Seattle Goobers' January '12 Trip! UPDATE 1/30: The TR has begun! :)

[poisonapple_PRINCESS]

aw, your "cozy pack" is precious! and I am totally going to have to go to Target asap! I'm in the market for Christmas Decorations!

And those Mickey and Minnie's look HUGE! But so cheap! Crazy.

 

[Lady Lallie]

I love your cozy pack! How adorable.

I plan out days for Marc & I's trips and then when we get down there we throw those plans out the window and make tons of changes and adjustments on the fly. That is just what works for us. Seems like you guys are the same as us. Funny how that is!

 

[danimaroo]

aw, your "cozy pack" is precious! and I am totally going to have to go to Target asap! I'm in the market for Christmas Decorations!

And those Mickey and Minnie's look HUGE! But so cheap! Crazy.

Haha I know, I thought it was the cutest thing ever! He's a good husband.

And yes, Target awaaaayyy! They have lots of fun stuff. Mickey and Minnie were huge. I couldn't believe it. They're easily bigger than a toddler. Not sure how I'd react to that if I were that size, hahaha. Then again, I might LOVE it since I loved Mickey so much growing up.

I love your cozy pack! How adorable.

I plan out days for Marc & I's trips and then when we get down there we throw those plans out the window and make tons of changes and adjustments on the fly. That is just what works for us. Seems like you guys are the same as us. Funny how that is!

Haha I loved it and thought it was too cute for words.

Plans are hard! Plus Matt really doesn't like it when we over plan because he wants to relax and enjoy things at our own pace. Even mentioning the words "rope drop" gets a somewhat strained response.

I might do some planning anyway, both for fun and just so I have an idea as to what we'd like to do and when, but I'm fully expecting it to be like last time where we wake up, look at our app, and make our way to whatever park has shorter lines that we're in the mood to go to.

 

[jenjolt]

Followed your link from Leslie's PTR!! I love love love January! It is such a great time to visit!!!!

YAY for your points coming through and WOOT WOOT for BCV!! What a great resort!!!!!

I love those Christmas plates, I guess I'll be taking a trip to my local Target soon!!!!!!

 

[danimaroo]

Followed your link from Leslie's PTR!! I love love love January! It is such a great time to visit!!!!

YAY for your points coming through and WOOT WOOT for BCV!! What a great resort!!!!!

I love those Christmas plates, I guess I'll be taking a trip to my local Target soon!!!!!!

Awesome! You went with Leslie on a trip to Disney, right? I recognize your name from a TR! Totally stoked to have you reading!

We were really excited about both the points and getting into BCV! I am really excited to be so close to Epcot and DHS. It is going to be a blast!

And you totally should. I had a hard time not buying any; Matt thought they were cute but said we didn't need them. I guess he is right though.

Anyway, thanks again for popping in! I'm hoping I can keep this entertaining (as interesting as a PTR can be ), or at least keep people up to date on my random babbling.

 

[danimaroo]

Before I update, I just need to note that I'm writing this on my iPad and was way into writing when suddenly Safari crashed and I lost the whole update. Funny enough, I was going on about why I hadn't updated this week, and how we had a crappy week between work, a broken PS3 and having to buy a new hot tub cover, and then Safari crashed. Guess I wasn't supposed to yap on about my crappy week and instead focus on the positives.

Well, this weekend we carved pumpkins with my in-laws and my niece. Matt and I thought it would be fun to carve our favorite Disney characters! I did Eeyore, Matt carved Stitch and I think they turned out pretty darn cute. Unfortunately my special pumpkin I'd picked out at the pumpkin patch turned out to be rotten, wompwomp, so we had to run out and grab a pumpkin at the supermarket. But it's still cute and Eeyore looks adorable!

That has definitely gotten us excited for all the kids coming by tomorrow! We give out big candy bars at Halloween, plus all the decorations, so we tend to get a good amount of trick or treaters at the house. I'm a little nervous we will get bombarded this year, if word got around last year that we gave out big candy bars, but I'm hoping 90 will be enough! If not, we have a backup of little candy, just in case.

That's about it on our front. Hoping this is a much less crazy week for us, and I can do more planning for our trip! I'll probably throw out the plans when we go to Disney, but it is still fun to plan and think about all the fun things I want to do while we are on vacation!

