ª"˜˜ª¤.¸Official Team August 2013 Thread!¸.¤ª˜˜"ª&#9733

Status
Not open for further replies.
Hello. First time on this board. We are staying at AoA 8/18 thru 8/25. My husband and daughters first trip, my second in 21 years. We are all very excited!:hyper:

We will be staying those exact dates but at YC!!
:)
It will be our youngest daughter's first trip too!
 
Months ago when I started planning out our days for our August trip I added some things to do that did not exist at that time:confused3, Being a Commando, when I plan I like to look way outside the box, I tend to plan some things based on speculation of rumors, Now when I start planning I will admit most have no ideal what I'm talking about, but crazy enough by the time of the trip most of them pan out:thumbsup2, A couple of things I already had incorporated into our plans for August, that are now operational :cool1: are A Pirate's Adventure Interactive Game in MK & Wilderness Explores Game at AK:banana:

Also I can't wait to start asking around for cards the Transportation Cards series 3 (have complete sets from series 1 & 2 including pulled cards) with all the park hopping we do it's a fun pastime:cool1:

Our kids are looking forward to the Wilderness Explorers game! DS10 was reading a review last night. It sounds like fun.
 
DH and I took the day off to spend it together. He's not feeling well, so it's likely a stay at home day. But at least we are together and relaxing.

75 days today! Totally not doing online check in at 60 days. We will need to have a conversation with the CMs and will be requesting a microwave at check in. Not sure what we will be heating up, but I want to option, :)
 
LOL, no doubt!!! :rotfl: But I bet it was a great trip nonetheless. Each of those cities are totally unique to the other and offer some great attractions :) . (But I'm perhaps a little biased, too, being the good Canadian girl I am :lmao: ).

:lmao: Seriously though, I fell in love with Canada! My previous experiences included a day when I was a child and I guess we just saw some of the 1,000 Islands, and then on an Alaskan cruise in '09 when I spent a day in the Yukon and a day in Victoria. Other than that, this was my first real immersion into Canada and I kept saying, I could live here. Everyone was so nice, the cities were so beautiful and clean, it was just a great experience. So much so that DS17 started to toss around ideas of going to college in Montreal or Toronto. I'm still pushing for U of Toronto, but he wants Buffalo (close enough, right? :rotfl:).

I think you mentioned a few posts back not liking Ottowa so much. Why is that? I found Ottowa to be a hidden gem on our trip mainly because I was looking for a place to stay over night on our drive from Montreal to Toronto, and had no expectations for it. I even mentioned to the boys (ok, I'm going to REALLY embarrass myself and hang my head in shame here - I swear I am an intelligent person!) and said I'm not sure what we'll do there other than sleep and the three of them looked at me (incredulously, I might add) and said, um, Mom, it's the CAPITAL OF CANADA - of course we'll find things to do. Hmmm....ok, I am not smarter than a 5th grader :confused3 And then I did a little poking around and realized we were checking in on June 30 and there was this little thing called Canada Day on July 1 :rotfl2: So yeah, we found a few things to do ;). One of them was literally (you can't imagine our luck - people camped out for this) running into Will and Kate! Evan (DS12) still talks about this!

A few weeks ago we had an auction to attend. It was for a program DW runs at the hospital, so we needed to make a large contribution and "won" (actually paid a lot of freaking money for) a trip to Ottowa - we'll be staying at the Fairmont Chateau Laurier and doing a class at Le Cordon Bleu, plus a tour and dinner. I'm excited - we probably won't go until next summer though. But just curious why you aren't as much of a fan as you are of Toronto (which to me felt more like NYC).
 

Wow...I'm exhausted.

I went to Target today and picked up $1700 in gift cards with my RedCard for $1615 to pay off our remaining balance. Then I got home and started paying off the balance $50 at a time. This is the first time I've ever had an issue with the Disney website (I know many have had issues with it) and it was agonizing. You can only enter one gift card at a time, it was very slow to process things and after two or three cards it would kick you out and have you sign back in again, sometimes two or three times before it would let you pay more. All in all I think it was about 2 and 1/2 hours to enter 34 gift cards.

The upshot is though that the trip is paid for now.

