I am so jealous of your cruise plans! I'm kicking myself for not booking a Disney Cruise now I'll definitely be going to see the ship when it comes to Newcastle in May next year though

I may need to convince the other half to do a cruise after our 2016 trip, whenever that may be! xx

Yay! Your countdown is decreasing rapidly! Have you broken up from school now? If so yippeee!

I rebooked our car hire via Virgin/Alamo in May instead of via alamo/Brits as a dibber had said they had got a brilliant deal, and when I checked it out it was a great deal for me too! We've got a full size SUV for 24 days in August, £823, inc top insurance, fuel and additional driver everyone else was charging around 1k for our dates.

Love the cruise update, looks like you'll have a brilliant time, I especially like the sound of the mixology class!

Sooo exciting! Our holidays are getting so close now!

Laura Xx

You always need an excuse to go back and a Disney cruise sounds like a good one to me! I promise to take lots of cruise pics that you can use to persuade him to book with!

Laura Xx

I broke up yesterday!

That's an amazing price, I might have to try that way next time we go.

I'm ridiculously excited about sipping fancy cocktails on the cruise after having fun making them!

Not long left at school for you now, that you can relax and do final prep for your holiday too

Laura Xx

Please take lots of photos, but... If they are not fuzzy towards the end you haven't quite got the mixing right and we will have to send you back again for another go

I will take loads of photos and I will try my hardest for some fuzzy ones!

Laura Xx

Ahhhhh just catching up, your cruise plans sound perfect! We're def gonna do that mixology class too, what a barg! And love that you have nothing planned for Castaway Cay day other than floating in a ring ahhhh it's gonna be magical!

Can't BELIEVE how close your holiday is now, I bet you're absolutely buzzing! xxxx

Huge bargain! I know how much you and Ben like your cocktails Floating in a ring will be the perfect way to end our holiday, I hope. I don't think we'll have any energy after being away for over three weeks to do anything else!

I am ready to explode! If you hear that someone has spontaneously combusted in the news, that will be me!

Laura Xx

Safaris & Fish Extenders

School finally finished for the summer holidays last Friday… Yippee! That means we are sooo close to the holiday now! To celebrate we went away for the weekend to somewhere I have always wanted to visit, Longleat. I used to love watching Animal Park as a child; does anyone remember the programme with Ben Fogle and Kate Humble? They still have the pictures at Longleat.



It was a bargain trip, as we are still saving for Florida. We used £9 worth of Tesco vouchers each for our tickets and we had a free night at a hotel saved up through booking so many hotels online, which meant all that we had to pay for was our food and we took a picnic for Longleat to save some more pennies! We had a fab time. We started off with the bits of the safari you can walk around and got to see some giraffes, zebras, wallabies, lemurs and tapirs.




He’s clearly dancing along to… ‘I like to move it, move it!...”




Tapirs are my all-time favourite animal, especially when they are small and have all their stripes. Nathan managed to record this guy weeing and my shock and it shooting out like a water gun!

We then drove around the savannah, which was beautiful and saw even more critters, including the big cats and some naughty monkeys.




This little dude did a big poo on the top of Nathan’s car and one of his friends was damaging the car in front. They were naughty little things, when we were in their enclosure they broke two window wipers, pulled the rubber seal off the top of someone’s car, chewed an aerial and pulled the window washing tube out of another! Some of the others were then using the car parts to groom each other.

I took quite a lot of pictures as I wanted to practice with my new camera, as I still don’t know all of the settings and I want to get some good pictures of Mickey! It’s just a super zoom point and shoot compact and I don’t think it did too badly. We had a mooch around the huge house and grounds, as well as getting to feed some of the seals on the boat trip, explore the bat cave and butterfly house, see some penguins and meerkats up close and hold a tarantula called Fred.








Looking nice and calm!


Sheer terror in his eyes, he doesn’t like bugs! Apparently after I had held Fred he felt his masculinity was being questioned so HAD to hold them too?!

