Now first things first, it’s Wednesday – home of the mini mid-week blog, but this weekend’s blog may or may not happen as it’s Rob’s birthday. So weather gods permitting, we aim to be on a nice stroll or sitting in our garden in the sunshine sipping something cool and possibly alcoholic on Saturday instead of writing the blog.
So – on to this week’s events.
We started the week like most other people who have a current Disney Hotel reservation and theme park tickets – staring the pink castle while the new Disney Park Reservation system tried to log us in. The Disney Park Reservation system is the new way of booking theme park visits. Fastpasses are out of the window for the time being while Disney plans it’s reopening with strictly controlled crowds to ensure safety and social distancing. You may recall we had our first go at booking Fastpasses 60 days out only to have them disappear within 48 hours, but for the sake of our knowledge we were glad we’d had a go. You now have to book your actual day in each particular park and no park-hopping is allowed. So – for about the fifth time, we re-wrote our rough schedule and made a list of the days and dates we wanted to be in each park. Having spent two and a half hours staring at that pink castle – like everyone else – I was finally in (Tracey here today by the way). To be fair to Disney, once I was in it was a doddle. Select your guests, that would be me and Rob, select your date, and then select your park. You can keep repeating the process until you have all of the dates you required, which I did fairly quickly and got all of the days we wanted. So far so good. As far as we know apart from the initial waiting for the system to load time, everyone managed to select all of the park dates they wanted, we haven’t heard that anyone so far has been disappointed and unable to book something they wanted. Which is a good thing as this system is likely to be in place until at least Summer 2021.
Moving swiftly on to later that evening, when a fellow Insta friend that we follow shared a story mentioning that the CDC (the Centre for Disease Control in the US) had said there was a spike in Covid cases in the Orlando area, with 4,000 being recorded in one day! This statement went on to say that as a result of that no flights from the UK were being allowed to fly into Orlando until 24th August at the earliest. Much frantic searching and tweeting and emailing later, and we learn, sadly, that this is true. Virgin Atlantic (who we were flying with) had made a statement as part of the news reports which said that sadly they were having to put back their flying to Orlando dates from mid-July to nearer the end of August. Our trip is scheduled for 25 July. OMG!! It’s over – our Orlando dream for this summer is sadly at an end.
Now at this point in time, we have not officially been cancelled – for reasons best known to themselves Virgin are not actually cancelling flights until next week (any ideas anyone???!) but having tweeted them and our travel agent joining us with the research etc, they confirm that the reports are all true and that our flight will be cancelled as of next week. Plus we had lots of other friends and work colleagues also travelling at the same time as us with other airlines and they have all been cancelled already. Cue much misery in the Oh Orlando household and a couple of very glum faces!
We have not cancelled either our hotel or our theme park bookings at this point – far to cautious for that – knowing how this trip has been on and off and on and off for the last three months – we have got so close that I’m reluctant to cancel anything until we have that confirmation through that our flight is cancelled – *adds to jobs to do next week*.As soon as we have the cancellation through I’ll immediately contact the hotel and clear all of our theme park bookings off our MyDisney Experience App – bad day indeed! But hey, on the bright side that might free a few days up for someone else who is still able to be in Orlando and may not actually be able to get the park days they want.
So at this point in time we are very upset to not be travelling to Orlando this year, but as Rob’s holidays are tied to a two week shut down period in the summer there is no opportunity to move the holiday to a later date this year, so next Summer it is! We have other plans afoot so we’ll keep you posted on those in the near future. So no Cracker Barrel breakfast this year, no Chicken Guy Donkey Sauce, no Mickey pretzels, no Longhorn Steakhouse, no Volcano Bay, no Hagrid’s Magical Creatures Motorbike Adventure, no mooching through the Disney Resort Hotels trying fancy food – etc etc the list goes on. But we know it will all be waiting for us next year – and we intend to enjoy it all the more then.
As much as we did want to be there this year, and to investigate the modified attractions and options, we were also a little bit sad that there’d be no fireworks, no hugging Mickey, no dancing with Tigger and no parade – well not in the normal sense. We know that WDW will make it super magical for everyone that IS going this year, we have absolutely no doubt of it and we’d have been delighted to sample everything they have planned. But our list of modified plans were changing almost daily from our original holiday plans and so now we can maybe go back to our original first model of the holiday and do the things we had originally planned. We of course have amazing fellow vlog and blog friends “on the ground” in Orlando report on the opening up of everything and the new normal that has become necessary. We hope most sincerely that the current report in increased Covid cases in the Orlando area is not as bad as is being reported, and that everyone there remains safe and well and able to enjoy this new freedom and the theme park openings without worry. WDW and Universal are taking safety measures extremely seriously and we are sure everything will be safe there. We certainly had no worries about travelling there given what we had seen – but alas it was not meant to be.
Reasons to be cheerful though – maybe by next Summer restrictions will have eased somewhat and some of the things that are currently not possible will become possible. Hope so – can’t wait to be eating my ice-cream waving at Mickey and Minnie on their fabulous parade float, can’t wait to be watching the fireworks from The California Grill at The Contemporary Resort and cannot wait to be high-fiving Scooby Doo. Also with any luck the new fantastic looking Jurassic Coaster at Universal may be up and running, woohoo another new ride to try. Possibly also the Tron Coaster at Epcot may be open, and maybe just maybe Spaceship Earth will have closed for refurbishment and re-opened in it’s new guise.
It’s a long wait, our countdown starts again, but this year we were robbed of our excitement in the planning of our trip a little bit because we always suspected it would be cancelled. So all of the Fastpass booking and Park Reservation booking was done more out of necessity than us having a ball excited to be almost at our departure date. No shopping for bits and bobs has been done (mostly because all of the shops have been closed) and not as much excited chitter chatter about what we were going to buy when we get there. Of course we always have that chitter chatter – all year round – but it kind of reaches a crescendo nearer our travel date which this year has been sadly lacking. We usually wander off each weekend and look at new suitcases (like we need them??!) and the travel section in Boots – making sure we have enough US plugs (we do, we have about 15 around the house!!) and for some reason buying new underwear (anyone else do that when they’re going on holiday ……….no……… just us then). At one point we weren’t even sure where we were going to get our cards loaded with dollars from because everything was closed.
So there we have it – the 2020 Orlando trip shudders to a close for us. By next week we’ll have cancelled everything and we’ll talk no more about the 2020 chapter. We’ll instead go back to bringing you great content about what’s going on in the newly opened parks, we’ll be closely watching all of our Orlando friends and living the excitement with them. We can’t wait to put the countdown back on our little holiday chalk board and we hope that everything that WDW and Universal and everyone else in the area have put into place will keep everyone safe – residents and tourists alike. We hope you all have a wonderful summer in Orlando getting back to what you all do best in the amazing Sunshine State and we will keep all of our UK (and possibly US) friends up to date with things as they progress in Orlando. We will go back to watching new rides being built, making new lists of different places we want to try as we see them, and laughing as I see yet another set of ears I need to buy. Keep everything safe for us – for next year WE’LL BE COMING TO GET YA ORLANDO. Tell Mickey we’re slightly delayed and not to forget us.
Have a good week folks!
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