All that stand between us and the airport are three days at work and roughly 3.5 million tasks and logistical challenges that we must complete. We’re almost there.
My to do list is longer than a thing that is very long and that’s just at home before I even think about the prep and angst involved at work.
The cases are out, packing has started and I’ve spent roughly half of the national debt on pet food to ensure those looking after them don’t run out whilst we are away. The dogs, Woody and Bean, are going off to separate sitters (foolish souls) whilst we have a house sitter coming here to keep the cats alive. If they don’t start eating less then next time we might not bother.
The last few stressful pre-trip days have started and whilst we complete all those tasks, we, as anyone travelling to Orlando at this time of year must do, are keeping our eyes on the weather over there hoping we can avoid a hurricane. It is looking pleasingly quiet on that front at this stage, although the weather has looked VERY wet over there recently. Bring it on. Have poncho, will endure.
The other thing I have seen on my “socials” are endless folks telling me how quiet the parks are.
I cannot bring myself to believe them. I’ve been going for too many years now to ever think the parks have quiet times anymore. I know September is comparatively quieter than most other times of year, but I just can’t allow myself to get my hopes up that we’ll be enjoying tolerable wait times on this trip.
As I said a couple of posts ago there was a lot of availability for our ADRs which is a good sign I guess, but I am taking nothing for granted.
In non holiday news, Willow is doing well, as is Rebecca, bearing in my mind she is still recovering from the operation/delivery. The boys are obsessed with their new sister, as are we all. Overall she’s been sleeping a lot and behaving herself as we all get used to the new addition to our family.
You know I don’t believe there is such a thing as “the right age” to take kids to WDW. You take them whenever you can afford to, but I think three weeks old may just be a little too soon, even if Rebecca could travel, so they will all have to stay at home this time. On this trip we will, for the first, have a girl grandchild to be buying presents for before we return. Exciting stuff.
If you want to, you can follow along as usual if I remember to post stuff to the Mkingdon Facebook page and whether you do or you don’t, I’ll see you back in a few weeks to tell you all about it.
This week’s title is one that will resonate with the kids and fans of Lena Martell. Ask your Grandad.
As tradition dictates, before any WDW trip, any planner worth their salt is required to outline their movements (bowel, optional) for every day of the holiday. I know to the handful of folks reading this, the concept is familiar and does not sound weird at all. I had a reminder this week that this is absolutely not the case for “normal people” when someone asked me about my upcoming holiday and I overshared slightly about the level of obsession and planning that goes on in this weird Disney online community. This is a safe space.
So here we go….
Day One
Travel Day. We are flying with Virgin from Manchester. Since booking, Virgin have moved our flight back one hour so we don’t take off until just after midday. I await their compensation for robbing us of sixty minutes in Orlando. This flight time now gives us a quandary. To get to Manchester airport from our house you have to navigate the M61/M60 and the infamous concrete tunnels and carnage that greet anyone daring to merge from 61 to 60 at rush hour. Then there is the 5mph crawl past the Trafford Centre.
I would say we need to be at the airport around 8.30, a good four hours ahead of the flight. In normal times that would be a 7.30 set off from our house, but in rush hour, in the first week after schools go back, we may have to leave 2-3 business days ahead of our flight. So I fear we will need to bite the bullet, be up very early and leave the house before 6.30am. It’ll be grim and I intend to scour the internet for alternative routes before the day.
We land late afternoon and I have sorted out the skip the desk Alamo thing so I am sure that will go without a hitch. Then it will inevitably be pouring with torrential rain as we try to battle the rush hour I4. The joys of a travel day.
Once at the villa, we will head out to do a supermarket run (I am mildly terrified of the costs involved for that as my social media feeds are just Americans telling me it cost them $100 for three apples and a box of “gram crackers”. Why they can’t say Graham or Craig is an eternal mystery.) We also plan to go out to eat. With no young kids on the trip this time we all may be awake enough to dine out and if so we aim to do that at Sickies on the 192. Their fried pickles are the best way to start any holiday.
Day Two
You know this is a Magic Kingdom day right? We’ll be there as early as we can be and not as early as I’d like and will be there until 6pmish when they throw us out as there is a MNSSHP on that evening. We are fairly happy this is case as crowds may be lighter and we’ll be tired by that time. We plan to eat at The Cheesecake Factory at Lake Buena Vista that evening.
It is harder to book a table from the UK than it is to do something that is very hard, as their online thing requires a US phone number. I really did not fancy the potential wait for a table on a Friday evening after an early start and a full MK day so I went old school and emailed their customer services team. It took a while but they did reply and booked us in for 7.45pm.
After our meal I suspect we will be in a food coma and ready for bed.
Day Three
The planning laws say this should be a rest day to get over the travel day after the adrenaline fuelled first day. For reasons too long to document here, mainly centred around us needing a rest day on day three as we intended to have a few drinks watching Yeeha Bob on this evening, we broke all the rules and put Animal Kingdom in here. The rule book states that should not be a rest day and instead be a theme park day, it should have been Epcot, as the parks must be visited in the order they opened, but AK closes early and we’d need to be out of the park to get over to Port Orleans.
The recent rule change around off site scum going to resorts make us now assume we will not be welcomed at POR, so instead we are going to the Grand Floridian to watch a favourite ex-Jellyrolls pianist, called Michael play in the lobby there. To get us into the place we have booked 1900 Park Fayre for dinner around 5pm. We could have booked an ADR at POR of course to get us in to see Bob’s show, but we’d planned to see Michael play at the GF *as well/first* before heading to Yeeha Bob so our ADR at the GF had already been made. So Bob lost out. That sentence wins the prize for most use of abbreviations in the world ever.
We will have a few posh drinks and watch him until we are ready for bed. Yeeha Bob will miss us as much as we will miss him.
Day Four
Here comes the rest day. Recently we had more upsetting news as we heard that Typhoon Lagoon won’t be open. That is our go to for an early trip rest day, but again we are scuppered.
