All of our VGC stays - 6/2024, 12/2025, 6/2026

[VGCgroupie]

I ran that by my wife and she said if we can’t afford to not to take a red eye then we can’t afford to take the trip and to just cancel it….

I actually upgraded the outbound to 1st class because the cost to upgrade wasn’t that big of a jump with the economy plus already being so darn expensive.

They let us upgrade the companion fares for the same price… so…. I guess I’ll take that as a win.

Id take 1st class for a small fee no problem. My husband is not thrilled with my booking the red eye... but I said it's that or another day off work so he gave in. Can we sleep at the water park??? I kid.. kinda.

 

[tx911]

Nope. Nothing within a couple hours.



Such a bummer.

I'm going to have my husband run the numbers on what it would cost to drive (tricky because you never really know what gas prices will be so he'll estimate high to be safe.) I'll price out hotels and food on a drive. And dog sitter for extra days. If it's similar or less than flying.....we will have to decide if we want to do that in February (decided that would be better than March if we use the days my son has off for conferences/presidents day) and then skip our June DLR trip.

It's a bummer and we might actually end up with VGC points (2026 UY) we can't use before expiration. So we'd have to rent them out maybe.

I'm going to hold out hope for SOMETHING doable on Southwest in December. I'm antsy waiting for flights to come out.



We have to be so picky about flight times and layovers because of our son. It just makes our options so limited. And it a big reason we actually prefer driving. It will be much easier once he's out of school (in 2032. Ha!)

Are you able to make carry-ons work? I've gotten pretty good at packing into a carry on. That will definitely be my default on Southwest from now on.

 

[VGCgroupie]

Are you able to make carry-ons work? I've gotten pretty good at packing into a carry on. That will definitely be my default on Southwest from now on.

I have gotten SO MUCH into whats considered a personal bag! The backpacks on Amazon are amazing.

 

[tx911]

I have gotten SO MUCH into whats considered a personal bag! The backpacks on Amazon are amazing.

I agree, just a simple little personal item.

 

[AstroBlasters]

How do you mean??

Sitting in a car for a day or two, no one ever arrives from that feeling refreshed…. it takes a lot out of you.

As I have gotten older…. the amount of Advil I would have to take…. my liver would scream at me….

 

[AstroBlasters]

Id take 1st class for a small fee no problem. My husband is not thrilled with my booking the red eye... but I said it's that or another day off work so he gave in. Can we sleep at the water park??? I kid.. kinda.

Yeah… you have to make the best call you can.

Traffic will be lighter, so that is a plus.

Are you booking a room for the night you fly in so you have a room to go to after you land? That’s what we would end up doing.

 

[ClaraOswald]

Are you able to make carry-ons work? I've gotten pretty good at packing into a carry on. That will definitely be my default on Southwest from now on.

I'm the queen of over-packing. Ha! I'm honestly not too bothered by checked bag fees. I'm mostly annoyed that SWA is going back to when flight credits expire. It's been nice booking my flight immediately when they are released. Then if prices go down, I get a credit to use next time.

It also made it so easy if we ever needed to reschedule or change flights. It still might be better in that way than other airlines (which are super pricey for refundable and whatnot.)

Sitting in a car for a day or two, no one ever arrives from that feeling refreshed…. it takes a lot out of you.

As I have gotten older…. the amount of Advil I would have to take…. my liver would scream at me….

We stop so much that it hasn't really been a problem yet. The only time is was bad was driving home when we all had Covid. We actually like the drive (well, except the boring parts through Nebraska, part of Colorado, and the last bit in California.)

 

[VGCgroupie]

Yeah… you have to make the best call you can.

Traffic will be lighter, so that is a plus.

Are you booking a room for the night you fly in so you have a room to go to after you land? That’s what we would end up doing.

Nope. When I originally booked this we were point poor. Now that we have a bunch of points no rooms that day. I could possibly change resorts. WDW is pretty foreign to me especially at DVC so I cant decide which place is best to pick. We originally had BLT/AKV. Now it's BWV/AKV. We don't plan on going to Magic Kingdom this trip and didnt want to be at AKV more than 2 nights.

 

[AstroBlasters]

Nope. When I originally booked this we were point poor. Now that we have a bunch of points no rooms that day. I could possibly change resorts. WDW is pretty foreign to me especially at DVC so I cant decide which place is best to pick. We originally had BLT/AKV. Now it's BWV/AKV. We don't plan on going to Magic Kingdom this trip and didnt want to be at AKV more than 2 nights.

