotel booked. We’d be spending 3 nights at Port Orleans Riverside. Flights would be JetBlue nonstop MHT-MCO and Southwest MCO-BWI-MHT. Trip would be Friday night November 14 to Monday November 17. I figured we’d do MVMCP plus do a day at Animal Kingdom with the park pass that I had bought but not used for Epcot when we got rained out in February.
Then summer rolled around and it was announced that not only would MVMCP happen during our long weekend, but so would Jollywood Nights. So, over the course of the summer, I bought tickets for both events!
While we were in Ireland, JetBlue emailed saying that my wonderful 7 pm flight out of Manchester had been changed to a 7 AM flight out of MHT. WTF…that won’t work! JetBlue runs just one flight a day from MHT-MCO, so I called up JetBlue to find out if we could switch to a flight from Boston. I got the runaround about how they could do that if the two airports are “co-located” from someone who clearly does not know New England geography. She found that they were (duh) and switched me to…the 6:30 am flight. Of course this was noticed as soon as I got off the phone, so I had to call back and jump through some hoops, but eventually I got switched to the 6:29 pm flight from Boston to MCO. Surprisingly, Southwest didn’t change my flight schedule at all.
The countdown got smaller. I got more plans in place. The government shut down. I did more planning. The government stayed shut down. Flights started getting cut. I started freaking out.
Thankfully, because I hadn’t bought trip insurance before the government shut down since I was still getting things in place and wanted to be able to insure the full cost of the trip…so I was out of luck on the trip insurance front, the government reopened approximately 36 hours before go time. I took a giant leap of faith and packed a few days before the trip, and checked flight schedules every few hours from then on to see which flights were being cut, etc.
The day before the trip was a race to get all the reports finished and school stuff set for the following week. Nick packed, I did an Instacart order for delivery to the resort, and Gizmo sulked. But…I think this trip might happen!
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