We might go to Blizzard Beach but more likely we will just use the resort’s pool and clubhouse and have a relaxing pool day instead.
Emily secured us a 7pm ADR for Beaches & Cream, mainly to get us access to the Boardwalk area so we can have an evening stroll around it and may be a drink or two too.
Day Five
We are back on track and heading to Epcot. Our first visit of the trip here means we do Future World. We have the evening loosely planned at this stage. The general idea is to leave the park when we get hungry for some tea and head to Celebration.
We haven’t been for a good few years and there are at least three eateries we are interested in trying there. There’s a new brewery place, a Mexican and the 80’s themed diner. If we do leave the park and get to Celebration we will try whichever of this is available and looks the best bet.
Day Six
Now things start to get a little complex. Emily and Mikey check in at the Polynesian today for their two day 30th birthday treat for Mikey. I have a rest day planned for Louise and I so I will drop them off and head back for another pool day back at the resort.
Our dining plans for the evening are simple. With Emily being a veggie our chances to dine at The Outback for a decent steak are limited so we will do that whilst she is otherwise engaged.
Day Seven
With it just being the two of us again today I have pencilled in Hollywood Studios as it is Louise’s favourite and if we need to buy Lightning Lanes it’ll be cheaper for just the two of us!!
Our evening plans are loose again. I have an option in the plan but we’ll see how we feel. I quite fancy a place called Ole’ Red up at Icon Park. We have never been to that neck of the woods. The food there looks good and they have live country music on. Recently I have found myself inexplicably listening to Absolute Country (thank goodness for the last two letters) on my car journeys so I’d like to see some live.
Day Eight
Today sees Emily and Mikey move again, this time up to Universal to stay at the Hard Rock for that glorious Front of line access and two days in the parks there. If I am feeling generous I will pick them up from the Poly and drive them up.
We are planning another rest day today, and in the evening we will meet up with them at City Walk for a meal together at Margaritaville before they head into HHN and we have a wander around City Walk.
Day Nine
On their second Universal day we have nothing planned. We might do another rest day if that’s what we fancy or need or we might head into a park. Look at me winging it!
In the evening we will head up to City Walk again to collect Emily and Mikey and we’ve booked the four of us a meal at Cafe Tu Tu Tango on IDrive for absolutely no reason whatsoever. This is one of our “let’s try somewhere new to eat” ideas.
Day Ten
All four us are headed to Hollywood Studios today. It’s a Saturday so I suspect coughing up for LLs will be a must.
We have a late lunch/early dinner booked at Sci-Fi Diner with a Fantasmic Dinner Package just to make sure it rains hard enough to see it cancelled.
Day Eleven
Today is a food day. The only way for us to fit in a couple of our dining musts was to eat ourselves to death on one day. We have brunch booked at The Boathouse at 11am and then in the evening we are eating at Wine Bar George. Pray for us.
In between, we will either head back to the pool or hang out at Disney Springs, trying in vain to walk off some calories.
Day Twelve
We head back to Animal Kingdom. Again we are expecting an early-ish exit from the park as we have a first time dining experience booked at Homecoming back at Disney Springs. I am looking forward to this one.
Day Thirteen
Epcot of course, and our second visit typically concentrates on World Showcase. Food and Wine will be on so I just hope it isn’t too busy as it can be at times. We have an ADR booked at Via Napoli for dinner and we will be staying for the fireworks just so we can reaffirm that they are good but in no way are they any sort of comparison to Reflections Of Earth.
Day Fourteen
You know of course that the last full day is spent at Magic Kingdom. There is no alternative to this. We are booked to eat at Steakhouse 71 at the Contemporary in the late afternoon so that we can get back into MK at dusk to weep at the nostalgia, magic and sheer horror of heading home the next day. Fireworks will be watched.
Day Fifteen
A late flight home around 9pm so I suspect some packing will be done, a large breakfast somewhere and then a lot of time at Disney Springs as my depression kicks in and Louise falls out with me due to my sulking. As God intended.
So there we are. Writing that does make me think that Louise and I have too many rest days planned but we do like a pool day as you saw on our last couple of trips so who knows. The plan (whisper it) can be changed if we wish to.
If you made it to the end, bless you and I’ll see you back here next week for the final post before we go.
Enough of this Dominican Republic nonsense. We meet again just 17 days out from a WDW trip and in all kinds of ways it feels like quite some time since we did one. In terms of our historical frequency of visiting that part of the world then it definitely has been quite some time. It was October 2024 the last time Louise and I Disneyed, and putting to one side the persisting fear of the collapse of the US, we’re looking forward to it. Leaving it almost two years between trips has been unheard of for the last three decades so the anticipation is real, alongside the feeling that I have lost touch with all my knowledge of the place. Emily has been going consistently, so the passing of the planning baton may take an extra step this time.
I understand that our travel plans may not be the foremost thing in your minds so I shall recap the details of the trip. This time the travelling party is Louise, myself, Emily and her boyfriend Mikey. It is a proper Orlando theme park centric old school trip, leaving on September 10th from Manchester for two weeks.
We are flying with Virgin for the first time in so long I can’t remember the last time. Louise and I are in Premium, with Emily and Mikey saving their pennies by doing extra leg room seats in Economy.
We will be flying into Terminal C at MCO and picking up a car from Alamo before heading off to our usual and absolute favourite villa (thanks as ever to Matt for allowing us to rent his place).
Louise and I are sticking to Disney for the 14 days but Emily and Mikey are doing a night at Universal and will also do Halloween Horror Nights whilst there. Emily has been delighted to see the huge focus on clowns in this year’s houses. Her fear of clowns is no joke and frankly I have no idea why she puts herself through this!
To celebrate Mikey turning 30 this year Emily has also booked him two nights at Mikey’s most favourite resort, the Polynesian. They are doing two nights, club level there and I am sure that will be incredible.
