Back in October 2013, I had ordered a collector’s item Ariel doll from the Disney store online.  I was very excited, until I received the doll.  I suppose I didn’t read the description of this doll very well, because to my surprise it was a 17 inch doll (not the normal “Barbie” size that I was expecting), which I ended up calling the monster doll.  Almost immediately, I wanted to return it right away, I just wasn’t sure if I could go to a local Disney Store to do it or if it had to be done by mailing it in since I had purchased it online.  However, with our hectic moving plans happening at the end of the month, Ryan talked me into keeping the doll and said we would try to sell it after we got to Ohio.  I was a little worried about this, since I felt like I was out of $100 for what I spent on the doll, plus I wasn’t sure if anyone would even be interested in this doll since it was so large, and also that neither of us had secured a job yet and our move was just around the corner.

Ariel

Now I don’t have my own ebay account, but Ryan does, and he practically did almost all of the work.  A while back, he took quite a few pictures of the doll, so when we post it online, potential buyers would be able to see the quality of the doll.  He also designed the page and set up the wording all before we decided to post it.  Then back on May 24th we posted the doll up auction style with a buy it now option as well, and then decided to put it up for 7 days.  We researched pricing a little bit to see how much the doll was going for, and I wasn’t trying to be greedy, but I wanted to make sure I made back at least how much I paid for it and then maybe a little more lol.  We put it up starting at $299.99 and then the buy it now was set at $425.  It was a little exciting, cause we had a few people view it within a few minutes of us posting it, so we kinda just sat and stared at the site for a little while to see how many views we would get or if anyone would even bid on it.  After almost an hour, we took the dogs outside, and then when we came back in Ryan went to check the auction, and we were pretty shocked to see that someone had done the option to buy it now!!  It was ridiculous!  I can’t believe we sold it so fast, when I was thinking we would be waiting a week to see what the bids looked like.

We were pretty ecstatic after we sold it, until five days passed by, and we still haven’t heard anything from ebay that the buyer paid, nor did we hear anything from the buyer.  Ryan decided to report it to ebay since the time limit had passed for what we requested for the payment, as well as the ebay rules for payment.  We were a bit aggravated by this point, I just didn’t understand why someone would click the buy it now, and not pay for it. Shortly after we reported it to ebay, we get an email from the buyer.  They said they had intentions on paying for it but they were waiting for a credit card payment to go through.  I’m kind of feeling bad at that point because I don’t think we should be selling someone something for over $4oo when her credit card is maxed out, but who knows what her situation really is.  We decided to give her till the end of the ebay reporting period to pay before we relist the item, but finally she ends up paying for it on June 2nd.   10 days it took for this person to pay it!  Ridiculous.  Anyhow, the next day, I dropped it off at the post office, with tracking and insurance, and it was delivered on June 5th, which was nice and quick, unlike our buyer.  Paypal must have been notified that the package was delivered because they then released the funds into Ryan’s Paypal account the same day.  He then transferred it to our bank account which showed up today!  I’m just happy this whole thing is finally over, and now we have to decide on what we want to sell next!  Also crossing my fingers that we don’t have another deadbeat buyers for any future items we put up.

