Our List of Wishes™ (Leave CANCELLED!!!!it to Disney to Trademark Those): Pre-Trippie

[ChefMickey123]

So we are going back to the World for our graduversary. So what is our graduversary? Well, it will be my graduation from seminary and our 2nd wedding anniversary.

The Cast: Me, Jared, Pastoral Intern (Vicar), 35 and Kelly, 28 my DW. Also, any assorted Floridian Relatives (ours) whom wish to come along for the day are welcome.

Our List of Wishes™ (Leave it to Disney to Trademark Those):



The Dates: 5/18/2013-5/27/2013
The Plan: Shoot the works!
The Resort: Disney’s Contemporary Resort
The Room: Tower with some sort of fabulous view, we hope.
The Tickets: 10-Day Park Hopper with Water Fun & More
The Dining Plan: Deluxe Disney Dining Plan. We may even throw caution to the wind and try Vicky & Al’s.



How are we gonna pay for this thing on a student pastor’s salary? Well, we are very blessed to hang on to much of our wedding gift money as we did not do a big, extravagant honeymoon. Also, we have a gift card program through our church that we plan on using monthly to put money toward our vacation-and the youth group gets 3% of whatever we buy. Our health insurance company has a get fit program, where we can earn $500 in gift cards by going to the gym, the doctor, and tracking our fruit and veggie intake-and it is legit.



We have been disciplined enough to pay off our Disney Visa Balance in full each month, and have earned many gift cards this way. We are curtailing Christmas & Birthday expenses to an extreme. Finally, we have a glass milk bottle with a small opening to shove in coins & bills which we receive as change. My wife also works, and it is safe to say that her job will probably be the kicker that makes such a large and deluxe trip possible. All of this is, of course is subject to the Will of (insert the tetragrammaton here).



With all of this help, scrimping and saving, we hope to accomplish the above outlined plan and celebrate our graduversary at Walt Disney World in a very big way. Why did we select the Contemporary? LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION! Being on the Deluxe Plan, we like to double up on the TS credits and have Signature Dining every night. This means travel from resort to resort. We won’t be renting a car to keep costs and headaches down, and the buses that go from the non monorail resorts we’ve stayed at previously mean 90 minutes travel from resort to resort for dinner. Getting back to the room by bus, then bussing back to DTD, waiting for the driver change and bus inspection, changing busses, just seemed like a lot of time out of our Disney Park Day. As an alternative, and if we can’t afford the Contemporary when it comes time to put our money where our mouths are, we are going to budget for a few night’s cab fare to speed things up a bit & stay someplace else.


Our Plans Include hitting up AK & HS once and spending the bulk of our time at MK and EPCOT. We also want to try the water parks this time if we are going to pay for Water Parks, Fun & More, as we didn’t really care for DisneyQuest. It was cool, but I have a hard time standing in line to play video games & skeeball & my wife got queasy in one of the simulators.
We would like to do some things we missed last time in regards to the parks:

Fantasmic!


Illuminations

Several Animal Kingdom Attractions we just did not get to.
World Showcase time for Kelly (She got pretty sick last time)


We are hoping that the Seven Dwarfs Mine Car Coaster & Little Mermaid Attractions will be finished by May 2013, but construction timetables often vary and stretch.


We also want to spend some time exploring the different resorts. I am on a major trainer-led exercise program under my doctor’s supervision, and if I lose enough weight, we will spend a day at Universal/IOA riding all the things I did not fit on last time. (Hopefully, I won't regain too much of the weight on vacation!)



Our Dining plans include the following:



Breakfasts at: The Wave, Kona Café, Grand Floridian Café, Kouzzina (Cat Cora would probably not remember me from our days at the Culinary Institute of America together now that she is all famous and such.) and Captain’s Grill. I’ve been to the Grand FL Café before but not the others. Kelly has not been to any of these restaurants.



Lunches at: Yacking Yeti, Via Napoli, San Angel & Sci-Fi. I’ve been to the Yak but Kelly has not. Neither of us has been to the other two.



Dinners at: California Grill, Brown Derby, Be Our Guest (if it is open by then), Yachtsman Steakhouse, Raglan Road, Narcoosee’s & Saana (We have both been to Yachtsman, CG & Narcoosee’s on our last trip. I have also been to Brown Derby).


So join us on our planning journey to complete our Wishes (trademark) list.

[LutheranChick82]

I'm so excited to see that you've started our pre-trip report. It makes it seem so real now

I can't wait until we are actually there!!
Only 646 more days to go, not like I'm counting or anything

Love you Baby!!!

[Kat in GA]

Count me in. Especially as a fellow Lutheranchick We actually just had a vicar finish up her internship at our church.

Can't wait to see how your whole trip comes together!

[ChefMickey123]

Originally Posted by Kat in GA

Count me in. Especially as a fellow Lutheranchick We actually just had a vicar finish up her internship at our church.

Can't wait to see how your whole trip comes together!

Yeah-our first subscriber (besides my wife, of course, she falls under the friends, relatives and associates clause)

[ChefMickey123]

Please vote and comment on a possible new hotel choice-Waldorf Astoria or Contemporary.

Link is here:

http://www.disboards.com/showthread.php?t=2786781

Thanks,

J & K.

[Stringbean&Wingnut]

Joining in!!! I really enjoyed your dining report and am looking forward to reading another report from you as well!!

