The Final Details

The Disney Cruise Line Wedding Planning Packet sat pinned at the top of my inbox for months. It was due on December 20th, 2019, approximately 77 days before our sailing. I assume it was supposed to be 75 days, but it needed to fall on a business day, instead of a Sunday. It didn’t really matter, I had it ready to go a month ahead of time and turned it in on November 26th. 

Jay and I sat down in early November and went through it again. We had gone through it when we initially got it, but some of our decisions had changed since then. Once we agreed on everything, I printed it out, and filled it out by hand. I crossed every T and dotted every I…. except I forgot to sign at the bottom. However, no one noticed this except my mother. 

Poor Faith, our Wedding Planner, already had to email back and forth with me, and all my questions for months. I’m sure she was happy to be getting to the end of the road! 

I left a lot of the packet blank since we weren’t going for any of the upgrades. I had an Excel chart of our guests and their reservations numbers, so filling in that information was easy. I did my best to describe the items in the welcome bags in the two little lines they gave me. We chose the chocolate cake filling, with the peanut butter buttercream frosting. On the page about the champagne toast, I wrote in a request for martini glasses, instead of champagne flutes, as a tribute to the Adventurers Club. We decided to skip the bouquet and boutonniere, and opt for rose petals instead since I was under the impression you couldn’t take them off the ship afterwards.  

We only needed the pianist for two songs: “When You Wish Upon a Star” for the prelude, and “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Da” for the cake cutting. The rest were coming loaded, on an old iPhone 6 we had laying around. I was worried if I used one of our newer phones without a headphone jack, that we would run into issues. I also had them loaded onto the phone via iTunes. One of the very last emails I got from Faith warned me not to rely on the internet to play the music, because WiFi on the ship isn’t great. I honestly never would have thought using a streaming service like Spotify, would have worked on the cruise ship, so I was ahead of the game there. We had an instrumental version of “When Can I See You Again?” for the processional. Not going to lie, I ripped it from a YouTube video. Better to ask forgiveness than permission, because it was the only version of the song I found that would work. I did the same thing with an instrumental version of “Happily Ever After” for the recessional. Disney didn’t question either one. I mixed our first dance myself. It started out as “Beauty and the Beast”, then it changed to “Shut Up and Dance With Me”, with some sound effects thrown in. Then we also had “He Mele no Lilo” for me and Robby to dance to, instead of a father daughter dance, and “Die Young” and “Burning Love” as songs for everyone to dance to. 

In the beginning, I had actually planned on walking down the aisle to Fantasmic and it was going to be our something borrowed from my friend Jessie’s wedding, but “When Can I See You Again?” is much more appropriate for us.  

Originally, our plan had been to go to Palo alone on the last night, and then join everyone at the Royal Palace for dessert. Instead, we wound up opening it up to everyone who wanted to go and pay the $40 upgrade. This left us with 14 people going to Palo, which was the exact number that fits in their semi-private dining room. With a little help from Faith, we were able to reserve that at no extra charge, beyond the $40 per person. Jay and I were free as it was included in the wedding package, and our five guests in our one Platinum stateroom were also free.

We were also able to add an extra wedding guest with a little help from Faith: the one and only Mickey Mouse! I had emailed in early in the planning, asking how much it would be for a Disney character to appear, and we were quoted $500 for one character and $850 for two. Well, come to find out further down the road, we had been quoted wrong, but Disney was willing to honor the misquote, and give us Mickey for $550, instead of his normal price of $928. 

Thank you, whatever force of the universe, made that happen. 

For the record, I did try to get Duffy, but I couldn’t get that lucky. 

At the bottom of the additional requests, after scribbling “First choice Duffy, second choice Mickey”, I added in once again that we needed extra chairs for stuffed animals. I also talked about Morgan’s peanut allergy, so there would be cake she could eat, I requested a table for the guest book, and an ARE dining rotation for everyone. That’s “Animator’s Palette, Royal Palace, Enchanted Garden”. 

Faith actually got back to me the same day I turned in my packet, with a couple of points we needed to clarify. Some of the reservations weren’t linked with ours, but that was an easy fix, and I had to explain that Lauren’s parents were on the cruise, but not coming to the wedding. (I’m sure they’re lovely, but I had never met them prior to the cruise.) It also turned out that we could keep the bouquet and boutonniere after the fact, so we swapped our petals request for red roses. I had managed to pick a dining rotation that didn’t exist, so we went with “AER” instead. Which was fine with me, I liked the sound of Enchanted Garden better than Royal Palace anyway, but I had been convinced otherwise. 

I also had to put my first and second choices for ceremony time. My first choice was 3:00 pm and my second choice was 4:30 pm. That changed when I found out I had a better chance of getting Mickey if we moved it to 12:30 pm, and he would not be available if we stuck with 4:30 pm. So, my first choice changed to 12:30 pm and second to 3 pm, because Mickey was much more important than the time. 

I went ahead and clarified my friends would be able to set tripods up to film, and explained we were just going to figure out the photography ourselves. 

Then I just had to pay the extra guest fee of $100 since we were five over the included amount, and the $550 for Mickey. I had to fax a form for that, and it was way more difficult than it should have been, but that was the fault of the fax machine. 

I also went online and preloaded onboard credit on our room, so I wouldn’t have to worry about anything on the ship. Plus, if you do it in advance with a Disney Visa Card, you get six months no interest financing on it! 

