Orlando Master Thread

[Feivish]

Thanks. Working on it. As long as one person will read it, it's worth sharing.

Yeh... I'm still waiting for you to finish your honeymoon TR.

[avadah]

Yeh... I'm still waiting for you to finish your honeymoon TR.

That's what I was thinking when I saw

Now, for the real TR...

[@Yehuda]

Hehe, it's a lot easier to write a TR about something that happened last week and only lasted 3 days, than to write the last 4 weeks of a trip that ended 6 months ago, unfortunately. I do have Gibraltar almost finished. Hopefully, I'll get to these. I would hate to never do it.

[lunatic]

Hehe, it's a lot easier to write a TR about something that happened last week and only lasted 3 days, than to write the last 4 weeks of a trip that ended 6 months ago, unfortunately. I do have Gibraltar almost finished. Hopefully, I'll get to these. I would hate to never do it.

Next time do it like Marco Polo

[Joe4007]

Next time do it like Marco Polo

Hopefully there's no next honeymoon

[@Yehuda]

Hopefully there's no next honeymoon

+1 Although, the first time we go to a beach destination, I'm calling it a honeymoon!

Next time do it like Marco Polo

If you recall, I actually planned to do that. I thought it would be easy, but after being sick the first few days in Israel, I fell behind...

[Marco Polo]

+1 Although, the first time we go to a beach destination, I'm calling it a honeymoon!If you recall, I actually planned to do that. I thought it would be easy, but after being sick the first few days in Israel, I fell behind...

Whenever you make a hotel reservation call it a honeymoon...

[@Yehuda]

Whenever you make a hotel reservation call it a honeymoon...

Yeah, yeah or "anniversary". We'll see how comfortable I am with that the next time I'm in the situation.

[lunatic]

Yeah, yeah or "anniversary". We'll see how comfortable I am with that the next time I'm in the situation.

Otherwise, call it a birthday trip

[3yummyboys]

There's always an occasion for a trip, chances are it's someones birthday, anniversary etc.

[dealfinder85]

There's always an occasion for a trip, chances are it's someones birthday, anniversary etc.

its always an anniversary of something

[noturbizniss]

After some thought, I decided I will do a quick TR of my Orlando trip now and then probably post a much longer version afterwards. I know it's "just" Orlando so why does it need a long TR? Because it's easy since I just went and it's fresh in my mind, because I like writing and had time, and because I think it's written as a good story and some here may enjoy it. BUT, I know it's not practical for a lot of folk, so I'll just the quick rundown now.

Flight:
We flew SW ISP-MCO (the only direct SW flight from NY-MCO) and paid with gift cards that I bought on DDF at a discount. With my CP, it came out to $109 pp RT.

Hotel:
We stayed at the Comfort Inn & Suites Universal Convention Center as a BRG and got upgraded to a suite because it was our anniversary. The hotel is a 5 minute walk to Chabad and 1 of the 2 Kosher restaurants in Orlando, Kosher Gourmet. The hotel also has free breakfast (for Kosher that means yogurts and Nestle hot chocolate) as well as a free shuttle to Universal and some other parks. The hotel was nothing fancy, but it did it's job as a free place, especially with the larger room

Universal:
Chabad is generally considered the cheapest place to get Universal and Disney tickets, but Yehoshua found a Black Friday sale at Musement.com and I got my tickets for about $15 cheaper pp than Chabad. I got 2-day passes so we could do 1 park each day, and it turns out they were hopper passes so we could technically go in between both parks on both days.

We did Islands of Adventure on day 1, and it was awesome! Didn't take the full day to go through it all (we went on most of the rides and walked slowly) and Harry Potter World was incredible! They really did a great job. We did Studios on the 2nd day, and it was also awesome! Harry Potter World here was also sick! (Yes, there are 2 HP Worlds) and yeah, I just love these kinda parks. The way they lay them out and design them just puts you in such a magical place

Kosher Gourmet Restaurant:
We ate at Kosher Gourmet both dinners and brought sandwiches from home for lunches. KG was a nice no-frills deli with reasonable prices, but medium-quality food. We like the chicken fingers, hot wings and BBQ beef (i.e. pulled beef) sandwich. Grilled chicken sandwich and the steak, onion and pepper sandwich were okay to ehh.

Legoland:
On the 3rd day, we rented a car from Hertz with a free day voucher and drove to Legoland with free tickets courtesy of a DDFer who had extra tickets Legoland was really cute, but is clearly geared towards kids. We did go on a bunch of rides, but most rides were too little for adults to even go on. The 3D show didn't come close to similar attractions in Universal, but I had always liked Legos, and therefore enjoyed the park. The mini-world that they built out of Lego included the NY skyline, Las Vegas strip, and other famous sites was really, really cool! It was too cold the last day, so I imagine that contributed to the park being EMPTY, which was pretty cool.