[ChefMickey123]

So, we have some information to update on our pre-trip report. After a special recognisance spy-mission to the Pop Century Resort by my Dear Sister (DS) and her Boyfriend (DSBF), and a realistic look at the cash for an 8-9 day stay at the Contemporary with not so great discount possibilities at this time, we are most likely going to stay at either Pop Century or the Art of Animation Resort in the yet to be built Little Mermaid rooms, which open sometime at the end of 2012.

If my princess-like sister can handle and enjoy tbe Pop Century resort and give me an absolutely glowing review, then Kelly and I are game. It pretty much lowers the cost of our trip by $4000 which we don't have and really don't need to spend. So, unless we get some sort of uber-deal we are staying at a value resort. It's a little tricky with Deluxe dining, but proper prior planning ensures a practically perfect performance (practically being the operative word it that sentence).

In other news, as a Graduation and Anniversary present, Kelly's aunt and uncle are springing for our plane tickets-very generous and very welcome.

We are still hoping for a 9-night stay so we can take our time, as it will be late May and it will be a lot busier than the last time we were there in mid-November.

The countdown continues at 572 days. We have earned through healthy eating and exercising $175 in Disney Gift Cards from our health insurance company. Our little jar of change is growing, and through a deal with Dominick's/Safeway, we have purchased some gift cards which resulted in $1 off/gallon of gas. So, we are about 1/3 of the way there in saving for our trip to WDW. We have roughly 18 months until pay-off day for our trip.

I hope you all have a Happy Hallowishes.


That's all for now and we'll keep you posted.

P.S. Our Halloween Candy is being served out of a Mickey Gift Bag.

Also, my DS and DSBF wnet to MNSSHP and hauled out about 8lb of candy.

[2xcited2sleep]

Oh, I hate when reality calls but tough to argue with saving $4,000! Enjoyed your previous reports/reviews and will look forward to planning along with you.

[ChefMickey123]

Yes, real life is never like fantasy life, but the reality is that we are very blessed to be able to go to Disneyworld at all. It is all working out and we will be booking in about a week.

hope you had a Merry Christmas.

[tinacaplan]

I'm in! Have always enjoyed your dining reviews.

[ChefMickey123]

It is officially official! Kelly and I called WDW Travel Co and booked the room today, and as most of you know, packages cannot be booked until they come out in the summer. It all seems real right now. It's as real as the deposit we put on the room.

Our insurance company is going to continue the rewards program in February, and I hope Disney is one of the gift card choices again. It will help greatly with the cost of our trip.

We checked out the pictures of Art of Animation on the website and found the plot of land of Google Earth where the resort is being built. Pretty cool.

As the post title mentioned, we are staying in the Little Mermaid Building. We have requested a King Bed. We'll see what happens. The room looks like a whole lot of fun.

If only it wasn't 16 months away...

Oh well, at least Kelly and I have the DIS to keep us company until then.

[LutheranChick82]

Our room is now booked!

It was so much fun to get up this morning and book our trip. The automated voice couldn't get Jared's name right. The automated voice thought his name was Tarezk or something like that, so we had a good laugh with the "real" person on how far off his name was. The lady was very excited that we would be celebrating 2 things while we are there.

We asked about booking The Art of Animation but didn't really think that we would be able to book it yet. We were very excited when she said we could go ahead and book it now.

Now we just have to wait for the 2013 rates to come out so that we can book the whole package and everything. We are doing really well with our saving up for the trip and we hope that we will have enough money saved up so we can do all 10 days that we have booked.

Hopefully we will get some discounts so that the entire price of our trip will come down.

That's it for now, thanks for following along with us.

[jecskc]

Just seeing this PTR. I absolutely loved your dining review from your last trip, so I was excited to see that you had another trip planned. Being Lutheran myself I am very drawn to you both. I am glad school is going well and that the married life agrees with you.

We booked a cruise at 400+ days out and it seemed like it was going to take forever for the time to get here, but we only have 52 days left. So the time passes faster than you think.

It is exciting that you will be staying at the new resort. And as you said, hopefully all of Fantasyland will be finished by then. Hang in there and we are looking forward to seeing your ADR's.

[ChefMickey123]

Originally Posted by jecskc

Just seeing this PTR. I absolutely loved your dining review from your last trip, so I was excited to see that you had another trip planned. Being Lutheran myself I am very drawn to you both. I am glad school is going well and that the married life agrees with you.

We booked a cruise at 400+ days out and it seemed like it was going to take forever for the time to get here, but we only have 52 days left. So the time passes faster than you think.

It is exciting that you will be staying at the new resort. And as you said, hopefully all of Fantasyland will be finished by then. Hang in there and we are looking forward to seeing your ADR's.

Well, thanks for the fine compliment on the dining review. So, we will have to have some sort of celebration when we cross the one year threshold. I hope you have a fabulous cruise. We are looking forward to staying at Art of Animation Resort. The room model photos look promising.

Look for another update here soon.

[ChefMickey123]

With all of the hoopla about the booking being open for Art of Animation today, I had to laugh because we already had our reservations a while ago.

As an update, it looks like my sister and her significant other, Jose will be joining us for most of our trip. We will be mostly eating our evening meals together when we have Signature meals because we are mostly foodies and winees. (Jose runs a wine shop).

While our trip is a while a way we keep ourselves busy with work and church, but when we have a little free time, we are enjoying our Disney Movies.

And-of course, catching up on the Disboards.

In the meantime, we have the Indianapolis DISmeet to look forward to in the fall and a trip to Colorado in June to say hi to old friends and retrieve my storage items.

Until then, we dream about our Little Mermaid room at:

Disney's

art of
ANIMATION
resort