Well this is super late, isn’t it? Better late than never though and I do have a good excuse. We landed back off holiday right at the very end of April and between jet lag and then being super busy with work whilst I try and make up for two weeks away (the joys of self-employment) it’s just been crazy busy! But I promise it’s been worth the wait because this Happy List is quite possibly the best one of the whole year. I’m not even going to apologise for the fact it’s all holiday related either! So grab a cuppa while we have a little catch-up on April!
1. So if you can’t tell from the photos we went to Orlando for two weeks! This was our third trip and I honestly never thought we’d go back. But when I finally quit my job in a school last year it just made sense to take advantage of the fact that we’d be no longer paying school holiday prices. Don’t get me wrong, Orlando is still a mega expensive holiday but there’s a huge difference in price now I’m no longer stuck with the school holidays. Now we’ve been back though we’ve been well and truly bitten with the Florida bug again and we’re already pricing up a trip next year. There’s just something about the place and if you’ve never been it’s hard to understand but it really does cast a spell over you.
2. We stayed in a Universal hotel for the first time ever. We’ve definitely spoilt ourselves now though because there’s no going back. We’ve never stayed on property at Disney or Universal before and to be honest, with the prices, I think it’s highly unlikely that we ever will with Disney but we’ll definitely be back at this hotel. We stayed at the Endless Summer Resort – Dockside and it was amazing. It’s actually classed as one of Universal’s value hotels but it’s amazing and we loved every second of our stay. I think it definitely helped with making a big decision for us too as we’ve now said that any future trips to Orlando at least for a few years won’t include Disney now. More on that shortly though!
3. I developed a whole new love for Universal on this trip. Every trip we’ve done has included visits to both Universal and Disney and this one was no different but I definitely fell more in love with Universal this time around. We’re both big waterpark fans and Universal’s Volcano Bay far exceeds anything Disney has ever done with a waterpark. Our Universal Resort days were definitely more chilled out than our Disney days too which we both really liked.
4. Disney was so magical. For the most part. However, a big factor in us deciding that we’re going to give Disney a rest is that a lot has changed since we last went six years ago and most of it isn’t for the better. This is a positive list so I won’t dive into it too much here but Disney is more money-focused than ever now and we found some of our Disney days to be quite hectic. With the introduction of Genie+ which we begrudgingly had to pay for a couple of times, I also found that I was on my phone all the time which I really didn’t like either. I will brighten this up by saying we made some absolutely amazing memories at Disney this year like going to the Flower & Garden Festival for the first time, seeing Galaxy’s Edge for the first time, and riding Guardians of the Galaxy. Disney definitely provided some standout moments for us this holiday but for us, it’s probably time to give Disney a break for a bit.
5. Traditionally our last two trips to Orlando before this one have been crazy busy and we’ve not really had any downtime. Staying on property at Universal definitely helped with this but this time around we did a lot more relaxing and it was great. It really made the busy days a lot more enjoyable. I’m not even joking when I say we noticed a huge difference this time around now we’re in our thirties and Orlando is knackering! Definitely more so than it was when we last visited in our twenties! So having some time to relax was really nice. If we’re lucky enough to go on future trips we’ll definitely be making sure we’ve got plenty of downtime pencilled in.
6. We vlogged our trip and it’s really nice to be back vlogging again. We first started vlogging back at the start of 2018 as we’d planned to film our Orlando trip that year. We somehow ended up daily vlogging though which we did for over 1,000 days. That’s still mad to me now that we did that! After such a long time filming and uploading daily, when we stopped it was just really hard to get back into, and aside from the odd vlog here and there we haven’t consistently uploaded since 2022. Recently though I’ve really started to miss it and although I don’t think I’d ever go back to daily vlogging again it is nice to be back sharing our memories and creating videos for us to look back on. We’re uploading one Florida vlog a week and we’ve filmed a lot so the whole series won’t be over until the middle of August. If you want to follow along with our adventure take a look at our YouTube channel and our Instagram account.
So that was April! There’s no way any other month this year is going to beat that unless I win the lottery and we go back to Florida again! As I mentioned, we have been looking at going back to Florida next year but nothing is set in stone yet. With us both being self-employed it is a big financial commitment! I do have some Florida-based blog posts planned though that I will be working on over the next few months.
We’re actually off on holiday again at the very end of this month so I apologise in advance that there’ll be more holiday photos coming up in a few Happy Lists’ time!
How was April for you? What did you get up to? Let me know in the comments!
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