I think that's it, pretty quick TR. Hope it helps some people. Now, for the real TR...

HOW COULD YOU GO TO ORLANDO AND NOT GO TO DISNEY WORLD!!!!! WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU!!!!!

[@Yehuda]

HOW COULD YOU GO TO ORLANDO AND NOT GO TO DISNEY WORLD!!!!! WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU!!!!!

I gave her the option and she said I want HP World.

[noturbizniss]

I gave her the option and she said I want HP World.

I wanna do that too, but come on!
When's the last time she was at Disney?

[@Yehuda]

I wanna do that too, but come on!
When's the last time she was at Disney?

Gulp. Never. But never at either.

[noturbizniss]

Gulp. Never. But never at either.

Arghh!! MISTAKE! I know it's costly, but it is the happiest place on earth. We went for our honeymoon. Did 4 days in disney, 1 in universal and then miami for the weekend.  We felt universal was blah.  Although I've heard HP world makes it much better, but we definitely felt like universal is the cheap step sister to WDW. I am planning to go next year jan/feb with the family.

[@Yehuda]

Arghh!! MISTAKE! I know it's costly, but it is the happiest place on earth. We went for our honeymoon. Did 4 days in disney, 1 in universal and then miami for the weekend.  We felt universal was blah.  Although I've heard HP world makes it much better, but we definitely felt like universal is the cheap step sister to WDW. I am planning to go next year jan/feb with the family.

My thought process was that Disney is easier to do with kids anyway, so if we get another chance to go in a few years and iy"h there are kids there, they will appreciate it more than Universal. Of course, it won't be the same as going alone, but we decided on Universal.

[@Yehuda]

I know, I know. I should have been writing my Eurotrip TR. I know, I know. A detailed trip to Orlando is not nearly as exciting as Europe, Australia or Asia. But hey, I did the legwork of writing it up, and I personally think it's a fun read. Enjoy!

Trip Planning and the first night

As soon as my company announced that we’d be getting off for 12 days from Christmas through New Years, I knew it was time to plan a nice, big trip. Unfortunately, that idea was nixed pretty quickly once I realized my wife was going to be amidst final exams in her final semester of undergrad. Awesome for her, terrible for the travel bug. She was scheduled to take her last exam the day work started up again and with busy season starting just 2 weeks later, I knew that if we were going to go anywhere in January, I would have to take days off and it would have to be within those 2 weeks. I had originally dreamed of Hawaii, but my wife told me she didn’t want to go away for a long time since she had to study for a grad school entrance exam that would be given at the beginning of February. Looking back now, I probably could have convinced her to go away for a whole week instead of the 3 days that we did get away for, but that’s in the past, and we had a great time anyway. With the requirement of only travelling for a few days, and her desire to visit Harry Potter World, MCO became the logical choice.

Hotel: A long time ago, I booked a BRG at the Comfort Inn & Suites – Universal Convention Center for the chance that perhaps January would turn into an Orlando trip. No risk if the trip wouldn’t work out, just the upside that if MCO became the destination, we’d have a free hotel stay. It wasn’t for the dates we would end up needing, but if you follow the BRG thread, you’ll learn that BRGs can be quite flexible.

Airfare: Staying domestically meant Southwest and the SW CP was going to be the way to go. SW (or WN for the professionals) in the NY area only flies direct to MCO from ISP, and being a good 6 weeks out, flights were still pretty cheap. I had recently bought a nice chunk of discounted SW gift cards, so it was cheaper for me to pay cash than use points. The RT cost for 1 person was $218 after the savings from the gift cards. Factor in my wife coming along for free as my companion, and that’s $109 pp RT. The only issue was that my CP was expiring in Dec ’14. I filled the forums up with my nerves as I tracked my CP progress from getting 2 SW CCs, to hitting the spend, to having the statements close on 1/2/15, to the points transferring to SW on 1/4, to having a pending notification on my account that my CP status wasn’t official yet, to finally getting CP status and adding my wife to the flight the morning of our flight, 1/5. (I had booked her a seat with points on the flight way back when I booked my ticket just in case, and I cancelled that ticket as soon as she was added on as my companion.)

Once I had the hotel and airfare, I worked on planning the itinerary, buying park tickets, finding discounts on restaurants, renting a car, etc. but we’ll get to each of those as we move along.

