My Disney World Honeymoon - Part 1

I love Mickey Ears!

This is the 3rd post in my series of Disney trips I've taken in the past. You can find previous installment here -  part one and part two.

Since I remember more of this trip, it will be in several parts.

I always wanted to go back to Disney World after my trip when I was 16. I spent seven years in college after I graduated from high school. My college roommate and I talked about taking a trip down to Florida, but it was just too expensive.

After I graduated, I moved back home because my mom was sick. She died less than a week after I moved back in. My life was in serious flux then so I didn't even entertain any thoughts of Disney. I met and started dating Todd. We moved in together and then as time progressed we got engaged.

We moved from Michigan to North Carolina about six months after we got engaged. Because we were still going to get married in Michigan, we decided to wait a year after the wedding to take our honeymoon.

Planning a long distance wedding is hard so we hadn't really talked about honeymoon destinations. One day, when Todd was sick with the stomach flu, the subject came up. He gave me a choice of Las Vegas or Disney World. Can you guess what I picked?

Even though I was still in the midst of planning a wedding, I started to look up information about planning a Disney World honeymoon. I started to realize that it was going to be more complicated that I had originally thought.

I found disboards.com which is a forum for planning Disney trips. It was and is an invaluable resource. It was there that I found my travel agent with Mouse Fan Travel. She helped with the planning, made all our dining reservations and even got us a discount that saved us nearly a thousand dollars.

Neither Todd nor I had ever stayed in a Disney resort so we decided we wanted to do that for our honeymoon. We also opted to use the Disney Dining Plan, which was pretty new then. On the dining plan, we got one fast food meal and one sit down meal a day, plus one snack a day and a refillable mug.

Since we only live about nine hours away from Disney World, we decided to save money and drive. We made pretty good time and got to our resort, Caribbean Beach, in the late afternoon. We didn't make any dining reservations for that night because we didn't know what we were going to do. We ended up eating at the restaurant at the resort, Shutters. It was good and they gave us free champagne because of our honeymoon.

The next day, we went to the Magic Kingdom. Originally we were going to use that day as a rest day but Todd’s favorite ride, Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, was going down for rehab and this was the only chance we were going to get to ride it. We spent about half the day at the Magic Kingdom, riding all of our favorites. Then we spent a little time back at our resort before we went to our first dinner reservation.

I had spent a lot of time on the restaurant section of the disboards forums since I hadn't eaten at any of the table service places before. One place that was highly recommended was Ohana in Disney's Polynesian Resort. I had heard that you could watch the Magic Kingdom’s fireworks right from the restaurant and the music would be piped in.

We waited a while to be seated but we were able to explore the resort which is beautiful. Finally we got our table which had a perfect view of Cinderella Castle out of the window.  The food is served family style and it’s all kinds of meat – ribs, smoked turkey, pork loin and more. It was so yummy!

It’s all you can eat so the server would come every once in a while to refill our food. When Wishes started, I was entranced by the fireworks show. I didn't hear our server behind me and he scared me so much that I nearly jumped out of my chair. Todd thought this was really funny.

After dinner, we went back to our room and passed out. We had an early day in the morning as we were spending our first anniversary at Epcot.