Tomh, I LOVE your story!
I'm so happy you eventually got to go with your family. SOOOO awesome that you are able to continually go! Yay for your 10th Disney World Family trip, so magical!!!!
Oh my gosh, and your uncle could possibly go next time? Very cool.
YEP: I am already trying to finagle a way to go again, hopefully sooner than later. I will be travelling with two Star Wars fanatics, so talking them into a future trip should be an easy one, ha ha.
Tom, do you have any other neat stories about your kids maybe seeing the Castle for the first time, or something like that? We go August 27th (LOVE that it's August, finally!!!!!!!!), and I want to soak up all the "pre-magic" I can....I just love a good story, and I want to thank you for sharing yours.....again, that would be so wonderful if your uncle could join you guys on a trip!!
Well, let's see . . . I did mention that we had tried, unsuccessfully, to take our daughter to Disney World a number of times. She was old enough, and aware enough a couple of those times that when we started planning the first trip that actually happened, she remembered the times that it didn't work out. She remembered them so well, in fact, that she didn't believe it was going to happen when we told her about it in January which was when we started planning.
She didn't believe it would work out in February when we got the paperwork from Disney World showing that we had made the reservation.
On Easter, we didn't have an Easter Egg Hunt, we had a Disney Dollar hunt (how I miss the Disney Dollars) because Tigger, and Eeyore, and Piglet (the kids favorite characters at the time) had all visited from sunny Florida and left the Disney Dollars for their upcoming trips. Tigger, by the way, is a bouncy fellow, and tends to leave Disney Dollars pretty high up, making it particularly challenging for kids to reach them. She still . . . didn't believe we were going lol.
When the paperwork came in showing that the trip was paid in full, sometime in June I think, she still didn't believe we were going.
Then, her best friends family decided to go, about 3 weeks before us. At the time, they had the exact same van we had. Their trip was an unmitigated disaster, and the friend was texting and calling DD every step of the way. They broke down in Virginia, wasted a day there, and paid way too much money to get their van fixed. In North Carolina, the same problem that they had in the first place came back. They finally made it to Florida, and had to take the van to a shop there, to get the real cause of the problem taken care of. By the time the van was finally fixed, they had wasted a third of their vacation time, and most of their money. The entirety of their trip was a visit to Wet and Wild, and Gator Land, and visiting the hotel that her parents had worked at when they met. They never went to Universal, or Disney World, or anywhere else.
My daughter was absolutely certain something would go wrong, the van would break down, the trip was going to be a failure. There was no convincing her. The day we left, she didn't believe we would make it. Later that afternoon, when we were sight seeing in Washington DC, she still didn't believe. The next evening, when we stopped for the night in Kinglsand Georgia, which is like 10 minutes from the Florida border, she was still certain the van would break down in the morning lol.
The young lade on the right, with the custom made Piglet ears, and the big cheesy smile had just stepped foot into the Wilderness Lodge for the very first time, and was finally starting to believe it!
Then there was the bus ride to DHS, our very first Disney park
It was pretty much all smiles from there