Monday 1/5
Because I was going back to work on Monday, I packed my stuff on Sunday. My wife took her last final Monday morning, was going to pack once she got home, and then be ready to leave with me as soon as I got home from work around 4:30PM to catch our 6:40 flight out of ISP (my first time flying out of there).  I’m glad Marco Polo flew this route just 2 weeks before me and convinced me that it’s a really smooth parking-to-gate process. I was planning on leaving work early at 3:30 to give myself an hour to get home via subway, but of course, somehow, I got a message at 3:10 asking if I could help with something. The project took till 3:55PM (with me bugging out) and then I decided to just jump in an Uber. The ride home was about $30 minus $20 referral = ~$10 out of pocket. Not bad for not having another option. I even got home at 4:20PM (10 minutes earlier than I originally planned) with plenty of time to quickly change into more comfortable clothes and jump in the car. My wife was, of course, ready and waiting on time for me, so that helped greatly as well. We jumped in the car and turned on Waze to find a shock that was beyond belief. The ride that I could have sworn was supposed to be only an hour, was predicted to be 1 hr 40 min! That would get us to the Clarion hotel parking lot (where we had booked a parking reservation) at just T-22 and we still had to take the shuttle from the Clarion to the airport! We actually contemplated turning around and trying to take a flight the next morning. Thank G-d, an idea popped into my head to see if Gmaps would have a different route to the hotel. It did! Gmaps had a way to get there in 1 hour 29 min – just 11 minutes faster, but that was enough for me to try and press our luck. I said a few little prayers as we were sitting in traffic and moving along slowly. After a long while, I noticed that the highway now had an HOV lane for 2+ people in a car, and we switched in and started going 60 while everyone else was doing 30! What a gift from G-d! Watching the ETA slowly go down was such a relief and joy. We got to the Clarion at T-45 (again, originally from T-22!). I ran in and waited on line (aaah!) to fill out my paperwork for parking, parked the car, and we were in the shuttle at T-40, 6:00PM exactly. The ride took literally 3 minutes (I could believe how close it was!) and there was no line by SW, although the agent told us that our bags weren’t guaranteed to make the flight was it was past T-45. This happened to us once in DEN and we opted to hold onto our bags, which turned out well since the flight ended up getting cancelled. This time, I figured we’ll take our chances (technically we could have taken our bags with us because they were small enough to be carry-ons) because #1 we had liquids in our bags and #2 the airport is so small that I figured – c’mon, they have to be able to get the bags onto the plane with over a half hour. There was no line by security (TSA Precheck wasn’t even open because there was no line), and we found our gate at T-30 with plenty of time to use the bathroom and make our way to our A35 boarding position. Phew! We couldn’t believe it, but we made it!

ISP is so small that the plane just backed up from the gate with a K-turn and then was on the runway taking off. Onboard, we enjoyed free Nestle hot chocolate, played Monopoly Deal, and my wife read Harry Potter .

We landed on time around 9:30PM to find a really cozy airport in MCO. It has a train from the terminals to the main section of the airport (just like DEN) and the airport is just really cozy and nice – not fancy or modern, but nice. The carpeting and smell make it feel like your grandparents’ apartment (maybe that’s to appeal to the many elders on our flight that were likely visiting their second home) and the Disney/Universal/SeaWorld stores immediately brought us into the magical world that is Orlando. We got to baggage claim and hesitantly waited to see if our bags had made it. Within a few minutes, we saw our bags come out the conveyor belt (!) and, once again, breathed a deep sigh of relief. Not having to worry about coming back to the airport in the morning felt great. We headed outside and were ready to use another Uber $20 off. Uber is no longer allowed to be requested in MCO (along with some other airports) since apparently they weren’t paying taxi airport fees. Thanks to some tips from DDFers, I moved my location pin in Uber to a road outside the airport and made the request from there. I called the first driver who responded and told him I was really in the airport. He didn’t seem to mind, but said he was too far away and won’t come. I guess I didn’t move the pin to the best spot. I made a second request and called the driver to find out he was first getting gas but wouldn’t mind picking us up in 10-15 minutes. We got in the cab and found out our driver, originally from the Dominican Republic, had served in the US Marines for 6 years in Afghanistan and his father was from Haifa. Go figure. The 25-30 minute ride to the Comfort Inn cost about $30 - 20 off = ~$10, and we checked into our room. We found out the information for the free shuttle in the morning to Universal (something I made sure was available at this hotel when I booked it) and went up to our room. A few days before we left, I called the hotel and asked to be upgraded to a suite because it was our first anniversary (which was a few days after our trip), and they gladly did so. Fun to use a BRG and get upgraded to a suite.  The room was great. We didn’t need anything fancy for a trip to MCO, and the upgrade gave us a lot of room to spread out. We brought some deli sandwiches for dinner and watched Friends on my laptop (forgot to bring my HDMI cable) before going to bed.
 

[EJB]

Whenever you make a hotel reservation call it a honeymoon...

Does that work if you're bringing a kid 

[morgs]

Does that work if you're bringing a kid 

Absolutley-tell them its a belated honeymoon because you could not get time off school after the wedding etc etc etc