I think either sound like great locations!

 

[ClaraOswald]

I think BWV over BLT makes the most sense if you aren't planning to go to MK at all.

 

[ClaraOswald]

Well, tomorrow we will know if we'll be heading back to VGC in December or not. Southwest is set to release their next chunk of flights through December. Crossing my fingers that there will be a flight that works for us!

If not...I think our back up plan is to skip this Disneyland trip and just go in June. And then maybe try to use our points that we can't bank towards a WDW trip in January.

But I really, really hope we can make this December trip work!

 

[ClaraOswald]

The December trip is a go! Woohoo!

Flights are definitely more expensive than I had hoped. And flight options weren't 100% fantastic. But they are tolerable so we'll hopefully be there in December! (Of course, you never know when it comes to winter and illnesses and whatnot but I'm not going to stress about something out of my control. At least not at this point. Ha!)

I decided to pay for the higher tier tickets so they are refundable and we get to board in group A1-A15. For our January WDW trip this year, we decided to do that last minute and even though it's expensive, I think it was worth it for us. This is definitely the most we've ever paid for Southwest flights though since I've always chosen the cheapest tier before.

255 days to go! I'm glad we have a non-Disney vacation planned before now and then to keep me occupied.

We ended up using 124 of the 126 points we had banked from 2024 into 2025 (June UY.) So 2 points will go unused and expire but such is life.

We plan to take a road trip out to Disneyland in June 2026. Before we book that in July, we will be banking all 160 of our 2025 points into 2026. And we plan to book a 1-bedroom. How we'll ever go back to a studio at VGC, I don't know. But I guess we'll survive. Ha!

 

[VGCgroupie]

The December trip is a go! Woohoo!

Flights are definitely more expensive than I had hoped. And flight options weren't 100% fantastic. But they are tolerable so we'll hopefully be there in December! (Of course, you never know when it comes to winter and illnesses and whatnot but I'm not going to stress about something out of my control. At least not at this point. Ha!)

I decided to pay for the higher tier tickets so they are refundable and we get to board in group A1-A15. For our January WDW trip this year, we decided to do that last minute and even though it's expensive, I think it was worth it for us. This is definitely the most we've ever paid for Southwest flights though since I've always chosen the cheapest tier before.

255 days to go! I'm glad we have a non-Disney vacation planned before now and then to keep me occupied.

We ended up using 124 of the 126 points we had banked from 2024 into 2025 (June UY.) So 2 points will go unused and expire but such is life.

We plan to take a road trip out to Disneyland in June 2026. Before we book that in July, we will be banking all 160 of our 2025 points into 2026. And we plan to book a 1-bedroom. How we'll ever go back to a studio at VGC, I don't know. But I guess we'll survive. Ha!

Glad it all worked out

 

[ClaraOswald]

I purchased our DLR tickets for December a week or so ago. I went with Getaway Today and bought the 5-day hoppers for the price of 4-days. Came out to $1707 for the three of us. Pretty much every time I buy tickets, I reminisce about having a Premium AP in the early 2000s. No blackout dates. Free parking. And only around $360. *sigh*

Last month, I also booked a 1-bedroom at VGC for June 2026! We were originally going to arrive on a Monday, with park days Tuesday-Saturday, like last summer. But instead, we'll be arriving on a Saturday, with park days Sunday-Thursday. We basically want to compare crowds on Sunday/Monday to our previous Friday/Saturday. I read through my posts here and I did make a comment that the crowds Saturday weren't too bad. So I guess we'll see.

We contemplated adding an extra "non-park" day to the trip but decided against it this time around. So the trip will look like this:

Thursday, June 11th - Drive to CO
Friday, June 12th - Drive to UT
Saturday, June 13th - Arrive at VGC
Sunday, June 14th - Thursday, June 18th - Parks (June 17th is our 20th anniversary so I'm excited to be in the park that day!)
Friday, June 19th - Drive to UT
Saturday, June 20th - Drive to CO
Sunday, June 21st - Drive home (another Father's Day of driving for my husband.)

It's exciting to have two VGC trips booked at the same time.

I need to change the title of this thread so it reflects that it's basically trip reports for all our VGC stays.

 

[ClaraOswald]

We don't go on our trip until next month but I'm just so excited and wanted to start my thread now.

This will be our 2nd time staying at the Grand Californian and our first time in the Villas. We'll be in a studio villa for 6 nights. We have 5-day park hoppers. We'll be driving so it's a fairly long trip, overall. Here's what it will look like....