When we woke this morning, we were already docked in Fort Lauderdale.  Our ship was scheduled to get in around 5:30 this morning, and it was a little after 6ish that we woke up.  We made it back safe and sound without any real problems, but our Honeymoon Cruise is just about over.  Sad..  Ryan and I weren’t scheduled to get off the boat till about 10:15 – 10:30 this morning, so we took showers and got ready.  We headed up to the Windjammer Cafe for breakfast, and we were able to get a table by the window.  It was fairly busy that morning there, but not as busy as usual.  They did start getting people off the boat around 6:30-7am so some guests have already left.  We took our time with breakfast, and got our final pops with our tumblers.  Both of us definitely got our money’s worth with the pop passes that we bought, we will be getting those again on future cruises!   After breakfast, we headed back to our room to hang out until we had to go to the Alhambra Theater to wait to leave the ship.  While hanging out, our room attendant showed up a couple of times and was surprised we were still there.  I guess he probably wanted to get a start on cleaning before the next group of guests boarded.  We ended up giving him an extra $15 tip on top of the prepaid tip, he was the only person we ended up giving more of an extra tip to.  I was ok with it at first, but after we gave it to him, it felt like his boss came shortly after to basically “kick” us out of our room, so now I feel like we shouldn’t have bothered with it.  Oh well, next time we will not give extra, or if we do it will be a smaller amount.  His boss said that we should probably leave because if we are late, then customs will probably charge us, which really didn’t make any sense, and it was still before 10am, even though our time to leave wasn’t scheduled later.  Just to make sure there was no trouble, we ended up leaving, and saw there were still quite a few people on the ship.  We may have been the last ones in our room (lol) but definitely not the last on the ship.  We got our Seapasses scanned for the last time to mark that we got off, and went down a ramp to the customs area.  We found our bags pretty quickly down there and then waited in line till we got to a customs officer.  It was pretty fast and efficient, we were only in line maybe 20-25 minutes or so.  I think getting a late disembark time definitely helped with that, and not trying to rush around with a bunch of other guests trying to get somewhere by a certain time.  Once we got up to the customs officer, it was pretty smooth.  We had filled out our declarations form the night before, and the customs guy just checked our passports, asked us if we had anything to declare, and asked us if we had over $10,000 in cash… which we didn’t.. lol.  Then they let us go.  Oh, there was a lady on the ship that had brought her little chihuahua dog on board, we saw her a few times thoughout the whole trip, it was such a good dog just riding around in the stroller and never barking, we could never bring Bailey and Indy on a cruise.  I hope she didn’t have any problems going through customs.  I saw her in the queue line a little ways ahead of us, so hopefully there were no issues.

Before our cruise started, we had prepaid for a shuttle ride after the cruise was over to take us to the hotel we were staying at for our last night in Fort Lauderdale.  It cost $25.00 for the both of us to get back to the hotel.  After we got through customs, we put our little stickers on our shirt to let the driver know we were prepaid for the service.  We asked of the people there where we needed to wait for the shuttle service, and he directed us across the street.  I must say that there is a definite difference in the superb customer service skills of the employees of the ship versus the employees of the port, if they even have any customer service skills at all, but whatever, I guess we weren’t paying to be at Port Everglades.  When we got to the shuttle waiting area, our driver was already there and brought us over to his shuttle.  I believe it was us and 5 or 6 other people on it.  He got our luggage in the back and asked us all where we were headed.  Ryan and I were going to the Hyatt Regency Pier 66, two other people were headed to the airport, and the other group was headed to Miami.  The driver dropped Ryan and I off first because we were the closest.  We were actually able to see our hotel from our room, it was pretty cool.  We got to the hotel around 10:45 that morning, and we initially requested an early check in because we were worried that we would end up getting their early, which we did.  Unfortunately the rooms were not ready yet.  We were able to drop off our luggage with the bell hop, which was nice that they offered that service.  The lobby of the hotel was very impressive, very clean, modern, and everyone there was super nice.  The bell hop told us about an Everglades Waterboat excursion we could do while we waited, but we declined.  We ended up taking the free shuttle service down to the beach though.  That ordeal was a bit of a frustrating mess.  We got a driver that said she normally doesn’t take people to the beach, but she would take us since the normal person wasn’t there.  She was friendly enough, and we tipped her a few dollars, but she dropped us off in front of a hotel across the street from the beach.  Their parking lot was a bit weird, and somewhat gated, and we got frustrated because we were not sure how to get out of the area. We walked behind the building for the safe route, since the street was busy and didn’t appear to have a sidewalk, but behind the building ended up being gated so we came back, and went up to a little sky bridge, but that too was gated, and you had to be a hotel guest to use it with your room card.  That would have been the most direct way right to the beach, but since we weren’t guests there we weren’t able to use it.  Ryan then asked a parking attendant how to get there the easiest, and she was just a complete moran who didn’t even care to really listen to what he was asking.  She said she didn’t know how to get to the beach unless we used the sky bridge…. ummm Hello???? are you not from this area???  What an idiot.  So we just walked down to the road and crossed the street at the light, and we were there finally.

We took our sandals off and walked in the sand, which was pretty warm and had little somewhat sharp rocks and little shells in it.  I forgot how hard and how much of a workout you get when you walk at the beach.  It’s a good 2 years or so since we were at Canon Beach in Oregon.  We walked closer to the water to get our feet into the Atlantic Ocean, and closer to the water, the sand was a lot nice and smooth, so that was much more fun lol.  The waves there were pretty crazy that day and splashing up on us, getting my shorts and my bag wet.  We didn’t stay for too long at the water, and ended up heading back to the sidewalk area.  They had an area where we could wash the sand off of our feet and then we crossed the street to browse through some of the shops, and try to find lunch somewhere.