Honeymoon in Orlando (Sans Disney) on a Budget: Ideas?

I’m getting married in early May of next year and my fiance and I are paying for the entire thing ourselves. I’d hate to skip a honeymoon or postpone it, but we don’t have thousands of dollars to spend on a trip to Hawaii or Tahiti. So, I’m thinking about things that aren’t so expensive, but still fun.

We went on vacation to San Diego last summer and visited SeaWorld. I LOVE animals, and this was by far the best part of our trip. We’d love to go there again, but we live in the Southeast. I was thinking we could visit the Orlando one instead, which is about a 7 hour drive from where we live.

I found a hotel called Caribe Royale in Orlando and the rate for a Deluxe King Suite for 4 nights (checking in on a Monday, out on a Friday—an attempt to avoid crowds) is $650. It seems really nice and is one of the cheaper ones I found with that quality. It’s also about 10 minutes from SeaWorld, so that works.

Here are some other ideas I had in mind for our trip. Of course, we can’t do them all, but I’m just trying to get the best bang for our buck here.

- SeaWorld is $145 for both of us for two days…
– OR we can go to Discovery Cove and swim with the dolphins (plus their other attractions) and get 14 days of unlimited access to SeaWorld for $490 for both of us. This seems like a decent deal when I checked out the Discovery Cove site and I hear great things about it. Swimming with dolphins would be AMAZING!

So, if we do the hotel and the Cove/SeaWorld deal, that adds up to about $1200. With gas for the trip, we’re probably looking at something like $1500 I guess.

- Ghost Tours are something we really like doing and we do them in Charleston, SC when we vacation there. So, we can do a walking or riding tour one night for about $50.
– Ripley’s Odditorium – $40 for both of us
– International Drive – Since this is near where SeaWorld and Ripley’s is, it’s convenient plus there is shopping, dining, night life, etc.
– City Park – This seems pretty cool. We could walk through the parks and maybe see a show or something.

I was also thinking Clearwater Beach, but it’s over an hour from Orlando. I’m not sure if it would be worth it. I also heard the ZipLine is pretty fun, but $230 seems kind of…excessive to me.

I didn’t want to pack the honeymoon full of activities, because we’ll also want to relax at the pool at the hotel and everything else you do on a honeymoon—ahem. :) But I also don’t want to drive 7 hours to Orlando and not do anything fun.

We don’t want to do Disney or anything like that. I’m open to ideas outside of that though. Nothing crazy expensive. I’m not sure how much this sort of vacation would end up costing us (with all the main stuff we want to do, including gas and about $400 for food and shopping, I’m getting about $2000), but I’m getting pretty excited about the possibility of going.

ETA: I just realized we probably sound like a couple of kids with all this SeaWorld and Ripley’s stuff. We’re 22, so I guess we are kids. :) Relaxing on a beach with an umbrella drink and chocolates on our pillows isn’t really our idea of a fun honeymoon. We’ll have plenty of time for that later.