Saturday 6/15 - Drive 550 miles to the Denver area.
Sunday 6/16 - Drive 570 miles to Cedar City, Utah.
Monday 6/17 *our 18th wedding anniversary* - Drive 430 miles to the Grand Californian.

Once we arrive, we'll get checked into the hotel. Then we'll do our usual Target run for bottled water and snacks.

We'll be in the parks Tuesday 6/18 - Saturday 6/22. We have park reservations at Disneyland on Tuesday/Thursday/Saturday and DCA on Wednesday/Friday. But we'll park hop a lot, I'm sure. We aren't going to the Pride events that occur on our dates. But we'll probably try to wear some LGBTQ shirts or something those days for fun anyway.

Sunday 6/23 - Drive 550 miles to Richfield, Utah
Monday 6/24 - Drive 545 miles to Fort Morgan, Colorado
Tuesday 6/25 - Drive 460 miles home

We did this same route for our trip in June 2022. Though we took an extra day on the way there last time so we could stop at some museums and parks. But this time we likely won't stop nearly as much. Just bathroom and meal breaks. If our son (he's 10 and autistic) gets too antsy, we'll try to find some parks for brief stops.

(Hopefully we don't catch Covid on this trip like we did in 2022!)

My husband does all of the driving and I'm just a passenger princess, relaxing and eating my little snacks. So I'm really looking forward to it. I plan to do a lot of Instagram posts and stories throughout the trip so that's always fun. Well, for me, anyway. Probably bores my few followers to tears since a lot of them aren't Disney people. Most of them don't even know we're DVCers because some are already a bit judgmental about how often we travel to Disney parks. But I'm not going to let them ruin my fun! (If anyone wants to follow along, just let me know.)

This trip will mark 20 years since my very first visit to Disneyland. In June 2004, my husband and I were newly dating and lived 1500 miles away from each other at the time. I made my first trip to California for a visit. We did 1 day at Disneyland and 1 day at California Adventure. I didn't have a digital camera at the time so I have very few photos (and the quality is just crappy but maybe I'll scan them or just take some pictures of the pictures to share.)

As I mentioned above, our wedding anniversary is also the day we arrive. We don't have anything planned to celebrate at all. I wish we could swing by our wedding chapel for fun but I doubt we'll get around to it. But it's such a cute chapel. I took this last time we visited (June 2017.)

View attachment 857903

We have no dining reservations so we'll just do what we always do, which is eat at quick service places. We haven't talked about what we'll do for breakfast yet. When we stayed at the Grand Californian (hotel side) in 2023, we ate at Craftsman Grill every morning. I suspect we may do that again, even though eating cereal or something in the room would be quicker and cheaper. But we'll see, I guess.

That's all for now! We leave in 38 days!

I was just re-reading my first post in this thread. We were 38 days away from our first VGC visit.

And today, we're 38 days away from our 2nd trip.

I'm getting excited. But my husband never gets as hyped up beforehand as I do. Probably why I like to come here to post about things beforehand. He hate flying so he doesn't get as excited for our winter trips as he does for road trips. And he's basically indifferent about the Christmas decorations, whereas that's one of the things I'm looking forward to the most.

I'm also looking forward to all the holiday ride overlays - Haunted Mansion Holiday, Small World, Mater, and Luigis. I think that's all of them, right?

My son was approved for DAS for this trip. Phew! They are getting picky about it so I was nervous but so thankful he was approved, especially since I assume crowds will be nuts. Hopefully he has a good time and isn't get sick of Disney parks yet!

 

[VGCgroupie]

I was just re-reading my first post in this thread. We were 38 days away from our first VGC visit.

And today, we're 38 days away from our 2nd trip.

I'm getting excited. But my husband never gets as hyped up beforehand as I do. Probably why I like to come here to post about things beforehand. He hate flying so he doesn't get as excited for our winter trips as he does for road trips. And he's basically indifferent about the Christmas decorations, whereas that's one of the things I'm looking forward to the most.

I'm also looking forward to all the holiday ride overlays - Haunted Mansion Holiday, Small World, Mater, and Luigis. I think that's all of them, right?

My son was approved for DAS for this trip. Phew! They are getting picky about it so I was nervous but so thankful he was approved, especially since I assume crowds will be nuts. Hopefully he has a good time and isn't get sick of Disney parks yet!

We havent been for Christmas in a long long time. It is my favorite! Haunted Mansion Holiday makes me so happy! Thank you for reminding me about Cars Land overlays, I had forgotten.