So with the recent price increase and our desire to come back next June I'm reconsidering the AP purchase. I'm going to bust out Excel this week and see if it is worthwhile.

:thumbsup2 That is great that you were able to save so much! I've been debating it, but don't have a Red Card. I have to look and see how much the double points on my Chase card will earn me over the money saved from Target.

The years we got APs always more than paid for themselves between the ticket prices, the resort discounts and other discounts in the parks. Plus we enjoyed some of the AP perks during those years.
 
Hello. First time on this board. We are staying at AoA 8/18 thru 8/25. My husband and daughters first trip, my second in 21 years. We are all very excited!:hyper:

:welcome: We're at AoA in a Cars suite (hoping to get switched to Nemo) from 8/17-8/23. Maybe we'll run into each other. Check out the facebook page too for more collaboration.

I told DH that if I'd known we were coming back within the year, I would've gotten an AP last September and booked a BB!! Oh well...he says no Disney for 2014 though...

Sent from my iPad using DISBoards

Yeah, if we had only known we were coming back...

We heard through the rumor mill that DH is up for deployment again. :sad: I do NOT want this, not only because this vacation is to celebrate him coming home from the last deployment - I'd trade the vaca to keep him home!, but because he's been gone for 15 months since we got married less than 23 months ago. We'll find out this week the timeframe we're looking at, please send happy thoughts that it is a long long LONG time from now!

My heart goes out to military spouses. They have one of the toughest jobs out there. You deal with so much uncertainty in your life of not knowing when you'll have to move again, when the next deployment is, etc that it takes a really strong person to handle it all. Praying that you get answers quickly and they are in your favor.

What is the advantage of doing the Target Gift Cards? Are you buying them with a credit card to get reward points?? I did someting similar one year when Sams Club was selling them for cheaper than the face value, and they had a free $10...or something along those lines.

Thanks!

I'd love to know this too! But we have a room only ressie, so I won't be paying it off online. I imagine the check in CMs would think I'm nuts if I showed up with a fistful of gift cards :rolleyes1

5% off when you use the Red Card to pay for them and I believe some people also have a pharmacy coupon for an additional percentage. So essentially if you buy enough of them to pay down your package, you build in a discount for yourself:)

pigletto nailed it. If you use the Target RedCard (Debit/Credit or VISA) you get 5% off of your purchase immediately at checkout, including gift cards. $2.50 off of a $50 gift card isn't much, but when you take 5% off of a large trip purchase it's significant. I kind of wish we had paid for the whole trip that way. If you are part of the pharmacy rewards through Target you can get a 5% off for one day coupon after filling 5 prescriptions or transferring one from another pharmacy. You can stack those 5% discounts and save even more. We didn't have any pharmacy discounts to use for this but potentially you could take 10% off the cost of your trip. And as other posters have said, towards Christmas time they often run promotions where you can get a free $10 card, etc when you spend certain amounts on gift cards. I think someone posted last fall that with the two 5% discounts plus the $10 promotion they were able to essentially get $50 Disney gift cards for $30.

:thumbsup2 That is great that you were able to save so much! I've been debating it, but don't have a Red Card. I have to look and see how much the double points on my Chase card will earn me over the money saved from Target.

The years we got APs always more than paid for themselves between the ticket prices, the resort discounts and other discounts in the parks. Plus we enjoyed some of the AP perks during those years.

Originally we paid for the whole trip with our Disney VISA card and enjoyed the 1% return in Disney Dollars. We were going to use that to pay for our PP+ card. Then we added our friend to our trip and was going to do the same, but instead did the math on the gift cards. $17 in Disney dollars was no match for $85 in real cash savings. Next year we're planning on another trip and potentially a cruise, so we're looking at another $7000 or so for that. 5% off is $350 and if we had the pharmacy discount that's a $700 savings. That's pretty huge. Granted, there is a time component of putting the gift cards into the system, but if you don't do it all at once it's probably not so bad. We'll likely put a deposit down on the trip in August with a BB and then we can do a little at a time paying the trip off.
 
QOTD: From the Disney facebook page today: Who were you with when you saw Cinderella's Castle for the first time?

I was with my mom when I was 4 years old in 1982. When I went back 20 years later with my ex and her kids it was a rush walking down Main Street USA again. The memories were very vivid. It's something that sticks with you for sure.
 
