A Magical, truly Magical Vacation

So about a year ago, my grandparents decided that they wanted to take one last trip with the whole family. The whole family being my grandparents, ages 88 and 86, my Mom, Jason, myself and our boys and my brother, his wife and their son and daughter. After talking about the best option, a plan was in place. A Disney Cruise!

And with that, the planning was set in motion. I looked at my nephew's school calendar and the potential calendar for Chase with his start of Kindergarten and the year-round system. With that in mind, I went online and scouted for the cheapest times of the year. We settled on the week prior to Veteran's Day. The boys would only have to miss 1 day of school because they would be tracked out and the rates were significantly cheaper because it was an "off-time". Perfect. Next step - where to go.

A couple of my boys have serious car-sickness so I was afraid there may be some issues on the cruise as well so we settled on a 4 day, 3 night cruise out of Port Canaveral with the only stop being at Disney's private island, Castaway Cay.

From there, each family made their own transportation plans as well as arrival and departure dates. Of course, because this is a Corn-family function, there has to be a few kinks in the plan. The biggest is that in June, Matt and his family moved to Columbus, Ohio for his job. Now that impacted their plans because they decided to extend their time and come down on Monday to Orlando (ship left port on Friday) and go to a couple theme parks. So let the next round of planning start.

Jason and I decided to drive down Monday and spend the night in Savannah and finish the drive to Orlando on Tuesday. The boys didn't know anything about the trip until I started packing on Sunday. Then all I would tell them is that we were going on a trip. Wouldn't even say where we were going. Monday morning as I dropped everyone off at school, I told them we were driving to Florida but frist would get to stay overnight in a hotel. Then Tuesday morning we told them we were driving to Orlando but not any more than that. My grandparents met us at the time share so the boys were pretty excited but the excitement ramped up once my Mom, Matt and his family got back from Sea World and the boys figured out we were all going to be together on the trip. We stayed at the time share on Wednesday and let the kids swim, play on the playground, have fun in the sun and just enjoy being with each other.

Thursday we ALL went to Magic Kingdom. We didn't tell the boys where we were going until we drove through the gates and we filmed their reactions. It was so neat to see them get excited and then all they wanted to do was see "Mickey's Castle" (sorry Cinderella, in our house, it belongs to Mickey!) Since we had 2 cars so we took my Mom and headed out early while Matt and family brought the grandparents. We put them on motorized scooters and after a rough start to the morning trying to get synched up, the afternoon was a blast. We didn't get to all the attractions we wanted to simply because we had too many bodies to keep up with and both the oldest and the youngest had a threshold for line waiting that we tried to be aware of.

Friday morning we loaded up and drove to the port. We told the boys the night before that we were going on a Disney cruise but it didn't register until they saw the boat as we approached the port. The got really excited and again we have some video of their reactions that I will share in a future post. After a relatively smooth check-in process, we got on the boat, had some lunch, put swim suits on the kids and let the fun really begin.

We got off the ship on Monday morning and drove straight home to Raleigh. We made it home in 10 hours and 10 minutes including meals and potty breaks! I was really proud of how the boys did and am more willing to do some more longer journeys with them in the future.

This was the overview to our trip and over the next few days I will post a detailed post of each event with pictures but I wanted to at least share what the big surprise was that I alluded to in the previous post.
 Update before crazy gets anymore out of hand