Duck Tours

Yesterday was Samuel and Joshua's birthday party, and Nicky and I got to go along for the ride! The real partygoers were the birthday boys, along with Jake, Owen, Will and Fraser. We tagged along as "adult helpers" !!

We met up at half past nine, and drove up to the O2 car park and got on the tube from there to Waterloo. This turns out to be an excellent way of getting into London at the weekend. It's quick and easy, the car park is only £3 for all day, and kids go free on the Underground - I think we will be doing this again soon. The Jubilee line is definitely the nicest of the tube lines, especially the new stations to the east - the proof of that being that Nicky was actually willing to go on it!

We arrived at the Duck Tour embarkation point a little early and so had a wander around next to the Eye for a little while, and the boys had their photos taken with some of the street performers.

Our Duck Tour was at midday, and we had a great time, on board the "Mistress Quickly" with our tour guide Heidi. The land-based part of our tour took in sights such as parliament square, Westminster Abbey, Downing Street and Buckingham Palce, before we took to the water (down a slipway next to the MI6 building) and went back up the Thames under Lambeth Bridge and as far as parliament before heading back.







After our tour it was back to the tube to Green Park and to the Hard Rock Cafe for a very nice lunch, accompanied by an extremely large and extremely chocolatey birthday cake!

More trip planning

4 weeks today !!



Making plans for our trip, we've decided that it's going to be easiest to hire a car from the airport as usual rather than trying out Disney's Magical Express transfer service. We've reserved a 7 seater with Budget again, and we're going to send them a message to ask nicely if they can make sure that they actually have a van there when we arrive this time, rather than making us wait an hour or so for one to arrive, at the end of a very long day.

We've also decided (confirmed by some of the replies to our post on DVC News) that we won't sign up for the Dining Plan, which would have cost us $1300 for the five of us for the whole stay. In stead, we are going to get the Dining Experience card (now suffering under the comedy rename of "Tables in Wonderland"!) for a cost of $60 and get 20% off at most of the restaurants. Should pay for itself after nice meals at Jiko and Le Cellier, and then everything after that will be a bonus! Plus, it will still be valid when we go back next February.

We've sent a message to Nikki, our DVC adviser, reminding her that she had promised to sort us out some Fastpasses earlier in the year (to compensate for the fun and games we had with trying to get access to the DVC member website). Hopefully we'll be able to meet up with her and ask her advice on what to do with our remaining developer points.

Thinking ahead to our February trip, Nicky was talking to Jake this morning, and as an attempt to encourage him to enjoy his school swimming lessons that have started on a Tuesday, she suggested that if he continues to do really well with swimming then perhaps we could go to Discovery Cove and go swimming with the dolphins. Sounds like a jolly good idea to me!

Having a dip

We've been enjoying our weekend, and today we took the dog for a walk around Leybourne Lakes. We enjoyed the walk, and Barley enjoyed a paddle too!



Straight after getting back from our walk, Grandad arrived to take Jake to the Ice Hockey. They've just returned, and Invicta won 5-2! Whilst they were out, Nicky and I went for a sneaky look at a house that's for sale. Looked quite nice, albeit that we thought that it is detached but it isn't, the garden goes right up to the train line, and it costs really rather a lot of money!

This weekend I've registered with the DVC News website and done by first post to their forum. Should be fun to get stuck in to some DVC discussions!

"Holidays are coming"

Well the holidays are definitely coming, even if we haven't spotted a convoy of Coke lorries on the horizon yet! Not long now until we go to the Animal Kingdom Lodge (44 days to be precise), and the even better news is that we've booked out next trip already.

Well, perhaps that's a bit of an exaggeration, but we've booked flights. We will be heading back to Orlando for the February 2009 half term, flying from Sunday to Sunday. Ordinarily we wouldn't be able to do this without Jake missing a day of school, as we won't land back here until the Monday morning, but Nicky has managed to get some inside information that the Monday after the February half term is going to be a training day at Jake's school.

Looking on the Virgin Atlantic site on Friday, the difference in price between flying on Saturday and Sunday was huge. If we went on Saturday, the flights for the three of us would be over £2,700, but flying on the Sunday we've managed to get flights for the bargain price of £1,050!

I tried calling the Virgin Flying Club yesterday to see whether we could use our points to upgrade our flights to Premium Economy, but it turns out that we don't have the right ticket type for that, and that to change to the right type would cost us an extra £700. Then we would be able to trade in 60,000 points for the upgrade. Seems a bit disappointing to me. Nowhere in the booking process was it made clear that these flights were non qualifying. In fact the booking screen had the option to upgrade to Premium Economy by paying about £1,000 for the three of us, so to then be told that we'd need to spend £700 before being allowed to use a large number of points to achieve the same thing does seem a little bit cheeky. Definitely one of those "I must write a letter" moments!

We haven't booked our accommodation for February yet. My preference would be to try out the Old Key West resort, as it's just down the river from Port Orleans which we like so much, and it was after all the original DVC location. Looking at the charts we could have a studio for the week for only just over 100 points.

Talking of DVC points we're trying to decide what to do with our "developer points" - the incentive ones that we were given when we joined. They gave us 160, and so far we've used 75 for 3 nights at the Newport Bay Club in Paris, leaving us 85 still to spend, and they will expire at the end of the year. Unfortunately it doesn't look easy to use them for some of our October trip. We've already used our regular points for that, and to swap over we would have to cancel part of our current booking, and then rebook with the developer points. The risk is that if there is a waiting list for our current booking, if we cancel we would go to the back of the line, and possibly end up with nothing.

Not fancying taking that risk, we are considering using 85 developer points and adding 75 of the regular points to book a week next summer in one of the Interval International locations. I think that we are allowed to do that - for the DVC properties I think we have to book and use points by the end of the year, but for Interval International we are OK provided we have booked by the end of the year.

We must call Nicky, our DVC advisor, soon (especially as she did promise to sort out some Fastpasses for us earlier in the year due to some problems we had with the DVC member website, and the related (lack of) customer service). It would be great if Nicky was around in October as we could pop in and see her, and I'm sure she would give us some good advice on getting value out of our developer points.

In other news, work is looking interesting at the moment, following discussions this week about a possible new role for me which might give me some new opportunities. We've got a meeting with the regional boss next Wednesday to discuss further, so we'll see what happens.

Finally, particularly good news from Bec, who got the results of her exams on Friday, and the great news is that she passed, and that there are no more written exams left to do. The graduation date has officially now gone into the diary!! Well done Bec !!

T minus 50 and counting

Well there are two milestones today on the holiday countdown. Firstly we can now tell the world that we are going on holiday next month, and it's also 50 days to go today!!



In other news, I've been playing with iGoogle, as can be seen from the calendar below!