First off, I'm a few days late for this, but we are officially down to...
It's hard to feel like Fall is anywhere in the future with the weather being so miserably hot & muggy outside, and yet my countdown on my phone says our trip is just 96 days away. Also difficult to believe is that when the trip does get here, my baby boy will be turning 2 years old! The time since he has been born has just flown by. I miss him being an infant, but at the same time, he is just so FUN at this age! He constantly has DH and I in stitches, although he is also testing the boundaries of what is and isn't acceptable behavior. Those terrible twos are just around the corner!
But, although it's pretty exciting that our WDW trip is 96 days away, in only 39 days we will be heading back to the west coast for our early anniversary trip! I thought I'd share a quick run-down of how we will be spending our 4 day weekend.
Friday August 24th
Our flight leaves New Orleans at 7:15 am, and 4 hours later, we will be arriving at LAX at 9:13 am.
After picking up our rental car (I think we are going to go with Enterprise this time...decent price, and there were definitely a LOT more Enterprise shuttles going by compared to how long it took us to get a shuttle to Advantage!), we're going to head out to Hollywood! There are a few things we definitely want to do this morning...DH has seen most of this when he was in California for work last year, but it will be my first time.
Hollywood Sign
Disney Soda Fountain & Studio Store
Grauman's Chinese Theater (maybe do the tours?)
Hollywood Walk of Fame
We will likely grab lunch somewhere along the way, and maybe save the Disney Soda Fountain for the afternoon for an ice cream snack before we get in the car and head to Anaheim. I think check-in is not until 4 pm, but maybe we will get lucky and a room will be ready earlier.
Like I mentioned before, we will be staying at the Peacock Suites in a king bedroom suite.
I'm sure we will at least give it a shot, and if it's not ready, we'll just continue on with our day and head to the parks!
I think we will go over to
Disneyland first and spend the afternoon/evening there. I'm pretty sure we will have dinner at the Plaza Inn again...it was so delicious last time! We both got chicken alfredo pasta when we ate there in May, but I think this time, one of us is going to get the pasta, and the other is getting the fried chicken & mashed potatoes so we can share both. No way will we be able to eat all of that food, but the other offerings looked so good and I wanted to try everything!
The park is open until 12 am, but I don't know if we will last until the end. We are SO not used to be awake that late!!
However, I really want to try seeing The Magic The Memories & You at 8:45 and the Magical Fireworks at 9:30 this night. We missed both of these (TMTM&Y because we didn't want to keep Paxton out late again, and Magical because we weren't there over the weekend and that was the only time you could see them), so I definitely want to experience them both! I think since we both saw Fantasmic! on our last trip, we are going to skip it this time around.
Saturday August 25th
We will be getting up SUPER DUPER EARLY this morning (another reason we probably won't make it until 12 am the night before!) to attempt to get to DCA for 6:30 am! Thanks to skier_pete, I found out we could register for an early morning at each park during our visit with our AP's. We will be able to get into DCA an hour early starting at 7 am with access to Cars Land! It will probably only give us time to ride RSR (or even just get a FP because I've heard the line for those is atrocious in itself!), but I really just want to walk around and explore Cars Land before the park really gets packed. Hopefully with this being a limited # of people (and something a lot of AP'ers seem to be complaining about because they can't get there that early in the morning), we will be able to see most of Cars Land.
Another top priority will be getting WoC FP's before exploring the rest of DCA and getting to do some of the stuff we missed out on in May. Like maybe riding Grizzly River Run before heading back to the resort for a break after lunch! Our breaks definitely won't be as long as we took with Paxton, but enough to get out of the heat and freshen up a bit (okay, maybe a short nap after that super duper early morning!) before heading back out to the parks.
I'd love to see WoC more than once, so this will be night one of the show!
Both parks are open until 11 pm, and we should be able to hang in there that late!
Sunday August 26th
Depending on how we feel from the night before, we may "sleep in" a little bit this morning. I put this in quotes because despite our best efforts to sleep in when Paxton is not around, our bodies are still wired to wake up pretty early! I'm thinking we might spend an hour or so at the parks, then head to Downtown Disney for some shopping and maybe lunch at Naples.
What can I say? I just can't wait for Via Napoli in WDW, and this sounds like the closest thing!
We will spend the day at the parks with no real touring plan to speak of, but we will have to go back to the resort to freshen up and change sometime in the afternoon. We will be going to Mass at 5 pm at St. Boniface, so I'd like to switch out my park clothes for something more church appropriate. Plus, I'll be ready for our anniversary dinner! After church, we will be heading to the Disneyland Hotel for our 7:30 dinner at Steakhouse 55!
After dinner, we'll spend the evening in the parks, eventually heading over to DCA for the later showing of WoC before calling it a night.
Monday August 27th
Our last morning may or may not start off very early. I signed us up for the early entry at Disneyland which is from 7-8 am. We may decide we don't feel like waking up that early, or we may want to take advantage of the lighter hour in the park. I guess we will decide the night before.
We will spend the rest of the day doing the stuff we haven't had time to do yet or things we enjoyed the most. This will probably include spending some time in Cars Land, even if it is just exploring instead of riding. I'm hoping we can get FP's for RSR and get at least 2 or 3 rides on it over the whole weekend. I guess we'll see how crazy it actually is once we get there!
We will have to leave to head to the airport by about 3:30 pm. That should hopefully give us plenty of time to drive to LAX, return the rental car, and get through security for our flight out at 6:45 pm.
This is where it gets kind of dicey. We will be getting in at 12:30 am. We're leaving our car parked at the airport, so no problems with getting a ride (don't think we'd have much luck with that otherwise! lol). But that puts us getting to my mom's house somewhere between 1 and 1:30 am. Her dogs are going to go CRAZY with us coming in at that hour!! I'm hoping we can maybe call when we get in the driveway so she can come let us in and maybe the dogs won't bark as much than if they hear us unlocking the door in the middle of the night. I'm so worried the barking is going to wake Paxton up and he'll have trouble falling back to sleep. The alternative is getting a hotel room either near the airport or my mom's house. But DH wants to be up and moving really early Tuesday morning so he can still go in to work that day. So in all, we'd be spending almost $100 for a few hours of sleep in the hotel room. Hopefully it doesn't end up as bad as I am imagining!!
Anyway, hope you don't mind me sharing more DL stuff on this WDW PTR.
You are going to 
VN! 
The only people that usually do are the ones who are just as big a Hanson fan as I am! I promise, I won't post a million pictures of them in the TR, though I will definitely be tempted. 
Woo Hoo! for double digit dancing! My October trip is exactly three months from today. I'm pretty happy about that. 
They don't need to know Paxton already turned 3! It's only a little white lie when it's just a few weeks, right? That way, you get to see all the Christmas stuff and can also catch the last weekend of F&W as well as Festival of the Masters! (OK, I'm just being selfish and want to meet you guys!)
