A girls only holiday adventure to WDW

[dawnandnala]

First, I want to thank everyone else who has written trip reports to share – they were enormously helpful in planning for our trip! I am not particularly witty so I hope I can live up to the DIS standards.
Introductions:

When: December 12th to 20th , 2009

Who:
Me – a 40 something lover of all things Disney (of course!) Living on the west coast I have quite a few Disneyland trips under my belt but this would be a first trip to the world.

Melanie - also 40 something She’s been my BF since college and we have traveled all over together over the years. This would be her second trip to the world the first was on her honeymoon 16 years ago when she did a land/sea combo.

Gillian – 13/just turned fourteen. We celebrated her birthday on this trip although her birthday wasn’t until a week after we returned home. We were also celebrating her recovery (more on that in a minute)


Here is a picture of the 3 of us at the Hard Rock Cafe in London in summer 2008. I am on the left, Melanie is in the middle, and Gillian on the right.

Some background:
Our trip was originally supposed to happen in mid August. Our planning started in April when Mel and I were chatting one night and she mentioned that she was thinking of taking Gillian on a trip to WDW and wanted to take her two nieces with her. Well her SIL said no. Both of the nieces are graduated from HS already and going to community college but do not have jobs – so therefore mom and dad would have to foot the bill – thus, the no. I thought about it and emailed her and said how about if I ask my sister If I could take my niece (also 13/14) with us - well MY sister ended up vetoing that idea after my back and forth because my ex-BIL would be a pain in the u know what about it and she wanted to save the money to do something with the kids herself over the summer ( I also have a 9 year old nephew.)

So, now we went back to the drawing board. Melanie asked Gillian if she still wanted to go if it was just her and “the two old ladies” LOL! Gilly wasn’t sure at first but Melanie told her she could have the best of both worlds – she would go on the intense rides with her (I am kind of a ride wimp) and her Aunt Dawn would go on all the spinning rides with her (Melanie doesn’t do spinning things after an unfortunate incident on Gravitron in college and another one on the teacups on her honeymoon). She also told her if she didn’t want to go then she would go without her! Well in the end Gilly decided she did want to come with us

So I started doing some research and found out about the free dining deal – came up with some price quotes and gave Melanie a call. I found I could get us a room at a POP with free dining and MYW tickets with PH and WPM for under $1800 (I don’t remember the exact amount any more sorry) for 7 nights and 8 days. We decided to go for it and I booked it.

Then we went ahead and booked flights on Alaska. We were set to arrive on August 16th and depart on August 24th. I Began researching and planning – joining the Dis of course! Our ADR date was May 17th (it was still 90 days at that time) so I got up at four am (remember we are Pacific time) and called to make our dining reservations (online reservations didn’t begin for another two weeks). Anyway we were soon ready to go with dining reservations!

Now we had things all planned out and the biggest thing we had left to do was count down our 90 days!

Fast forward to June….

 

[cmp1111]

Sounds like fun so far! Great start, and thanks for the intros and pictures - always helpful!

 

[dawnandnala]

Background continued...

School was now out and Gilly and her Dad headed to Eastern Oregon to have a dad/daughter weekend of outdoorsy stuff. Well, the short version of the story is that Gilly lost control of the 4 wheeler/ATV she was driving. She drove it off a 30ft. bridge. She had to be airlifted to the nearest trauma center hospital a couple hundred miles away. She ended up losing her spleen, half of her pancreas, and one of her kidney as well breaking her arm.

She was one lucky girl just to be alive. She ended up spending almost all of the summer in and out of hospitals – spending most of the summer in Childrens hospital in Seattle.
Needless to say we ended up canceling our August trip.

About the same time that that all of this was happening Disney announced a new free dining deal for the fall. After discussing it with Melanie I was able to reschedule our trip to December 12th. She would take Gillian out of school for a week - not something she would normally do but these were special circumstances.

The fall dining deal only had QSD for free with the values – after looking at our options we decided to switch resorts to a moderate to get the regular dining plan for free. The difference was $500 more than our previously paid off trip but we were upgrading to a moderate resort and several of our days were in holiday season versus value season for the room rates.

So anyway we were now set again for a WDW trip – Gillian would have been recovering for 5 ½ months by the time our trip rolled around so hopefully things would go well!

Anyway, I’m sorry the intro got a little long but I got on a roll!

 

[dawnandnala]

Sounds like fun so far! Great start, and thanks for the intros and pictures - always helpful!

Thank you! I'm glad to have someone reading along

 

[cmp1111]

Background continued...

School was now out and Gilly and her Dad headed to Eastern Oregon to have a dad/daughter weekend of outdoorsy stuff. Well, the short version of the story is that Gilly lost control of the 4 wheeler/ATV she was driving. She drove it off a 30ft. bridge. She had to be airlifted to the nearest trauma center hospital a couple hundred miles away. She ended up losing her spleen, half of her pancreas, and one of her kidney as well breaking her arm.

She was one lucky girl just to be alive. She ended up spending almost all of the summer in and out of hospitals – spending most of the summer in Childrens hospital in Seattle.
Needless to say we ended up canceling our August trip.

About the same time that that all of this was happening Disney announced a new free dining deal for the fall. After discussing it with Melanie I was able to reschedule our trip to December 12th. She would take Gillian out of school for a week - not something she would normally do but these were special circumstances.

The fall dining deal only had QSD for free with the values – after looking at our options we decided to switch resorts to a moderate to get the regular dining plan for free. The difference was $500 more than our previously paid off trip but we were upgrading to a moderate resort and several of our days were in holiday season versus value season for the room rates.

So anyway we were now set again for a WDW trip – Gillian would have been recovering for 5 ½ months by the time our trip rolled around so hopefully things would go well!

Anyway, I’m sorry the intro got a little long but I got on a roll!

Oh, my gosh. Poor kid!

Which moderate did you end up booking?