With my work being so crazy, I delegated all the ADR bookings to Emily who smashed it, securing all of our first choices. I may be clutching at straws but the seemingly endless options for all our dining choices might be suggesting that the place will be quiet whilst we are there.
I will probably outline our day by day plan next week, so that’s something you can all look forward to. I just hope you can sleep with all that excitement and anticipation. We have a lot of our usual eateries on the plan but we’ve tried to sprinkle in a few new ones to expand our repertoire too.
I’ve missed the heat, I’ve missed the food and I’ve missed the familiar feeling of home we always get when we are there. I just hope we still feel all those things despite what is happening in the real world over there. I have been a little disappointed with the recent changes to off site folks visiting resorts. I get it, the folks paying to do so should absolutely be the priority, but it seems counter intuitive as those visiting will surely be tempted to book there for their next trip, and it blocking folks like us going to watch Yeeha Bob at Port Orleans is a real shame.
For years whenever anyone asked for WDW advice one of the things I always included was to visit some resorts. Sure, with an ADR you still can, but it feels like a little bit of the magic has gone.
Two more of these blogs before we leave so stay tuned for lots more detail on our plans alongside the glacial pace at which these last few days at work will go by. Some things never change.
Despite the chaos and unending drama around the world, with just a few days to go before we are due to fly, it does seem that we may be able to go on holiday. This is good news. Today was the official “get the cases out” day and we have a spare bedroom filled with clothes in varying stages of ironed-ness and over the coming days the packing fairies will place them into my case ready for the off on Friday.
I have been to the Post Office and ordered some dollars for tipping, with everything in low denominations as I am notoriously cheap and will not be tipping anyone in tens and twenties. We are all inclusive after all. I can pick those up on Wednesday if all goes to plan.
I am both relieved and terrified to be stepping away from work for two weeks. I am desperately in need of some time away from Teams and the daily drama and chaos of my current working life, but I am equally terrified of the plates and balls that will get dropped without me constantly fretting about them on a minute by minute basis.
What narcissism to think that I am that vital to anything.
I have been ordering the seemingly endless pet supplies that Emily will need for the time we are away. It is only at times like that that I fully understand the huge financial drain these furry shits are. I refer mostly to the cats of course.
Speaking of furry shits (and no I do not have a rare stomach condition with those symptoms) poor Bean has had a bit of a week. We’ve been battling tooth and gum issues with her for a long while but it came to a head last week and we had to admit defeat and get her to the vets for some intervention. It was clear that things were not getting better and we did not want her suffering, especially when we are away.
To cut a long story short, as expected she needed an operation to remove the offending teeth that were causing all the issues, pain and smells. Bless her, she had thirteen teeth out in total and has of course been drowsy and recovering all week. Getting her painkillers down her when she is not that keen to eat right now has been a challenge but already we can smell an immediate improvement in her breath and I’m sure she will be better for it in the long term. On that note, and you knew I couldn’t resist moaning about the costs, she now needs to live for another couple decades to make that financial investment in her well being worthwhile.
With Bean out of the house for a full day for her op and then for a good few hours on other days for check ups, we have also suffered at the hands and paws of Woody who has revealed just how much he relies on Bean for emotional support! He cried the entire time she was out, either because he was missing her or assumed she’d gone on some fun adventure without him. If he only knew how much better off he was ruining my Teams calls with his non stop moaning.
Pre op
Immediately Post OP
She looks more like herself now of course with the drugs out of her system, but bless her.
In other tooth news, in a not uncommon bit of play fighting this week, Tom suffered his own dental drama. With the rough housing getting a little too extreme, Freddie accidentally connected foot to tooth and now Tom has an appointment at the dentist tomorrow to see what can be done. Boys will be boys!
All this makes my dental visit last Monday seem pretty calm, despite me having a filling without an injection. It is common knowledge that I have a real fear of dental procedures but I trusted the dentist who assured me all would be well and it was surprisingly pain free and she sorted my own chipped tooth issue out brilliantly. So in the dental wars of this week I feel like I have been the winner.
Four days of work chaos to go and then we fly…..I cannot wait.
Just a brief one today as we’ve been busy Eastering with the family.
I don’t know if my social media algorithm just likes to mess with me but all I’m seeing are posts from people talking about jet fuel shortages putting holidays at risk.
I know, as ever, there are bigger issues but I am so tired of this constant uncertainty around hard earned holidays. Ever since the carnage of Covid it seems there is always something to take away from your pre holiday countdown excitement. It seems in recent years until you are leaving the tarmac and heading for the clouds you cannot be sure of anything. I long for the days when the world seemed calmer, more predictable and allowed folks to book a trip and be relatively sure it’ll go ahead.
We leave on April 24th and all the doom mongers online seem to be talking about summer holidays being at risk but that does little to reduce my worries and resentment of the one man root cause of all this.
September’s trip is a whole other ball game. We are way too far out to even guess at the state of play at that stage. That’s just a case of assuming we are going for now and reassess in August.
So here we are with another angst ridden post about an upcoming holiday and some goon in power somewhere doing stuff to detract from my ability to look forward to it. Sigh.
Anyway I hope your Easter’s have been lovely. Mine consisted of a gig last night in a very windy Wales (some nice pics below) and today lunch out with Rebecca, Tom and the boys and then a walk with dogs and boys up on the field before they consumed a record breaking amount of Easter related sugar.
I’m looking forward to a better Monday than most tomorrow and I’ll leave you with some professional pictures we got from our latest Pink gig.
I didn’t post last week as we had the boys staying with us so time for other stuff was short.
Honestly my weeks are just a blur of travel, hotels and a varying degrees of crisis management so there isn’t a great deal to document anyway. Next week looks similar but I am having a week off the work related travel the week after as it’s just getting silly now.
