Tag: holiday planning

Man With A Plan

by mkingdon, posted in mkingdon, Walt Disney World

Last week felt like a long one didn’t it? Or was that just me? It may not have helped that I had a life threatening cold for most of it. It’s always surprising to rediscover just how bloody awful you can feel with just a cold.

As I sat in the office sniffing and coughing up vital organs, all I could hear around me was colleagues doing the same thing. The first day of summer seems to have brought with it a plague that is sweeping through the nation. Apart from fighting off a deadly virus last week was fairly quiet. Oh apart from the political infrastructure collapsing, friends and family turning on each other and Facebook becoming a more dangerous battle ground than Afghanistan.

I’ve never done politics here and won’t start now but by Christ what a mess we seem to have found ourselves in. Good luck to those now charged with sorting it all out.

Whilst the voting was going on we had a band rehearsal. We are pretty much reinventing our whole set as we find ourselves having to replace a member of the band. It’s a gentle and amicable hand over so we’re taking the opportunity to make some big changes to the songs we do as they have been largely the same for some time now. It’s good fun learning new stuff, although when you are musically barely competent as I am, the main panic when someone suggests a song to do is the fear that you won’t be capable of playing it. Although the only thing worse than that is when you have learned a song and then it’s discovered that we need to do it in a different key and then my tiny brain has to move everything I just learned to new places on the fret board. I envy those with real musical ability!

This weekend I have been employed as a Disney planner. Naturally, as this was for Rebecca and Tom, there was no fee involved. They had thought of holidaying somewhere exotic and beachy, such as Bali, but with some more thought and of course encouragement from me, they have moved their plans to Florida. It made perfect sense (to me anyway) as their requirements were sun, stuff to do, great food in large quantities and a flight time under double figures.

Tom is an eater of epic ability. He has never been to Florida and I suspect he may never return to the UK as it is surely his spiritual home. Due to their age, hiring a car becomes expensive so I have suggested an on-site package, with Magical Express at a value resort. Between Disney buses and Uber they can get where they want to get to for a lot less than the very high surcharges hire car companies tend to charge for those under 25.

disney site

The free memory maker now included in these packages is quite handy when travelling as a couple, otherwise you struggle to get photos of the two of you together.  However, the dining plan offer has never really appealed to me and I have passed that prejudice on in my advice. Rebecca wants to take Tom to the places we have always loved such as Applebees, Teak, Olive Garden, Bahama Breeze etc and so the restriction of always eating on site wouldn’t really suit them.

Anyway, their planning is in early stages and they may change destination entirely, but again it seems the pulling power of the Sunshine State is strong, especially if you ask me for holiday advice!!

On the subject of the plans for Louise and I in March, I haven’t done a great deal more than pencil in a rough sketch of the theme park days and of course where to eat on those days. Most of our trip is beach based so the planning requirements are less demanding. There’ll be more to do once the ADR window opens up in September and then FP+ in January. Hopefully the dollar rate will rally between now and then, but my breath is not held.

So it seems my use as Taxi Dad is not what it was, but I still come in handy when it comes to holiday planning. I think that’s not a bad deal!

Till the next time…..

Uncommon Common Sense

by mkingdon, posted in mkingdon

The biggest surprise of your week maybe the fact that we do not now have a fully booked US-based itinerary in the bag. We are for once demonstrating very un-Williams like common sense and taking our time over the decision.

There are a few things happening in the world of Williams that we need to see played out before we take the plunge so right now, I’m not sure what will happen. It didn’t stop me spending a good chunk of time last Sunday doing lots of looking around at options. The trouble with doing that is that the options then multiply, like some temptation filled amoeba, doubling on themselves at every click of the mouse.

Looking at places that are not so familiar to you has its challenges, such as needing to rely on Google maps and Trip Advisor to see if it is somewhere worthy of our hard-earned pounds. Every hotel on the planet has a number of reviews on Trip Advisor that make it sound like a mix between Alcatraz and a house featured on those OCD cleaner shows, so you have to take them with a pinch of salt, which it seems a lot of people have found in their bedding, amongst other unmentionables.

Life was probably easier when booking holidays before the internet. You took your 67 brochures home from the travel agent and spent an evening looking at misleading photographs of hotels. None the wiser you then went back to sit with the travel agent for a few hours whilst they made tippy tappy noises on their green screen VDU to secure your two weeks in Alcudia at a hotel that was three miles from the beach and not quite fully built.

Imagine that, two weeks, in one place……crazy thinking and different times. Now, in the world of DIY holidays and idiots like me who spend more time planning the trip than they do on it, the multi-destination options are more complex than the D-Day Landings. At this stage the world is our lobster of course and we may not even end up in the US, or indeed going away at all but that’s no reason to not have the fun of the possible in the meantime.