Some other final details I took care of in the months leading up to the cruise: 

• Put in a Panera catering order for bagels the morning of the cruise, and arranged for one of our friends to pick them up. 
• Scheduled some fun activities with my parents before the cruise. 
• Went to Sephora for a Perk Facial because I’d rather get a free facial with $75 product purchase than pay for a facial. 
• Ordered Jay’s ring off Etsy. Extremely happy with his ring and the owner’s service. Made of Tennessee Whiskey Barrel wood. 
• Ordered my ring off Gemvara. Not happy with this. More on that later. 
• Changed our Beach Club Resort Reservation to the Yacht Club, because they had a better special going on. 
• Prepaid our gratuities. Admittedly, my mom actually took care of this for me because it involved making a phone call. 
• Picked up new jewelry, while shopping with my mom, for her Mother of the Bride dress. 
• Got Thank You cards from Amazon that weren’t very fancy, but they at least had cute animals on them. 
• Got a better curling iron from Amazon for Lacey to use on my hair on the ship. 
• Picked up an entirely white pirate outfit from Antilles Trading Company in Cocoa Beach. 
• Ordered some other various small supplies from Amazon. 
• Lined up Cara and Chris from our engagement photos, to watch our dog Fiona and our cat Brightheart. 
• Helped my mom find a place to board her dogs in Tennessee. 
• Arranged for Gary to crash at Morgan’s the night before Fort Wilderness. 
• Arranged for Morgan and Scott to pick up Robby at the airport the night before Fort Wilderness. 
• We wound up coordinating Lacey, Melanie, Morgan, Tess, and Lauren wearing Disney Dress Shop dresses to the wedding. I had to loan Melanie one of mine. 

I realize some of that was pretty random, but this partially has to do with me being as transparent with the true cost of this wedding as possible, and some of these details will make more sense later. 

For our something old, we had Nip, who is the stuffed Mickey I’ve had since I was a baby. For our something blue, we had Jay’s suit. We changed out our songs so we wound up counting the tripods we borrowed as our something borrowed, and our something new was going to be purchased on the ship. 

I honestly haven’t been to a lot of weddings in my life, so I was reliant on sites like Wedding Wire. To my understanding, most weddings usually have a member of the bridal party or the officiant read different passages or quotes. Once again, I can’t do anything traditional.  

I put together a version of the safety spiel each Jungle Cruise Skipper says as they leave dock, and asked Morgan to read it to start the wedding. I also had our friend Michael Knight look it over, because he is funnier and a better writer than I will ever be. We also asked our friend Lauren to introduce Morgan. 

However just writing that wasn’t enough for me. I put together a script, and worse, I wrote it like a film script because it’s the only type of script I know how to write. Everyone’s copy of the script had certain aspects redacted, so some elements would remain a surprise. Lauren knew what she was saying, but not what Morgan was saying, and vice versa. 

I also made not one, but two seating charts for the stuffed animals and color coded them because I didn’t know what kind of seating arrangement we would have. I also included where the cameras should go. I wouldn’t be able to get into the Outlook Lounge ahead of time, so I needed it to be as easy as possible for Melanie, Robby, and Gary.  

I picked up an accordion folder at Walmart to keep everything organized in. 

Out of pocket expenses so far: 

Cruise Fare: $4,944.06 
Invitations and Postage: $89 
Disney Fine Art Photography: $2875.50    
Fairytale Hair and Makeup Deposit: $100    
Hair and Makeup Trial: $180    
Hoop-Dee-Doo: $444   
Park n’ Cruise for 6 Vehicles: $256.94  
Wedding Party Outfits: $125.43 
Wedding Dress Materials: $300 
Wedding Dress Garment Bag: $15.99  
Groom’s Suit: $527.18  
Groom’s Dress Clothes and Shoes for the Cruise: $79.14  
Groom’s Accessories: $73.04  
Suit Garment Bag: $13.99 
Lanyard Supplies: $64.89 
Robby Cook Art: $100 
Duffy Tsum Tsums and Buckets: $28.50 
Duffy Bottles: $20.29 
25 Canvas Bags: $47.49 
Stainless Steel Tumblers, Glitter, and Cardstock: $123.89 
Sunscreen and Bandaids: $178.96 
Sorcerers Cards, Buttons, and Custom Tie: $107.08 
Magnets: $5.99 
Chapstick: $17.23 
DIY Supplies: $14.26 
Sunglasses, Kleenex, Sleep Masks: $57.97 
Card Protectors and Sharpies: $15.51 
Cricut Vinyl: $74.39 
Boardwalk Guest Book: $114.28 
Cardstock: $30.88 
Life Preserver: $4.60 
Tell-a-cast Printing: $14.06 
Paper Cutter: $12.94 

Mickey Character Appearance: $550 
Extra Guest Fee: $100 
Prepaid Gratuities for Our Room: $81 
Bridal Jewelry: $47.90 
Sephora Product Purchase and Free Facial: $77.75 
Amazon Supplies: $37.69 
Curling Iron: $39.99 
Chelsea Wedding Band: $437.36 
Jay Wedding Band: $175 
Thank You Cards: $10.99 
Panera Catering Order: $34.82 
Accordion Folder: $3.97 
Marriage License: $89.50 
White Pirate Outfit: $127.55 
Total: $12,862.80