I know that usually the core content of these posts has traditionally been Disney holiday related but even with one theoretically in the barrel for September my desire to plan is low as I don’t trust the US to behave itself sufficiently to make that trip a reality. I suppose once we get our other trip out of the way and we get into the warmer summer months assuming there isn’t a world war, civil war or global economic apocalypse then I can get my head in the game.
So whilst I can’t share any WDW specific content I can try to hide the content vacuum by posting some stuff I’ve been up to in my other hobby in the hope that nobody notices that I’m posting about nothing.
Many weeks ago in one of my posts I mentioned that I’d been filming a new promo video for one of the bands I’m in and I threatened to share that once complete. It’s taken much longer than it should but that video for the Pink tribute is below alongside another less produced and polished video shot by our singer Emily at a recent wedding with Mustard.
If this orange turd starts something in Cuba next I will impotently scream into the void and end up booking a holiday in a dark room on some bleak industrial estate in the UK.
Yep the Dominican Republic is literally next door to Cuba and I am, as I’m sure he intended, exhausted by this constant stream of horror and distraction. With some of his mouthpieces starting to mention Cuba being next, I am worried that there will nowhere safe to holiday oh and yes we will all die in a nuclear holocaust. Hopefully this ridiculous nightmare ends soon in some way for the benefit of the entire planet.
As ever, me pissing and moaning about a holiday while folks are dying in a war is ridiculous but there’s nothing new there.
I, like most of the world, am just looking for some boring normality rather than wondering how far this lard bucket is willing to go to prevent his jail term.
Anyway….
Last night Mustard played a lovely wedding in poshest Cheshire.
Some weddings can be a bit of a slog if the guests aren’t there for a party and more of a chat but last night was the opposite. We had a packed dance floor all night and it makes such a difference.
It was a late night/early morning so today will be a quiet one. Louise is working so it’ll be a visit to my Mum for Mother’s Day, a dog walk should it ever stop raining and then a bit of football (watching) before I settle down to dread the impending Monday as God intended.
I am London bound again next week and that’s always something to look forward to. 🙄.
I’m not one for a load of nostalgic yearning for the good old days. That sounds ironic for someone who for the last good few decades has almost exclusively spent their holidays in a place where the main currency is memories, but I am almost allergic to the boomer porn “things were better in my day” guff prevalent in most Facebook communities.
However, this week I have been looking back all bleary eyed at that time not so long ago that you could book a holiday and know, almost with certainty that it would happen as planned. Sure, the odd volcano eruption or hurricane could scupper your plans, but at least they were natural.
Since those heady days of Covid, it seems that nothing is certain until you are sat on the plane hurtling down the runway. I look back in horror at the endless uncertainty of those early post Covid months and years when trips were endlessly booked, rescheduled and in some cases cancelled.
Ever since, it seems the world has got itself into a downward spiral of uncertainty and simple things like a trip to WDW can no longer be taken for granted. Our upcoming September trip is still in pencil rather than ink, waiting to see if the US descends into civil war or indeed if World War 3 happens before we can get there.
In the last couple of weeks Mexico entered the game, with a “hold my cerveza” with cartel violence ripping through the country. As soon as Louise saw that our trip was in deep jeopardy. I did not appreciate one bit that the cartels waited until we had paid in full before subjecting their country to these horrors.
I was pretty certain it would all calm down by late April, but it didn’t stop Louise from going on a one woman mission to find us an alternative destination, less likely to see us held at gun point in my speedos. So for the last week we have been spending our evenings watching videos on You Tube of lovely looking places all around the globe.
With Mexico discounted, and the US already in our definite maybe pile, pickings were slim. I may be a working class lad from Bolton, but we soon also discounted closer countries such as Greece, Turkey and Spain as, at least with TUI who we would have to stick with to avoid huge cancellation fees, that meant flying with Easyjet or Ryanair and well, no thank you.
Having virtually visited Thailand, Bali, Tanzania and other far flung locations, we had almost settled on a resort in one of those. The search is now such a blur I cannot remember which to be honest. This search was not helped by my current working situation meaning I could devote little to no time aiding the hunt.
On Friday however, I managed to eek out half an hour over what in a normal job would be my lunch and I did one last search on the TUI site before attempting to swap us over. There it was, about half way down the first set of results.
To be honest, I had been reluctant to change our holiday at all, as I loved Secrets Akumal so much and I was very much looking forward to going back. I almost felt like I was betraying them by looking elsewhere. Having spent so long finding somewhere to compete for our US WDW holiday money, we had finally found somewhere that perfectly ticked all our boxes.
So when I saw another Secrets resort, seemingly in the ball park of our budget/spend on the Mexico trip I quickly clicked to find out more. It did seem to tick all those same boxes, and unlike the Thailand, Bali options it meant a direct flight in Premium with TUI rather than indirect flights of over 18 hours in economy with another airline.
Louise reviewed and accepted my choice and it was then down to me to do the business. Now, it starts to get interesting (I make no promises you will find this interesting, but that is sort of baked into all my posts).
Earlier in the week I have chatted with TUI to establish that we could change our trip for £50 each and whatever the difference in price was, so I expected this to be painless. Having priced up the new holiday on their site, I found the “Amend my holiday” option and off I went. At the final stage where the money became involved I thought it odd that the price I was now looking at was 20% higher than the price I had seen on their site.
I opened up another chat and to say the contents of this chat was confusing is like saying I have a restricted fringe. I explained my dilemma and shared the price differences. After a good twenty minutes I was more confused than ever, as I was told that it was both an extra £1700, or maybe £1200 to change my holiday, despite their site pricing it just a couple of hundred more than my original booking or I could just cancel my first booking for £570 and book the new one as a new trip. I declined all options as that just sounded dodgy and not right at all. Apparently it was something to do with brand new bookings getting some automatic discount but amendments did not. The insistence on companies to reward new customers over loyal returning ones baffles me.
I had another go on their site and tried to cancel my existing trip for that £570 so I could book afresh and their site then told me I’d lose £2500 if I cancelled. What the……??