It was an amazing day and I would definitely recommend a day out here. It brought back lots of memories of AK, as it had some brilliant theming in places. Whilst we were in the gift shop the Tiki Rooms was playing in the background?! We both looked at each other confused, but excited for a Disney fix!



On the way back we nipped in to the Bicester shopping outlets to see if there were any nice bits for our holiday. Nathan picked up a smart polo top and pants, but everything I wanted was fairly expensive and I kept on thinking that I could probably get it cheaper out in America so would wait.



It is a very pretty shopping outlet and we enjoyed looking around and window shopping. We had a ‘Jamie-dodger’ at Jamie Oliver’s Café which was yummy and had fun adding more things to our holiday shopping lists!



Ok then, let’s get back to the actual trippie, sorry for the slight diversion. As well as being safari adventurers we have also been putting together our FE gifts. When Nathan was doing his cruise research, he stumbled across fish extenders. For those of you that haven’t heard of these before, basically outside all DCL staterooms is a hook in the shape of a fish. This is what Disney use to hang information for the room onto. Some guests now use these for some fun and hang things on them to collect presents from other guests in.

You can search on Disney forums or FB for a group to join and once accepted you will get a list with room numbers, name, ages, hometown, interests, favourite Disney characters etc. on. You can then use this information to get little gifts for the people in your group. You can buy per person or per room and once on board you leave them in their fish extender, so they have a nice little surprise when they get back to their room . People also reciprocate, so I guess it’s a little bit like a cruise version of Secret Santa .

I was planning on customising a basic pocket storage holder from IKEA, until a lovely American lady on our cruise FB page offered to make us one! This was sooo kind of her and completely unexpected. She won’t let us pay for anything, so we are making her and her granddaughter a goody bag up of lots of UK and Disney inspired gifts as a big thank you (they are not part of our fish extender group). I still cannot believe how sweet this was of her – all of the people we have got to know through the cruise FB page have been so helpful and I can’t wait to meet some of them in person around the ship and during the mixology class .


I think that she has done a brilliant job and I am really pleased with it.


The fabric is really cute and has lots of Mickey and Minnie’s all over it!

There are 10 families in total in our group, 32 people, including us. All of them except one are American, the other family are Canadian. We decided to try and collect some British inspired gifts, as we thought that this would be unique and hopefully something that others wouldn’t give or have received before. We have brought for each person, instead of family group and I have brought some little bags (Disney inspired obviously! ) from eBay to sort them all into before we go. I am hoping to store them inside some shoe boxes, so that they are easier to transfer and also so they don’t get damaged during all of the travelling and transfers beforehand.



I am hoping that no-one in our group is reading this, as it will give away the surprise! For everyone we have brought some cute little Union Jack badges, with UK pictures on (double decker buses, telephone boxes etc.) and lots of British sweeties – Curly Wurlys, Refresher Bars and Haribo Starmix. For the ladies in the group we have also got Tinkerbell nail files and Union Jack magnets. The men in the group have English football car air fresheners and England flag socks. All of the adults also have some fancy teabags. The girls, who are around 10 years old, have double decker bus necklaces and nautical themed bracelets and the boys who range from 7 years to 15 years old have football stationary kits and England flag socks, except for the youngest who we have substituted with football surprise character toys instead of the socks. We have also included a little tourist leaflet about our home city of Leicester for each family, as we thought that it would be a nice touch as the only British people in the group and also because they have probably never heard of Leicester before!


Some of the bits that we have brought.


Franklin decided to help out; he was in charge of the crepe paper!


And some of the finished products…

It has been an effort (and expense) to get everything together, but I have really enjoyed doing this and I am glad that Nathan found the group. I’m looking forward to exploring / sneaking around the ship and delivering all of the goodies , we will probably do this on the first evening on-board or the next morning. I just hope that everyone enjoys their little pressies!

I am just finalising my snack list, as there are a lot! I am hoping to get this up ASAP as there are still a few updates I want to add to this pre-trippie and I am running out of time!