Orlando, 2010

For some reason I do have charts saved from our trip to Orlando. I did do some extensive research on car rentals, travel directions (avoid toll roads), cheap deals to Disney and Universal, and finding a motel that was cheap, close enough to the parks and close enough to Dean's favorite place to go eat on vacation - Waffle House. We actually ended up next door to Waffle House. The name of the place was Master's Inn.

I got the motel from the Master's Inn website because that would give us points with our frequent flyer card from AA. But I also investigated Expedia. both places offered me awesome deals.

As for the rental, it was also through some frequent flyer deal. Besides, by using American Express we paid even less. The car was an awesome deal! And we got to drive a Versa. In Cali we drove a Yaris. Actually, renting cars is an awesome way to test drive a car while having fun on vacation. The Yaris and the Versa were both on our realm of possible next cars and we had a very upclose and personal experience with both of them.

For Disney tickets I found this awesome deal - buy 5 for the price of 3 days at The Official Ticket Center, a local vendor that sells on line. We paid $464 total for the two of us. Just make sure you bring the card you used to redeem the tickets. They won't give the tickets to you unless you have the same credit card in hand.

For Universal I just went on their website and bough two two-day tickets.

As for to the minute planning, oh, dear, I was freaking out. I was scared that there would be so much to do that I would not be able to do it all and be frustrated.  I ordered brochures from both parks and listed all the must-not-miss rides. Then traced our route inside the park using the little maps from the brochures and trying to maximize the amount of rides hit per hour.

Did we stick to the route? You must be joking right? Of course not! But it turned out that we did everything we wanted and a bit more, with time for repeats. As long as you try to maximize your time in a somewhat organized fashion you'll do fine.

Since our Orlando trip was the latest one, things went much smoother than all the others. Why? Well, let's just say I am getting the hang of it. I am a great planner, but I have to work on the follow-through part. And Orlando showed a great improvement from Cali and U.S.  I hope I follow the pattern with England. My fear with England is that it is so overwhelmingly huge. It's two weeks and it's a different country.

If you want to see more of Florida, check out my regular blog - www.simplyv.blogspot.com. I did a post trip journal there. I was hoping to to journal during the trip but we got to the motel room waaay too tired for any thing. As you can tell, that would not have been much of a honeymoon either, since the highlight of a honeymoon should happen inside the motel room.

Well, as you can see, the DVW (Dean and Vika Winters) trips are not very much on the romantic side. We understand that we skimp a lot during the year in order to take these once-in-a-life-time trips. That means we are there to enjoy the trip, not each other. And that's just about it.