At this point I resorted to the nuclear option and I phoned them. I was raging at this point. Disinformation, uncertainty, lies and an unreliable website were all in play and I just wanted to change my trip for the £100 I’d been told and move on with my life.
The lady I spoke to was awesome. She listened to me moan at length, agreed that was a shit show and vowed to help me. She also immediately spotted that my original booking had the TUI Flex option on it (I had forgotten) which meant I didn’t even need to pay the £100 admin fee.
She patiently worked through a whole range of options of dates and length of stays. We had always regretted only booking for 8 nights originally, and as this was part of our 30th anniversary tour, we figured we should go bigger as we may well kill each other before our next significant milestone. I had also had to cancel a few days off I had planned around Easter due to work being crazy so as punishment to them I figured I would tack on a few days at the start of this trip to make up for it.
So after literally hours of faff (most of which I have spared you) extending late into Friday evening, thanks to that lovely lady on the phone, all those ridiculous and confusing sums of money quoted online went away and we managed to change our booking, extend from 8 to 14 nights all for an extra £460. I was very happy.
If you feel like it was hard work reading that, imagine what it was like trying to navigate it.
Anyway, so what have we changed to?
We have secured another Secrets resort, Secrets Playa Esmeralda, in the Dominican Republic. It’ll be our first time going there, assuming we aren’t all dead as a result of a world wide nuclear escalation.
It is a direct flight, retaining our Premium cabin from the Mexico booking and all in all, if we had to change (and Louise said we did) I don’t think we could have done much better.
We will definitely return to Secrets Akumal, unless of course we like this place so much better, but even so I do feel we’d like to return as we loved it so much.
I don’t think I have it in me to rearrange another holiday so unless the US is literally on fire and/or travel is banned due to world wide conflict, I think we’ll be going. Won’t you all be relieved being spared another of these posts.
Rather than serve up another whiny post about being busy at work (I was) and being sick of being cold/wet ( I am) I have something significant to share this week.
No, not another gig nobody cares about (although I did gig last night) but a much more significant life event. In fact maybe there are no more significant life events.
With it now approaching the 14 week mark I’m delighted, thrilled and very happy to share that our family is expanding.
Rebecca and Tom are expecting baby number three, sometime in August.
Yesterday was a significant day too as courtesy of an early scan they found out that the new arrival will be a girl. Whilst all everyone was hoping for was a healthy arrival, I think it’s OK to say that everyone is delighted that there will be a little girl in the family again.
It has been a rough few months for Rebecca as she has felt and been very sick throughout, and is only now feeling somewhere close to human again.
The boys stayed at ours whilst the scan was undertaken and a quickly assembled gender reveal was convened with a DIY cake, me on FaceTime from my gig and the boys digging glasses into the cake to reveal the pink filling.
It was fair to say Dougie was not enormously thrilled initially to learn he was getting a sister. Few three year old boys would be I guess. He came round fairly quickly and I’m sure by the time she arrives he will be as delighted as everyone else.
Freddie has said ahead of the scan that he wanted a sister so he was immediately very happy but that might have been because he now had cake.
So lovely news all round and many congrats to Rebecca and Tom.
Another week vanished in an eye blink. London came and went over Wednesday night and Thursday and then it was Friday again and I’m a few days closer to the next holiday and my inevitable mortality.
There was no obvious murder during my capital stay this week but I’m came close a couple of times in meetings.
We had no plans for the weekend. Louise had booked us into one of our favourite restaurants for Valentine’s ages ago displaying uncommon levels of foresight but when she checked the booking and saw it was 9.30 she cancelled as that is just too late for anything to start with our current energy levels.
Instead we had the boys for a bit in the afternoon whilst Rebecca and Tom went to the cinema.
So after a morning at the tip and supermarket for me the afternoon was spent baking with the boys.
There were chocolate chip cookies and cup cakes. Neither would trouble the judges on bake off but they enjoyed making them.
To be fair they lost interest once they went into the oven and I was left to finish them off whilst the boys helped Louise shave Bean. This is not something renowned as an activity with grand kids but they were thrilled to help. Bean, less so.
Then we took them out for some tea at a local pub. We were surprised to be able to book a table last minute on Valentine’s but it was at 6pm.
Once seated we were given the Valentine’s menu for us adults. It was bloody pricey and incredibly limited. We were gutted to be honest.
We both chose the only dish we could tolerate in the lamb as everything else was fish, veggie or in the case of the starters, Tartare or Mackerel based.
The boys had the kids menu so were happy enough.
Once it arrived the food was decent enough but not something we’d usually choose.
Imagine how gutted we were to hear the next table arrive after we’d ordered and immediately ask if the set menu was the only option and the waitress tell them that it wasn’t and present them with the full menu.
Sigh. We are too polite.
We had a crème brûlée for Louise and a Chocolate thing for me, trying to fill up and Freddie was delighted with his cheese board. He’s growing up and so is his palette.
We helped him out, as did Dougie. It was lovely.
It was also lovely to have the boys along.
The bill was painful when compared to the enjoyment levels of our food due to the set price of the Valentine’s menu we had endured. You live and learn.
Today I am hopeful of doing as little as possible. Wish me luck. I’m tired.
Last week saw us pay the balance off for our Mexico trip in April. We’d been debating whether to go ahead with this one since we put down the low deposit.
As ever, should we have been sensible and not spent that money on a holiday? Of course. Have we ever done that at any point in the last three decades? You know the answer.
We shall find a way as we always do and cross our fingers that no major unexpected expense bites us on the arse this year. Nothing ever goes wrong with our house or anything so we should be fine.
Our plans for later in the year to visit WDW remain in pencil and will do until balances are due and we see what state the US is in. Hopefully a better one than it is today.
So we are pleased to at least know we are headed back to Secrets Akumal if only for eight nights this time. It is such a lovely place and experience we are both very much looking forward to it.