QOTD: From the Disney facebook page today: Who were you with when you saw Cinderella's Castle for the first time?

It was 1985 for me and I was 5 yrs old. I went with my parents and my two older brothers and my younger sister. To this day I go and start walking down Main St and I just get filled with emotion. It's ver hard to hold back the tears.
 
QOTD: From the Disney facebook page today: Who were you with when you saw Cinderella's Castle for the first time?

I was with my mom when I was 4 years old in 1982. When I went back 20 years later with my ex and her kids it was a rush walking down Main Street USA again. The memories were very vivid. It's something that sticks with you for sure.

I was with my hubby and my two girls 6 years ago! Tears in my eyes and all!
 
QOTD....

It was in 2007. I was with my four children. This was our first trip and we were hooked! I still get choked up everytime we hit mainstreet.pixiedust:
 
:lmao: Seriously though, I fell in love with Canada! My previous experiences included a day when I was a child and I guess we just saw some of the 1,000 Islands, and then on an Alaskan cruise in '09 when I spent a day in the Yukon and a day in Victoria. Other than that, this was my first real immersion into Canada and I kept saying, I could live here. Everyone was so nice, the cities were so beautiful and clean, it was just a great experience. So much so that DS17 started to toss around ideas of going to college in Montreal or Toronto. I'm still pushing for U of Toronto, but he wants Buffalo (close enough, right? :rotfl:).

I think you mentioned a few posts back not liking Ottowa so much. Why is that? I found Ottowa to be a hidden gem on our trip mainly because I was looking for a place to stay over night on our drive from Montreal to Toronto, and had no expectations for it. I even mentioned to the boys (ok, I'm going to REALLY embarrass myself and hang my head in shame here - I swear I am an intelligent person!) and said I'm not sure what we'll do there other than sleep and the three of them looked at me (incredulously, I might add) and said, um, Mom, it's the CAPITAL OF CANADA - of course we'll find things to do. Hmmm....ok, I am not smarter than a 5th grader :confused3 And then I did a little poking around and realized we were checking in on June 30 and there was this little thing called Canada Day on July 1 :rotfl2: So yeah, we found a few things to do ;). One of them was literally (you can't imagine our luck - people camped out for this) running into Will and Kate! Evan (DS12) still talks about this!

A few weeks ago we had an auction to attend. It was for a program DW runs at the hospital, so we needed to make a large contribution and "won" (actually paid a lot of freaking money for) a trip to Ottowa - we'll be staying at the Fairmont Chateau Laurier and doing a class at Le Cordon Bleu, plus a tour and dinner. I'm excited - we probably won't go until next summer though. But just curious why you aren't as much of a fan as you are of Toronto (which to me felt more like NYC).

A good deal of my love of Toronto (as opposed to my indifference to Ottawa) is the familiarity of it all. After regularly going to the hospital there for so many years, we grew to know it quite well. I love the multiculturalism it holds (being able to visit Chinatown, Little Italy, the Jewish village, etc.) and its a more entertaining (and shorter) commute for us (our drive to Ottawa is blah-tawa :rotfl:) . We find the vibe of Toronto to be exciting and active and FUN. We love their sports teams. We love the big-city feel.

We're not huge museum people, which Ottawa has A LOT of. We're not overly political folks, so the fact that our national parliament buildings are there isn't a draw. And we don't speak French, which somehow I always feel like we need to apologize for when we're in the Ottawa area :confused3 . We always seem to have a harder time getting around, we never seem to have a good sense of direction when we're there (even with the GPS) and .... I don't know :scratchin .... the whole city just doesn't feel "fun" to us.

The 1000 Islands? Love it there :thumbsup2 . Niagara Falls? Amazing. :thumbsup2 London? Cambridge? Barrie? Kingston? All great. But Ottawa and area? Just not our style.

We're weird....I know! :lmao:

NYC is totally on my bucket list!!!!! I am almost thinking that might be an alternative to Orlando for next summer.....maybe ;) .