In other news this week I had a couple of days off work and spent it productively. After wasting time on nonsense like painting stuff round the house I invested a few hours in finishing off Season 4 of House of Cards. It is awesome. Clever, sophisticated and compelling viewing. You know you have a binge watch issue when you know exactly what time to fast forward to in order to avoid the opening titles on each new episode!

I enjoyed it so much that I have now started again from the beginning of Season 1, this time taking Louise with me. First time around I think Louise fell asleep during a crucial episode or two and I left her behind unable to wait for her to catch up. Watching for a second time is no less enjoyable. If you haven’t watched it, do yourself a favour and book a week off work to do so! Tell your boss I said it was OK.

Louise and Emily have a Once Upon A Time obsession which I just can’t get into. I’m not sure why, as it should, on paper, float my boat with all the Disney references but it never has. I do seem to prefer the more real-life type stuff when it comes to wasting hours of my life on Netflix. You know, real life type things like Game of Thrones!! There goes that theory.

Enjoy your Sunday.

Till the next time…….

Spring Means Only One Thing (again)…..

by mkingdon, posted in All This And More, mkingdon

Spring. The country emerges from the depressing cold tundra of traveling to and from work in the pitch dark, blinking and stumbling blindly into the unfamiliar sun. Lawn mowers are dug out of the garage or shed (the BEST thing about our current house is the absolute absence of any grass), people flock to B&Q on auto-pilot to buy Rattan furniture which will stay covered for all but six days of the wet summer and everyone posts on Facebook about their first barbecue of the year in that freakishly warm week we always get in April.

That’s what normal people do. What seems to happen to us, no sorry, Louise, is that the start of March triggers a Pavlovian response which involves the need to book a holiday. It’s as natural a reflex reaction as you’ll see from any dog hearing a bell at feeding time and so now we are wrestling with which planned home projects to back burner to facilitate said plans.

I should say any such plans will be for quite a different holiday this time. If we go at all, we don’t really know where to go. It will be much more beach based than anything we’ve done for the last decade and a half and who knows who will be in our traveling party.

One destination under consideration is the US of course. As we can go outside of school holidays these days (we are looking at end of September into October) we need to be looking at long haul to ensure the temperatures are high enough to satisfy Louise’s sun cravings and obviously southern parts of the states tick that box. Knowing Florida pretty well, it is tempting to head back there I guess, trying new destinations such as Miami or even the west coast of the state, which for some weird reason we still have never been too. There’s something about that Floridian beach culture that I really like. I’m no fan of the song really, other than the fond feelings and memories it conjures up of previous relaxing stays on US sand, but this sort of sums up the feeling I’m talking about.

The few days we spent at Key Largo on the beautiful private beach of the Hilton there have lasted long in the memory and this song takes me right back there along with the other Hilton we’ve done a couple of times at Daytona. The vivid colours of the clear Floridian sky, fluffy clouds (in between storms) and the white sand mixed with the incredible heat, and I just feel instantly relaxed. There’s a nice excitement at this stage of any planning. Aside from the key decision of whether we actually do go away or not, the almost limitless possibilities feel nice and that is just those available in Florida.

We paid a very brief visit to the Keys a few years ago and a return for a slightly longer stay feels justified. Naples was superb too or should we finally go to Clearwater, St Pete’s or Siesta Key? Of course, the old favourite Vero Beach then comes into the equation too. Do we go Caribbean? The Maldives look incredible but I may have to sell the house to fund that one. My brain hurts from the planning decisions and up until we actually decide to go I can enjoy wrestling with them. Is it strange that I enjoy this?

The knowledge we have of the sunshine state draws us back like a tractor beam. The (lack of) a language barrier, if you discount the fact that nobody in the US can pronounce my name of course, the food we love, the eateries we return to time after time and the knowledge that pretty much everywhere touristy delivers outstanding service make it a tough proposition to beat.

So over the coming days and weeks we can indulge ourselves in that lovely warm feeling of speculative holiday planning which delivers its own joy with no cost, up until the time you decide to actually go and have to press some expensive buttons on the internet.

Of course, for once, common sense may prevail and we will invest our funds instead on the things closer to home, like that new bathroom we need, some decorating and Louise has this crazy idea of needing a new car too. We’ll see. I may open up the betting market so that you can lay some money on what you think the outcome may be. I do know that this won’t be the normal Williams style of holiday. It feels right to do it differently now, whether that difference ends up only being that we’ll be in a slightly different part of the same place we always go to!

On a totally unrelated note some kind soul left a lovely review for my novel, All This And More, this week, so thank you for that as it means I can plug it again here without sounding overly needy to do so.

Till the next time…..