We are trying to keep travel costs down in this double holiday year to celebrate our 30th anniversary if we can but that did not stop Louise moaning that I have not upgraded us to private transfers from the airport to the resort and back. The provided transfers by TUI look to take about ten minutes longer and it’s not as if 100 people are all going to our resort so it may even be a minibus anyway rather than a packed coach. That £150 may make all the difference. 😏 We shall see how long I can withstand the whinging.
Away from holidays I undertook a less pleasurable hotel stay in London as I was down there for work for three days. The Travelodge around the corner from our office is not quite up to the same standards as Secrets and that was confirmed by what looked like a murder scene popping up outside it on my first night there.
The road was taped off for two days with a police guard. I’ve not been able to find anything online about what happened. It was near Spitalfields and Aldgate tube station if anyone knows?
Last weekend we did a great gig with the 80s tribute band in Brighouse. A great new venue has opened at the Civic Hall there and we had a good night and a packed room.
With a lot venues closing it’s lovely to see such a great place opening and from what we could see being successful. We are looking forward to going back.
I’m in London again next week but just for one day/night this time. Hopefully my stay can be murder free unless one more person asks me to reach out, jump on a call or action something. Then all bets are off.
One blog covering Mexico, Brighouse and London. I am just so jet set.
Not a great deal to report this week, or at least nothing too different to last week.
Work was a never ending stream of problems, emergencies and issues sprinkled in between a million meetings and a Friday trip to London. That was fun.
However on the train back from London I received a message from my friend Paul who I have known since I was 18. It contained a video that I thought had long since been lost to landfill as when it was recorded, the internet and the cloud did not exist. The VHS tape on which it existed was as far as I knew now no longer in existence.
It seems not. Somehow Paul had come across it and it has been uploaded to the internet where it can now live forever. Whether it should or not.
Way back in the late 80s and early 90s I was in several bands with Paul. We were hoping for pop stardom and for a few years we gigged a lot locally, gaining a decent local following and even got onto local radio at one point.
Of course, just like our hairlines those dreams went away but we all carried on getting enjoyment from music and we stay in touch from time to time.
As toe curlingly embarrassing as this video is, it genuinely made my day. It was so lovely to see something that only existed before the internet as so much of what we did in these bands is now lost.
Anyway, here is a video we shot in Paul’s dining room to send off to some TV competition for unsigned bands. The song is called New Foundation which you would quickly realise if you can make it beyond the early parts of the video where we do a terrible job of trying to do some kind of cool band intro.
The hair, fresh faces and fun we had reflected how much we all enjoyed being in bands with people you genuinely like and get on with. That is still the case today. For anyone that showed any interest in the book I did a while back, my experiences in bands at this time formed much of the “research” done for it. Write about what you know and all that.
I didn’t have time to post last week so I just didn’t. That might sound obvious but when you are wired as I am that sometimes can be more problematic than you might imagine.
Anyway, the week was a blur and the weekend got away from me. I was out for most of Sunday filming again for band stuff as we recorded a new promo video for the Pink tribute stuff.
I’ll inflict it upon you once it’s finished in a couple of weeks.
I’m not sure how glamorous that sounds or looks but all I can tell you is that no matter where we film these things it is always absolutely freezing cold. It was painful.
This week again whizzed by in a maelstrom of one seemingly unending Teams call. I’ve never been busier or more stressed and I really look forward to when the extra stuff I am doing is over and some form of normalcy returns. I had to go to Leeds on Wednesday for a meeting that seemingly required being in the same room all day but we did get to go for a curry in the evening as reward. We went to Mowgli and it was good but not spectacular.
I always look forward to our holidays of course but never more so than right now. April seems a while off still so there is much hunkering down.
Whether we get to the US in September is anyone’s guess right now. His determination to avoid the Epstein stuff coming out seems to be driving him to start foreign wars and kill his own citizens. In the time frame of his madness September is a long, long way off so we’ll just have to wait and see what’s happening nearer the time.
In other news I should record the fact that our problematic leaky roof that has been an issue on and off for years seems to have been sorted. A guy came a few weeks before Christmas and did some stuff that looks to have kept us dry. I’m not counting any chickens but we’ve had a load of rain as we always do in these parts and so far so good. As penance, our tumble dryer has broken but forking out bundles of cash for the pleasure of living in a house seems to be the status quo.
With no sign of a let up in the chaos of my working week let’s see what the next one brings and who knows we may meet here again in seven days.
I’ve not had time to blog this week. We’ve had the boys all weekend as Rebecca and Tom went to London to watch Cabaret so I’ll just share some pictures from the last couple of days which have been been fun.
Saturday we were at home so we went for a walk in the local countryside.
The boys decorated a giant gingerbread man each, played games and we went to visit my Mum before they had a McDonalds for their tea.
Thankfully they both slept well and today we’ve taken them to the Hot Wheels Monster Truck show in Manchester.
We had time for a pre-show coffee/hot chocolate/milkshake….
Then we had a chilly walk through the city centre after paying a small mortgage to park.
The show was very loud and the boys enjoyed it. I paid an amount of money for pick n mix that would fund a household for a number of weeks and then we went to Pizza Express before heading home.
I did my usual trick of leaving my phone in the venue and having to run back in a panic. A steward rescued it for me thankfully but that didn’t stop me then leaving the checkered flags we’d bought the boys in Pizza Express!! I am losing it clearly.
It was snowing a bit during our walk back to the car. The boys played in the snow on our drive once we got back and they left us not long ago.
All that remains now is for me to contemplate the impending horror of my return to work tomorrow. I cannot describe the impending doom.
If I survive there might be another post next Sunday.
This week’s title is homage to the only response possible when someone asks how your Christmas was. Well, maybe that’s just me, as our festivities are typically quiet and uneventful and by the time I meet any human beings again post xmas I am in no mental state to be having actual conversations whilst also dealing with the existential crisis of returning to work.
