A Solo Trip with a Purpose

[elbodans]

greetings all!

i'm mostly a stalker here, with some scattered comments mainly on dining reviews (i love dining reviews!) but i thought i'd do a pre-trip report so that i can do a Post-Trip report...well, actually, who am i kidding? i want to do a dining report of my own!

so here you have it...my very first trip report of any kind on on the DisBoards!

first, please allow me to introduce myself! i'm a teacher married to a teacher--we both teach english (so this SHOULD be free of grammar and spelling errors, though i don't promise anything! and i do stick to lower case letters...) we do not have children, unless you count the 130 or so i teach every day, and my husband's 40 high school seniors.

test photo...if this works, it is me looking happy with donald, and my husband looking, well, not so much...

i love to travel like i love to breathe. some would call it an obsession. actually, even i'd call it an obsession! i went to WDW for the first time this past november--after a perfectly awful almost-month-long europe trip last summer--and loved it. i took lots of cheesy photos like this one...

we went for work--the national council for the teachers of english convention. if you 'have to' go to a convention, it might as well be in disney world, right? here's the view of me looking through the convention book at the pool bar...

i put zero planning into that trip, but still managed to spend almost a full day at MK, a few early morning hours at AK, and a EMH friday night at epcot. my morning at AK was insane, as it was practically empty...

in fact, everywhere we went (other than DTD) was pretty slow. we rode some rides all by ourselves!

we stayed at BC because that was our only option (and it was mostly covered by my husband's work).

we had dinner at the yachtsman, flying fish, fulton's crab house, and at a variety of counter service locations in epcot's WS.

we didn't have time for breakfast or lunch, as we were at convention sessions all day long. between the parks and the convention and the eating and the traveling, i got maybe 10 hours of sleep the entire week, but it was totally worth it. here's the husband at DTD...

one week after we returned, i had completely booked and planned a return trip with my mother, over mother's day this may. but that's trip number three.

the trip i'm pre-reporting upon--trip 2--is in less than two weeks. i'm going back to do some research for a book i'm working on (very long story). it was a giant leap of faith to even book this trip, but as it approaches, i get more and more excited...thus the need to share it with all of you! because of the timing of the trip, i will be going on my own--sans husband.

he's surprisingly ok with that, considering how happy he looked last time...

coming up...
-picking a resort
-not so solo, after all
-dining plans
-bonus day
-the multi-purposes of this trip

 

[elbodans]

So I realized that this PTR looks kind of boring without any photos. I started to add photos last night, but then we had a semi-major dog-related emergency, and ended up at the vet all night. so--I promise to update post 1 with some photos as soon as possible, and all other posts will have photos as well.

thanks for reading!

 

[athenna]

I'm reading Hope your dog is ok

 

[elbodans]

I'm reading Hope your dog is ok

thanks for reading! i have a long weekend this weekend, so hopefully this will grow a bit faster now!

thanks for asking about the dog. she dislocated her shoulder trying to walk in the snow/ice/slush. after an annoyingly expensive emergency vet trip, she's on meds and is feeling better.

 

[elbodans]

now on with the PTR...i think the rest will be photo free, though i guarantee there will be lots of photos in the actual trip report, as well as in the dining report. i'm in no way ashamed of taking photos of everything i eat, no matter where i am!

because this trip is a short one, and because i'm going without my husband, i didn't really want to spend that much money. fortunately flights are fairly cheap from where i live, so that wasn't an issue. lodging, however, was. i decided to stay at POP, because it was inexpensive yet still on site. i felt that the money i'd save by being able to use DME would sort of almost kind of make up for the extra lodging cost; additionally, i wanted to use extra magic hours at epcot, as i was only going to have three days to explore (and document) four parks. so i booked POP.

but then a chain of events occurred that changed my plans. first, a friend of mine that lives in the tampa area became available to stay with me and hang out in the parks for the greater part of two days, including one overnight. she's never been to disney before (strange, i know!) and i thought it would be nice for her to have a slightly nicer disney resort experience. at about the same time, my mother gave me my birthday present--an AP. (before you all think 'wow, what a generous mother', let me say first that yes, she is! but also let me say that the AP practically paid for itself with the savings we got on our room at AKL for our may mother-daughter trip...but more on THAT trip in a later report!)

with the AP, i was able to change my resort to CSR with only a slight price difference. so i officially changed it...or so i THOUGHT.

you see, when i called to change it, they said they had rooms available, quoted me the new price, and asked me if i wanted to book it--which i did. i thought everything was done, and i even got the confirmation email. but then, exactly one week ago (three weeks before my trip) i called to inquire about adding an extra night. when i called, i was informed that...my reservation had AUTO CANCELED!

 

[elbodans]

after my heart started beating again, i was put on hold...for a while. after a LONG time listening to disney music, here's what they figured out: when i called and changed my reservation, my required deposit amount changed; whe the additional deposit wasn't 'made up' by the auto cancel date, the reservation auto canceled. now, here's the thing--they changed the reservation . they quoted me the new price. what they did NOT do was say 'can we please have your credit card info again so that we may adjust your deposit'. i would have been HAPPY to give them my credit card number again, had i known this was required. so i'm sharing the lesson--when you upgrade an already made room reservation, make sure you re enter your payment method...even if for some insane reason they don't ask you to.

the worst part? i was never alerted that my reservation had canceled. so if i hadn't been calling to see if i could add an extra night, i would have arrived at CSR at 10pm after a long day and a flight...and found that i didn't have reservations! can you imagine???

ok. that ends the complaining portion of this PTR!

the other thing they did when they fixed my reservation was to add the night on that i was calling to inquire about. note, i only meant to inquire, but they went through with it when fixing the glitch--so my next move was to immediately attempt to change my flight. this was the easy part--seats were available, and as for some reason the new flight was cheaper than the original flight i booked, i only ended up paying $33 to change my flight. yay for air tran!

so now i have four full days to work on my research--one day for each park. and, due to epcot EMHs and a late night at MK combined with an early day at DHS, i have two bonus nights at epcot and mk! currently, my schedule looks something like this:

day 0--arrive late. sleep.
day 1--MK all day, with a break for monorail resorts.
day 2--Epcot all day. friend arrives in the afternoon, meets me in epcot.
day 3--AK all day. Friend leaves. EMH at Epcot until Midnight
day 4--DHS all day. MK 6-10pm.
day 5--go home.

up next...food!

 

[elbodans]

gee...i guess i didn't do a very good job of keeping up with this PTR! ooops! i will be doing the actual trip report this evening--as i've been back for a month...and my next trip is in a month!

here's the link for the actual trip report...
http://www.disboards.com/showthread.php?t=2694427

 

[jenneth79]

gee...i guess i didn't do a very good job of keeping up with this PTR! ooops! i will be doing the actual trip report this evening--as i've been back for a month...and my next trip is in a month!

Great, if the actual TR is separate, please include a link here, for I'd love to read it. Hope the research went well!

 

[elbodans]

Great, if the actual TR is separate, please include a link here, for I'd love to read it. Hope the research went well!

sure--here you go!

http://www.disboards.com/showthread.php?t=2694427

 

[jenneth79]

sure--here you go!

http://www.disboards.com/showthread.php?t=2694427

Thanks!