The Grand Floridian to All-Stars, in that order, sounds tortuous as I get older. Sounds like you had a great mindset about it.
I just bought myself with my Saks credit (plus some topoff) the supposed Le Labo scent from The Reykjavik EDITION. That's one of my favorite things to do to remember a trip. I'm like Ross from Friends, trying to maximize what he spent on that expensive hotel.
View attachment 1036374
How was the trip overall? We were planning the Snaefelsness Peninsula for this August but have canceled our plans because car rentals were so insane during August ($1600 per car) due to the solar eclipse, even though we weren't going to even be there directly during the eclipse.
GF->All-Stars: it was not bad! Just me and my mother (she wanted to see the Xmas decor at WDW and do the holiday parties), not a lot of luggage and we had her car since she lives in SoFL. The GF days were pretty chill with lots of enjoying the resort, character dining (she loves that), and only at the parks at night/for parties. Then the two days at All-Stars Movies we were on full park mode because we're not going back to WDW until late 2027 or 2028 so we were like "let's do all our favorites one last time." Plus, we took advantage of the free water park upon check-in. That meant that we were hardly in the room, we really didn't need something nice, just somewhere to sleep for those two nights... and All Stars is totally fine for that purpose. Good use of the credit imo, though it took a lot of checking the Citi travel portal to get a good rate.
Too bad you had to cancel your trip to see Snaefelsness, but it does seem like Iceland will be crazy around the eclipse. If you decide to do it in the future, I highly recommend Vidgelmir Lava cave (not in the peninsula but western Iceland and easily part of the itinerary) over the various others. There are a lot of lava caves in the area but this particular one is the largest in the country and I believe in Europe. This was one of the highlights of the trip for us; the smaller caves are more crowded because they are more "on the way" but they're basically just any cave/lava tube, like the ones one can find in Hawaii or elsewhere.
The trip was good, only 5 day so kind of fast but a nice way to spend Christmas just the two of us after a year of a lot of family drama, lol. The Edition is a nice hotel, some critiques: it's a bit overpriced (but so is everything in Iceland), the rooms a bit dark (it's fine until you want more light for packing), and the staff seems to be getting used to all the various CC credits and how to apply them in conjunction to the credits from the destination fee, so it took a couple of trips to the front desk to straighten things out (I remember you had some issues as well, so I think the kinks are not worked out). But all the food we had was excellent, the restaurant staff is great, and even the room service food impressed us. Did not try the rooftop bar so no idea how that is. For the Chase part of the stay I paid $250 plus points for those two nights and at the time it was point boosted (2x pp), hopefully Chase doesn't take away the boost for this property. So we paid $250 plus 59K URs for those two nights, which I guess it comparable to a mid-to-high tier Hyatt--I prefer this to Amex FHR since the $300 doesn't cover the one night.
When we weren't in the Snaefelsness tour, we had a lot of fun going around Reykjavik, shopping for wool items, and doing some museums (The Settlement Exhibit was my favorite, and it's not a full-day commitment like a lot of museums). We'll likely go back to Iceland at some point down the line but in summer since we've now seen it twice in winter, and we'd like to explore the northern parts and be able to drive on our own. Probably not going to happen for a few years.