To be fair, our festive period was exactly as described, with just the four of us on the day itself, (Me, Emily, my Mum and Louise once she finished work), and I’ll be honest, the majority of hours of my xmas day were spent cooking things. But the meal was nice, despite feeling so full I might die within minutes of starting to eat, due in no small part to deciding upon the wrong starter. A whole baked camembert with bread each was perhaps not the smartest choice with a turkey dinner to follow.
The gifting theme this year was driven by Louise finding these things online. So my Mum, Emily and Mikey and Rebecca, Tom and the boys all got one of these.
Boxing Day saw the boys visit us for their round two of present opening and a Carrs pasty bonanza for tea (if you’re from Bolton, you’ll know). That was Louise’s one day off as she returned to work again on Saturday to continue her less than festive “break”. I just felt quite pleased to recognise that it was actually Saturday. There was a bin collection on the same day that had it not been for the kindness of our neighbour I would have completely missed. It was the cardboard bin too, so that would have been a disastrous post Christmas omission.
I’ve done a few decent dog walks and generally just loved not being on a Teams call for a percentage of my life I never thought possible. For as long as it lasts I intend to savour every non working moment.
Last night, we mopped up some of the remaining Stranger Things episodes whilst eating leftovers from our Christmas meal in a more peaceful house than normal as Woody is with Emily over in Liverpool. It’s amazing how much calmer the house is with just the one dog around! He likes his Liverpool weekend getaways as he gets (more) spoiled over there.
Typically, during my festive holidays my thoughts would turn to planning our inevitable WDW trip the next year, but there isn’t a great deal to do in all honesty. We are a long way from ADR territory and those dining choices are the only things that should take any real thought and those will determine and fit in with what parks we may do on each day.
If anyone has any suggestions for eateries we do always like to fit a couple of newbies in amongst the greatest hits.
Before that, we hope to get away to Mexico in April. I can’t wait to go back for all kinds of reasons but right now I am just so sick of being cold and almost always wet.
As I am now risking sending you all (both) to sleep I shall return to my Twixmas hinterland to do as much nothing as possible.
Hello again. Turns out I’ve had, and needed, a little break from the weekly blogging so apologies to anyone….anyone??? who missed these on the last few Sundays. It wasn’t really planned and just happened but it was very much required and unavoidable.
I return today unable to promise a weekly delivery but for now, mainly as I’m off work until the new year, we blog again.
Over the years I know I have regularly moaned about work being busy, but I was a young naïve fool, as only now do I feel justified in claiming that. In the late summer I was asked to take on some new responsibilities at work as well as my real job and it’s been carnage ever since. It’s involved some travel too with visits in recent weeks to London (a few times), Southampton, Birmingham, Leeds and of course our Manchester office which, with the commute as it, is qualifying as a trip all on its own.
I can’t say I am deliriously happy at work, but that’s not really related to the silly levels of busy, but more the over arching landscape since a new boss and some changes came around during this last year. Everything will pass I guess and when you’ve been there as long as I have, these Johnny come latelys don’t seem to stick around for the long haul so hopefully this is a temporary thing as I could do without having to find another job at my time of life.
So that work stuff meant that for the last few months I really haven’t had a minute to think about much else, and the prospect of sitting back at the laptop at the weekend to write this nonsense did not appeal. I’ve already been spending good chunks of evenings and weekends either working or travelling for work so I decided to not spend whatever free time I did have typing these posts for a bit.
How’s everyone doing? Well, Louise keeps on nursing despite not really wanting to, Emily still works with me and Rebecca, Tom and the boys are all good, with Rebecca now working part time in a local nursery.
Yesterday we went to see my Mum to commemorate what would have been her and my Dad’s 67th wedding anniversary had he still been with us. She’s doing well, is fit and healthy for someone in their mid 80s and she’ll be joining us for Christmas Day next week. Louise is once again working on the day itself and for a lot of the festive period, such is the life of a Community Nurse and she tends to volunteer to do/get stuck with Christmas Day as many of her colleagues still have young children and they want to be there for the big present unwrap.
Both of my readers may have been wondering if we have any holiday plans for 2026. Well, next year is a significant anniversary for Louise and I, as we will hit 30 years of marriage, so we are hoping to gift each other not one, but two holidays, if funds allow.
We have hopes of a return to Mexico and Secrets Akumal in April. We’ve paid a low deposit to secure our dates and have to decide by February if we’re going. It ain’t cheap so we’ll make a call then as to whether it is wise to once again blow all our available funds on overseas travel rather than more sensible uses. Our house continues to conspire against us financially so we’ll see what major bills hit between now and then before inevitable saying sod it we’re going anyway.
However, our main trip next year is a, perhaps surprisingly a Disney one.
In September we have booked to return to Florida, this time with Emily and her boyfriend. It’ll be an off-site affair in our usual villa, flying with Virgin and that’s about all we know at this point. Our boycott of the US was not an easy thing to lift, but after Emily went last year and found that inside the WDW bubble all was well, we decided we didn’t want the orange turd dictating our holiday plans for the next three years so we’re going despite our strong objections to current events over there.
So let’s see how long I can keep this blogging up, and I’d like to as I do like to look back on these things many years later, and to do that, I suppose I have to write them first!
Well, as punishment for daring to go on holiday, last week at work was one of the worst I’ve experienced in all the decades I’ve been sucking this shit up to pay the bills. Just two more similar days to go before I can pretend to not think about it for two weeks.
I can feel the stress coursing through my body and my neck and shoulders feel like I’ve done something that is very bad for your neck and shoulders.
All that meant that yesterday was also stupidly busy as I had to do some work that has to be finished before I go and I’m in meetings for every hour God sends from the start of Monday to the end of Tuesday and then start to try and prep the stuff I prep for the holiday. That meant printing off the stuff we might need (I’ve been over cautious as this isn’t our familiar journey) and can I say, how is it that in 2025 AI can do your job for you but we still can’t build printers that print? I also filled the rucksack, which won’t be Ryan for this trip. Louise says he’s too scruffy to go a resort like ours and I gave in as his role is solely for US based trips. Instead I’m taking son of Ryan, the brand new exact replica Louse bought me a few years ago.
