July 2, 2014 - On the Go in MCO

Red, Brick And Boom At LEGOLAND Florida

Red, Brick and Boom Returns to

LEGOLAND Florida With New Fireworks Show

LEGOLAND Florida is celebrating the 4^th of July weekend in 2014 with its annual Red, Brick and Boom event!

Red, Brick and Boom is three nights of fireworks set to The LEGO Movie soundtrack will light up the sky for all guests to experience, along with fun activities for the entire family to enjoy. The event allows visitors to celebrate the weekend in style while experiencing LEGOLAND Florida’s more than 50 rides, shows and attractions.

Red, Brick and Boom at

LEGOLAND Florida Activities:

Fireworks choreographed to The LEGO Movie soundtrack, including such hits as “Everything is Awesome!”
Special viewing glasses to turn fireworks into millions of exploding LEGO bricks at night

Collective, interactive build of a giant LEGO American Flag
Special scavenger hunt in Miniland USA to win a LEGO Prize pack and much more

Where: LEGOLAND Florida | One LEGOLAND Way, Winter Haven, FL, 33884 |

When: Red, Brick and Boom will run from Friday, July 4^th through Sunday, July 6^th and is included in park admission. Park hours will be extended to 9 p.m. during the three-day event.

Additional Details: For more information, please visit Florida.LEGOLAND.com.

LEGOLAND Florida:

LEGOLAND Florida is a 150-acre interactive theme park with more than 50 rides, shows and attractions, a Water Park and The LEGO World of Chima presented by Cartoon Network all geared to families with children ages 2 to 12. Recently announced, The LEGOLAND Hotel will open in 2015 featuring 152 highly themed rooms and suites, LEGO décor, interactive play areas, a pool and a restaurant. There are currently five other LEGOLAND Parks in the world – LEGOLAND California in Carlsbad, LEGOLAND Billund in Denmark, LEGOLAND Deutschland near Günzburg, Germany and LEGOLAND Windsor outside of London and just opened LEGOLAND Malaysia —the sixth LEGOLAND Park and first in Asia. The LEGOLAND theme parks are a part of Merlin Entertainments Group, the second largest attractions operator in the world. For the most current information, log on to www.LEGOLAND.com.

Inside a Disney Wedding Planning Session

Other than the actual wedding day, brides and grooms planning a wedding at Disney probably most look forward to planning session day.

I’ve mentioned before that planning a Disney Wedding follows a unique schedule. Beginning at six months out from your wedding day, couples (and parents/family members if they are part of the planning process) schedule a planning session with their assigned wedding planner. These can either be held in person or over the phone if couples aren’t able to make the trip to Florida. This is the time when you can finally give voice to all those ideas you’ve pinned to your Pinterest board for your wedding day!

You can also schedule a separate menu tasting with the chefs that will be preparing the meal at your reception. I’ll discuss that in another post.

For now, I’ll tell you how our planning session went when we met with our planner a few weeks ago at Franck’s Bridal Studio.

Franck's Disney Wedding — Franck’s Bridal Studio

We got to meet in the Merryweather room! Disney Wedding — We got to meet in the Merriweather room!

Depending on the size of the wedding and number of events taking place, sessions last around 3-4 hours. During this time, our planner basically took us step-by-step through our wedding weekend beginning with rehearsal. We talked about where and what time we would prefer to hold rehearsal. They won’t guarantee a time and place until 30 days before so we had to give a couple of preferences.

Then we moved to the actual wedding day, starting from the time we wake up. This was important because we had to make sure that we had our photography set up for the right time to cover everything based on the hourly package that we picked. Since we are having an Epcot ceremony, our day will be starting very early.

We then made decisions on everything from transportation (if you want to use Cinderella’s coach for your wedding, now is your chance!) to song choices and favors and linens for the reception. Nothing is set in stone at this point. Essentially this is the “blue sky” phase of wedding planning. We were told to include everything we thought we might want. In the following weeks, our planner will prepare a Banquet Event Order (BEO) and then we can make cuts or adjustments from there, once we recover from the sticker shock! We had done a lot of research prior to our appointment so we had a very good idea of what we wanted. However, if you don’t, they have lots of displays and pictures to show different options. Basically anything you can think of – this is Disney after all!

Disney Wedding Display — Fall wedding decor

The final thing we discussed during our meeting was the most fun – cake!! We could taste four different flavors of cake and four different fillings. We got a couple of bonuses because they included the buttercream icing and a slice of cake to show us how the layers would be. This was really fun and so hard to choose! I almost wish we were having a bigger wedding just so we could have more layers on our cake! In the end we chose marble cake with peanut butter cup filling for one layer, and almond cake with amaretto crunch filling for the other.

Disney Wedding Not the cake we chose — Not the cake we chose 😉

Flavors we tried Disney Wedding — Flavors we tried

After cake, our floral designer came in to meet with us and discuss any flowers and décor we wanted for our wedding events. Lucky for us, our venues don’t need much extra decoration so that part was over pretty quickly. Plus, I came prepared with pictures and paint chips of our colors so that helped to make sure we were all on the same page.

Bouquet Examples Disney Wedding — Bouquet Examples

Going into our meeting I was pretty anxious. I was worried that maybe we wouldn’t connect with our planner or that she would try to talk us into getting a bunch of extras that we didn’t want or need. I’m happy to report that everything went very smoothly and everyone was really helpful and kind. Our planner really took the time to make sure we came up with the best options. It was really fun to finally do some official planning! Throughout the day I kept think about how lucky we are to be there. It’s still a little surreal!

Now we just have to wait to get our BEO and hope we don’t need to make too many adjustments! Stay tuned for my report on our menu tasting, which was probably one of the most special experiences I’ve ever had.