In July 2019, our friends booked a cruise. There was a kids cruise free deal, and Kyle and I decided to crash their vacation. They then booked a 3 bedroom timeshare in Orlando for the week before the cruise to do Disney World, and invited us to crash that too. We would spend most of November 2020 in Florida and the Caribbean. We would dock 4 days before our daughter's 12th birthday, and 9 before their twins turned 9. It would be the trip of a lifetime.
Enter covid.
So we postponed the trip. We would spend November 22-26 at Disney World, with the 26th being my daughter's 13th birthday. The new cruise would sail November 28-December 5th, 2021, December 1st being our friends twins 10th birthday. This might work out better!
Except covid didn't go away. Vaccines were introduced and requirements came into effect. But that's ok, all of the guests aged 12+ are fully vaccinated. Nope. The two dads had the Astra-Zeneca shot combined with Moderna. And the US CDC doesn't accept that combination as fully vaccinated. So once again our trip was in limbo. There was a LOT of back and forth, and a LOT of uncertainty and SO MUCH anxiety but we finally came to a decision, which isn't easy when there are 2 families with 9 people waiting to figure it out.
In October 2021, the US government announced it was going to open the land border and would start to accept mixed vaccines as fully vaccinated! Things were finally starting to come together. Case numbers in Florida had started to decrease drastically. But there were still too many unknown about the islands our cruise was to visit. So we cancelled the cruise, again, and kept the Disney vacation.
Then came the realization, I am one month away from going to Walt Disney World for a week! Time to start super planning! There was the normal stuff: clothes, toiletries, etc. But with a trip like this came some new fun things: new walking shoes ($300 for 3 of us) and supportive socks, new Disney Ears, matching t-shirts (which only our family will have, our friends refuse to participate), refills for the first aid kit, airplane snacks and activities which a new adventure with pre-teens!
Other than packing, there was another layer of planning-what we do while we're there! Both my kids have ADD/ADHD so we can get the Disability Access Service (DAS) passes. That was an ordeal of 3 days online to get a video chat done. Then pre-booking rides with those passes, which took another whole day on hold. We finally figured out that was probably because of the browser I was using, which kept timing out. We also could book dining, but at this close to our trip, which is also over Thanksgiving week, dining reservations are few and far between so we will probably stick to mostly quick service food, which is fine with us.
At this point, with less than 10 days until we fly, we still need to get our travel insurance, rolls of US quarters for the tolls and a few other accessories but even those we can get down there.
Time to celebrate, we are actually going on vacation!!!
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