Filling the rucksack is faffy, ranging from the essential passports and docs to the relevant phone and watch chargers, camera, kindle, painkillers, money and credit cards etc.
What I also learned this week was trying to order some US dollars in specific denominations appears to be impossible. I tried a load of websites and nobody gives you the option to request smaller bills (these dollars are only for tipping folks) so in the end I had to go old school and rock up the local post office and ask them to give me the smallest they had. They were still mostly too big.
With Louise out working I was also in charge of doing multiple washer loads, mainly of the dog’s bedding, and our bedding despite the fact that our house sitter is Emily, who lives here. I waited in for a delivery for Louise, which I “missed” as when it arrived, the chap rang the bell and then seemingly sprinted to his van and drove away by the time I walked the thirty steps from the couch to the front door.
Then I had to do some mowing up on the field as the grass was getting ridiculous despite me attacking it with a strimmer for the past week and I had to at least cut some walking paths in it for when Emily walks them whilst we are away.
I took delivery of an obscene amount of pet food for the dogs and cats and then nipped to the supermarket to get enough food to feed us until Tuesday and then I made tea.
It was a busy Saturday and today is looking similar. I’ve done some more work this morning, wrote this clap trap and then I have to go to a shop to collect an order Louise clicked last night and then go and see my Mum.
Anyway, as it always does, time will pass, I’ll get through work and we’ll be off soon enough. I’ll probably share some stuff on the Mkingdon Facebook page whilst away so do what you need to do if you want those. A day by day trip report is unlikely as it would be (more) boring than a US trip and I almost certainly won’t have time to write it, but I will of course share thoughts, highlights and food in some way.
Cheer up. Just two more of these things and you get a couple of weeks off from them being inflicted on you.
Yes the holiday is so close now I can almost smell it, literally. I don’t know if it’s only me but when the warm weather hits there’s a certain smell that I get that just evokes holiday. I used to think it was sun cream or Florida but I get it here too. It’s either that or I’m having a stroke.
Ahead of me are seven more work days and they feel like a marathon right now but this is always the way.
Other than wishing my life away it’s been another week of being busy at work and none of that is worth documenting here but at least I didn’t have to go anywhere and sleep in a strange bed.
Yesterday I did leave the country as we had a gig in Wales. Denbigh to be exact. It was a wedding at an unnecessarily rural location. The last four miles, yes, four miles involved a single lane country road that did nothing for the blood pressure. It was, as you might expect a lovely location when we got there and we were surrounded by alpacas, peacocks and most importantly freshly baked pizza.
They were a good crowd and the dance floor was full from start to finish which is always lovely. I don’t know if it’s some sort of Welsh tradition but we witnessed our first ever conga to AC/DC.
That clip is quite short as I started filming before very quickly realising that I had to play in about nine seconds.
Being a fair distance away it was a late night and necessitated a lie in this morning. With Louise working and Woody away in Liverpool with Emily it’s just me and Bean today taking it easy. All I’ve done so far today is clean the kitchen, do the recycling, had the big shop delivered, got all my band gear out of the car and packed it away and had some toast. I suspect all international rock stars have similar mornings after a gig in Denbigh.
Speaking of the dogs Emily recently created these lovely pics of the dogs using some AI magic and I love them. So I’ll leave you with those.
My recent tour of the UK continued last week with a couple of days in Marlow doing things considerably less fun than playing bass to people. Work required my presence and so 450 miles of driving, a night in a Travelodge and two days of meetings made up most of my week, as I was off on Monday.
I think/hope that might be it for travels until after my next proper travels to Mexico but with a couple of weeks still to go, who knows. Work is a bit like that at the moment.
My night away did afford me an expenses paid meal at a place called the Giggling Squid in Marlow which was very nice, even if the main course I chose snuck up on me with its spice. A wander down by the Thames on a summer evening did beat more recent trips of staring at a concrete tower block in London with a Tesco meal deal, but I’d still rather be at home.
My pre-holiday prep is complete with two deliveries this week. Louise has “toiletries” to procure, mainly sun cream, but it’s almost time to get the cases out. I am unusually anxious about the trip as I lack my normal levels of certainty of what is to come. Louise’s uncertainty was I suspect none existent until Friday’s Air India crash and now all of her long held fears around flying are re-surfacing.
Any last minute buying will need to be done outside of the next two weekends as she has somehow been rota-ed to work both of them. I’m at the stage now where I am scouring my work diary and counting how many really crappy things I have to endure before we go. Anyone else do that?
Aside from the mundane details of how I’ve passed the last seven days, today is Father’s Day which has been weird for me for the last couple of years of course. I think about my Dad a lot, but I suppose today is the a day when that is bound to happen more than it might normally.
I still don’t think I have fully accepted that I’ll never see him again. It’s very weird and for reasons I don’t understand I regularly play back those last few hours we spent with him in the hospital before he died. I somehow feel like I did it wrong or could have spent those more wisely even though he didn’t really know we were there.
Anyway, I love you Dad, and I miss you every day. It’s a cliché but if you’ve still got one, try to appreciate them as when they’ve gone and you think you can’t even remember their voice, you start to panic a bit and feel like you’re letting them down. Enjoy your Father’s Day and here’s mine as he would probably like to be remembered.
Another week with a half baked post. I’m currently in the back of a van heading back from a festival/gig up in Scotland. This rock n roll lifestyle is getting out of control.
As typing is difficult in these circumstances I’ll just share some photos of the very scenic journey up to Dunoon and the journey so far back where we played at a Harley Owner’s Group event.
That bed was not built for a man of my width.
The gig itself went very well which is always nice. It’ll be a good few hours before I’m back home so forgive the poor posting and enjoy your weeks.
