December 11: 10 Year Anniversary Trip

Daniel and I will celebrate our ten year wedding anniversary next week.  Ten years!  How can we possibly be that old???

 In honor of our anniversary, we took a little trip to Orlando last weekend, leaving the girls with my mom.  I had bigger plans for this trip at first.  I wanted to go somewhere warm and somewhere that I had never been.  It would have been fun to stay 5-7 days, in my dreams at least.  But in reality, we didn't have much money to work with, so we picked the cheapest flight we could find for a weekend trip...which took us to Orlando!  Considering what the weather looked like last weekend, I am so glad that we chose Orlando.  Florida was the only warm state in the entire country, so we were in the right place!  It was lovely and warm and sunny, with temps in the mid to upper 80s each day.

I also really wanted to stay in a fancy hotel.  But I had this darn budget to deal with, so I ended up using Priceline.  We were able to get a four star hotel in the Downtown Disney area for $70 a night, which seemed like a decent deal.  However, once I started reading reviews about the hotel, I got really upset.  It had lots of bad reviews, and it did not sound like the nice fancy place I had envisioned.

In reality, the hotel was pretty nice.  I had prepared myself for the worst, but I was very pleasantly surprised.  We stayed at the Sheraton Lake Buena Vista Resort.  It is an older hotel, and I did see some of the things that were complained about in some of the bad reviews (the air conditioner was loud, one of the elevators was in rough shape, etc).  But the lobby and the rooms had all been recently remodeled.  Our room was clean, the bed was comfortable, everything worked perfectly, the staff was helpful, the flat screen TV in our room was big, the pool area was nice...I couldn't really find anything to complain about.  It wasn't super fancy, but it was comfortable and clean and nice.  I would stay there again.

Our Room

When we checked in, Daniel told them we were celebrating our 10 year anniversary and asked if they had any upgrades available.  They couldn't upgrade us to a nicer room, but they do move us to a pool view room (which is a  little better than a parking lot view room).  They also waved the resort fee ($18 per day) and gave us two free breakfast buffets (a $28 value).  I didn't feel like they needed to do anything for us, especially since we paid at a discounted rate through Priceline, so I was very happy with this customer service!!

 The view from our room

Most of our trip (all 2 1/2 days of it!) we just spent our time enjoying the warm weather.  I could have sat in the sun all day every day, I think.  We did a little shopping, we ate some good food, and we enjoyed sleeping in until 9 or 10 every morning!  I found a couple of Groupons for some local restaurants, and we used those to help out the budget as well. 

Saturday night we went to Downtown Disney, along with everyone else in the city!  It was crazy busy.  We decided to eat at Raglan Road, an Irish pub with live Irish music and dancers.  We waited for an hour and a half to get seated.  The food was pretty good and the entertainment was fun, but I'm not sure it was worth that long of a wait?

Daniel's Shepherd Pie at Raglan Road

We also spent a day at Disney, but since this post is getting long, I think I will save that for my next post.