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Wednesday, January 29, 2025

Surprising our Dad with a Cruise on the Disney Wish!

2024 was a very momentous year for the Shinglebells! Rachel's Bachelorette Cruise was in February, she and Landon got married and went on their honeymoon in June, and our dad (a.k.a. Stove) turned 70 in July. We really wanted to do something big for our Dad's milestone birthday, but in the midst of bachelorette planning and wedding planning, we didn't have a lot of time to pull a trip together.

It was my mom (a.k.a. Judy)'s idea to surprise him with a trip. She didn't have a lot of requirements, just that the entire family should be there so it would make sense to do it over a weekend. Rachel, Judy, and I went through several different destination ideas until we finally landed on..... Disney. SURPRISE!


Listen, I totally see the irony of surprising my Dad by taking him somewhere that we go frequently. However, it was the only destination that we all agreed on, and with limited time to plan, it was helpful to choose a place we're already very knowledgeable about.

Stove isn't the easiest guy to surprise. He's a planner and likes to know everything, and he usually coordinates the travel. This was going to be tough to pull off. So on his 70th birthday, July 20, we Facetimed Stove and surprised him with a trip to Walt Disney World. We bought roundtrip airline tickets for him and my mom (because Orlando is a destination that Stove considers driving distance) and told him that we'd be staying at the Boardwalk Inn for three nights, then hopping over to the Yacht Club for three more nights...

Which leads us to the real surprise - instead of transferring to the Yacht Club, we'd be hopping in a limousine to take us to Port Canaveral for a 3-night cruise on the Disney Wish!

Keeping the Disney Cruise a surprise was our ultimate mission. The convenient part about this surprise is that my mom always packs my dad's clothes for vacation, so he wasn't even aware that she had packed his dinner clothes.

The only hiccup we had pre-cruise was the luggage tags that they mail to you.... when I booked the cruise, it asked for the primary address for each of the reservations. Assuming that this was associated with passports and documentation, I filled out my parents' address - as soon as I clicked "submit," it said that my pre-cruise documents would be mailed to the addresses I had designated for each reservation. NOOOO! The next day, I called Disney Cruise Line and explained my predicament, and the phone rep said that they changed the mailing address successfully..... but I was nervous.

I was hoping that because we had booked the cruise only 4 weeks in advance that we wouldn't even be receiving luggage tags. However, just two weeks before the cruise I saw the DCL documents in my USPS Informed Delivery..... which meant that even if my dad didn't get the luggage tags from the mailbox before my mom could, he could see the image of the luggage tags on informed delivery. With my mom's help, I hacked into his USPS account and changed his email address to my email so that I would see when/if the luggage tags were arriving. Interestingly, the DCL documents showed up as "not scanned" on my parents' informed delivery, and my mom was actually on the phone with Rachel, taking a walk when the mailman dropped off the day's mail and my mom was able to successfully get the luggage tags from the mailbox without my dad noticing. PHEW! All that to say - if you're surprising someone with a Disney Cruise, don't enter their address when you book the reservation.

Pre-Cruise Planning

The advantage of doing Disney + Cruise is that I had already extensively researched earlier in the year when planning Rachel's Bachelorette. For our transportation from Disney to Port Canaveral, I booked the same limousine through Backstage Limo.

Since the personalized buttons were such a hit for Rachel's Bachelorette, I knew I wanted to do the same for Stove's birthday. I worked with Clubhouse Creates on Etsy to design a Pirate Mickey button.


Rachel took charge of the Koozie order, working with Carolina Can Coolers on Etsy to create a regular and skinny can cooler design.


I designed magnetic door decorations and used my Cricut Maker 3 (that I bought to make the escort cards for Rachel and Landon's wedding) to cut out pirate hats and a birthday banner. I was able to use cardstock paper and twine that I already had from my stash. It's actually amazing how fast I was able to make the door decorations with the Cricut - in the past, I've cut out door decorations by hand with an exacto knife. I wouldn't recommend buying a Cricut solely to make door decorations, but if you happen to have one, it's a game changer.


The great thing about booking a Disney trip relatively last-minute is that the countdown is shorter! (And the great thing about planning a surprise trip relatively last-minute is that there is less time to ruin the surprise.)

NEXT: Stove's Birthday Trip | WDW [Day 1] - Animal Kingdom & Space 220

1 comment:

  1. SO COOL; Stove sounds just like me as I am the planner for vacations, especially cruises. I am only 66, while he is 70, but we were both engineers in the electrical field

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