ETA....I would totally look into schools in Buffalo over Toronto. The cost of living will be soooo much cheaper (one of the pitfalls of Toronto....holy macaroni, its expensive to live there). And the proximity to Niagara is awesome. And there's a great little airport there, at your disposal. The only bitter pill to swallow would be the winters. NOT FUN! lol
 
QOTD:[/COLOR] From the Disney facebook page today: Who were you with when you saw Cinderella's Castle for the first time?

January 11th, 2009 .... visited for the first time on Jake's 13th birthday. The most amazing experience for the boys and I. Even they were sufficiently awestruck (in their manly, macho way, of course :lmao:) by the sight of the castle. Lots of pictures taken that day ::yes:: . Great memories!
 
We lived and worked in Niagara Falls for years and our inlaws still live there so we are there often. It loses it's appeal when it's "home". So I fully admit to being kind of jaded about the place.:)
Toronto is another place that just is part of my growing up. Grandma lives there, SIL lives there and I've been at least once every few months for my whole life. I like it but I am not a fan of huge cities. Ottawa? LOVE Ottawa. I have 3 siblings there for University and it was always somewhere that was a travel destination to us rather than somewhere we went regularly. So it still has that new and fun feeling to me. But we love the museums and outdoor festivals and the Byward market etc. I don't feel as intimidated in Ottawa as I do in downtown T.O.

They are all just lovely places though and really it's just an individual preference thing. If Niagara Falls hadn't been my stomping ground I'd probably enjoy it a lot more:thumbsup2
 
QOTD: From the Disney facebook page today: Who were you with when you saw Cinderella's Castle for the first time?

The first time I saw it was when I went as a kid with my family when it was the big pink birthday cake :( that was the only time i went as a kid.

I was so excited to see the REAL castle when I went for the first time with my family (my husband and kids). <3 it!
 
Oh and I hope you love the Chateau Laurier as much as we do. Beautiful historical property. My little brother was married there 2 summers ago. He and his bride were doing their wedding pictures in the lobby and who walks in but BRIAN MULRONEY (former Prime Minister). My brother waltzes over and says "My Mulroney, it is my wedding day and I would be honoured if you'd be in our wedding pictures." So we get called down to do the family shots and there's the former Prime Minister standing there waiting to take pictures with our family.:faint:
It was a really neat day!!
 
I don't know when the first time I saw the castle was. I went on day trips with my family as a little girl. I do remember walking in with my own kids and husband in 2008 though. This was after years and years of dreaming of going back and 2 years of planning. There were tears streaming down my face and I was holding hands with each of the kids. One of my best memories ever!!
 
We lived and worked in Niagara Falls for years and our inlaws still live there so we are there often. It loses it's appeal when it's "home". So I fully admit to being kind of jaded about the place.:)

This could not be anymore true! I live 15 minutes away from the American side of the falls and honestly pay it no mind what so ever, being so close makes it lose it's draw to an extent.
 
QOTD: From the Disney facebook page today: Who were you with when you saw Cinderella's Castle for the first time?

March 2002 - with my husband and two older boys ages 4 and 1 at the time(youngest wasn't born yet). It was such a great trip, and even though we only went for two days, and spent them both in MK, I was hooked :goodvibes
 
QOTD: From the Disney facebook page today: Who were you with when you saw Cinderella's Castle for the first time?

I was with my mom when I was 4 years old in 1982. When I went back 20 years later with my ex and her kids it was a rush walking down Main Street USA again. The memories were very vivid. It's something that sticks with you for sure.

My husband (boyfriend at the time) took me to MK for the first time. We were 18, and we drove from Penn State to Orlando for Spring Break.:goodvibes
 
QOTD: From the Disney facebook page today: Who were you with when you saw Cinderella's Castle for the first time?

I was with my mom when I was 4 years old in 1982. When I went back 20 years later with my ex and her kids it was a rush walking down Main Street USA again. The memories were very vivid. It's something that sticks with you for sure.

It was '75 I was 3. I was with my mom, brother, and grandfather. I got lost in Frontier Land.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.












Receive up to $1,000 in Onboard Credit and a Gift Basket!
That’s right — when you book your Disney Cruise with Dreams Unlimited Travel, you’ll receive incredible shipboard credits to spend during your vacation!
CLICK HERE













DIS Facebook DIS youtube DIS Instagram DIS Pinterest DIS Tiktok DIS Twitter DIS Bluesky

Back
Top