khertz
DIS Veteran
- Joined
- Aug 10, 2008
Magic Kingdom? I Think I Know My Way Around Magic Kingdom!
WDW January 2023 TR
With a smile on your face and a song in your heart
This is where you’re meant to be
Make a wish upon a star
The magic is here
It’s here for you and me
WDW January 2023 TR
With a smile on your face and a song in your heart
This is where you’re meant to be
Make a wish upon a star
The magic is here
It’s here for you and me
Hello, everyone, and welcome to our January 2023 TR! It’s been awhile since I’ve done a WDW trip report (since February 2020, just before the shutdown!), so hopefully I remember what to do.
Some of you may remember us from other TR boards as I have done many of them for our Walt Disney World, Disneyland, Disney Cruise Line, Universal Orlando, and even Adventures by Disney trips! But in case you are joining for the first time, or need a refresher, here is our family of 4 Disney fans!
DH and I have been married for 15 years, and spent our honeymoon at WDW! Since then, we have been to the parks many times with and without the kids, and we absolutely love all the Disney things. He is going to be the major contributor of photos in this TR, while I do the note-taking and TR-writing.
DS is 12 years old, and he is my Disney kid at heart. He has been going since he was a year old, and has always loved the parks and the atmosphere. He developed a love of Figment this trip, which you will see grow before your very eyes as the TR progresses!
DD is 7 years old, and while she loves being in the parks, she is not as much into Disney when we are away from the parks. Last trip, she was 4 years old and around 41” so she could do a lot, but she has been wanting to do more. So this time around at 49”, there was nothing she couldn’t ride and she couldn’t WAIT to do all of the new thrill rides that were available to her!
But we were not the only people traveling this trip!
2023-01-26 - Epcot - UK at Epcot_6 by disneymom1024, on Flickr
Also joining us were my parents, Nonni & Poppi, and my sister and her son.
Nonni & Poppi have been visiting WDW since the 70’s, and brought my sister and I many times as kids. They had not been to the parks since 2016, so a lot had changed for them. They were both excited to get to experience the Disney parks with all of their grandbabies.
My sister (I’ll call her Nanny since that’s what my kids call her) was visiting for the first time as a Mom! She was very excited for my nephew’s (DN) first trip to see Mickey. DN is 17 months old, and while he didn’t love all of the things we did, it was a successful first trip for him of hopefully many to come!
Since we had so many people, we banked and borrowed some of our DVC points to stay in a 2 bedroom at Bay Lake Tower! It was our first time staying there, and we chose it for several reasons. We knew we would be spending a lot of time at MK and the idea of being able to walk back and forth was very appealing. Plus, it was one of the DVC resorts that has a 3rd bathroom in their 2 bedroom units! For the size of our group, that was another great perk of staying there. We looked at the room views on Touring Plans, and sent in a request a couple of weeks before check in requesting a room in the North tower on a high floor with an even number in the hopes that we might be able to see MK from our balcony even though we had booked a Lake View Room. Our home resort is AKV, so we booked that first at 11 months out, and we didn’t have any trouble switching to BLT once we could book other resorts. We had chosen our dates using DVC Help’s availability charts and saw that we should have an easy time getting what we wanted.
Our travel dates were Saturday January 21st-Saturday January 28th. Our kids were missing a full week of school, but they are both good students so we were ok taking them out in order to hopefully have lower crowds and nice weather. We were very excited to be visiting during Festival of the Arts at Epcot! We had 6 day park hopper tickets, and we only planned on getting Genie+ for 3 of those days.
As we have returned from this trip and people asked how it was, I find myself saying, “It was honestly perfect!” We had a really amazing time and got to experience almost everything we wanted to, which had been one of my fears going into the trip that we would miss out on some of the headliners. But we got to do it all! I hope you’ll join in!
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Happy to see your TR! Been following your adventures for a long time. Glad you revealed early on that you had a great trip. Style-wise the Contemporary isn't my favorite but you can't beat the location. Anxious to hear about your first park day!
Great view!