 

[danimaroo]

This isn't really anything Disney-related, but it IS Halloween and I personally enjoy having a little fun. I'm at work, where we're allowed to wear costumes, though I'm keeping it a little subdued, so I just stuck with a mustache, along with my manager. Mustaches tend to make things funnier, anyway.

Hope everyone is having a safe but fun Halloween.

 

[Twoboysnmygirl]

The pumpkins look ADORABLE!!! you rock giving out large bars, wish we lived near you!

 

[danimaroo]

The pumpkins look ADORABLE!!! you rock giving out large bars, wish we lived near you!

Aww thank you! I thought they turned out pretty cute. Hopefully all the kids like them!

And yeah, I just remember as a kid loving that one house that gave out the large candy bars. We are also by far the most decorated house in our neighborhood, so it just kind of makes sense for us to have some fun and give out some extra fun candy.

I'm just hoping word did not get around TOO much last year and that we get totally overwhelmed with kids, especially older ones who are a little questionable as to whether or not they should be trick or treating. I told Matt we should give out small ones to the older kids and big ones to to the younger kids who have awesome costumes.

We bought 90 candy bars, and then a pack of small candy just in case we run out. Hopefully it'll be a bit later in the evening when we run out.

 

[Lady Lallie]

I love your pumpkins, so cute! We usually carve them but with the party this weekend we just never got to it.

Love the mustache! I threw Marc a 30th birthday party in April that was mustache themed, it was so much fun!

 

[danimaroo]

I love your pumpkins, so cute! We usually carve them but with the party this weekend we just never got to it.

Love the mustache! I threw Marc a 30th birthday party in April that was mustache themed, it was so much fun!

Thanks. And yeah, I'd say it's pretty okay that you guys didn't carve considering the party you guys just put on and all the adorable decorations you made! Such cute ideas; I might have to steal some of your ideas in a few years.

It was funny, I found a pack of mustaches at the dollar store and thought it'd be funny to bring to work. My manager and I have been wearing them all day and it's hilarious seeing people do a double-take and then laugh at us. Mustaches are pretty freakin' awesome and make everyone look so much more dapper.

We also had a Halloween potluck in which I made these... Mummy Dogs! Too much fun, and all 70 of them were devoured!

 

[poisonapple_PRINCESS]

looks like you had a fun Halloween! Love the pumpkins!

 

[danimaroo]

looks like you had a fun Halloween! Love the pumpkins!

Haha, we had a BLAST! We ended up seeing around 100 kids and ran out of our big candy bars. The reactions were too cute for words... and it made me really happy about many kids LOVED our pumpkins! I heard a lot of "STITCH!" coming from kids. One kid even exclaimed, "THIS IS THE BEST HOUSE!" It always makes decorating and the money we spend on candy totally worth it. 95% of the kids we got were very polite as well!

Now, onto November and my FAVORITE time of year. I love the holidays and my birthday is coming up at the end of the month. We are also huge Christmas fanatics so I'm sure I'll have some fun photos with that, along with more Disney updates as we get closer. Only 79 days away from being back in our favorite place!

 

[oeshpdog2]

Love, love, love the pumpkins! Those are awesome!!

Also, love the Christmas dishes at Target. I have a thing for dishes so I may have to get some of these. Surprised I haven't seen them at our Target since we're there practically every other day. I love Target!!

 

[danimaroo]

Love, love, love the pumpkins! Those are awesome!!

Also, love the Christmas dishes at Target. I have a thing for dishes so I may have to get some of these. Surprised I haven't seen them at our Target since we're there practically every other day. I love Target!!

Thanks so much! They took a bit of time but were TOTALLY worth it. We love carving fun pumpkins every year because the neighborhood kids always seem to really love them when they come to our house for trick or treating!

And um, I'm going to confess that I have a serious addiction to Target. I could spend hours in that place, it's so bad! They have everything I need in one place at good prices. I'm surprise you don't have the Christmas stuff either. I'm sure it'll be there quite soon, especially considering we're now passed Halloween. They were in the Home section right across from the grocery area, if that helps at all.

 

[poisonapple_PRINCESS]

Haha, we had a BLAST! We ended up seeing around 100 kids and ran out of our big candy bars. The reactions were too cute for words... and it made me really happy about many kids LOVED our pumpkins! I heard a lot of "STITCH!" coming from kids. One kid even exclaimed, "THIS IS THE BEST HOUSE!" It always makes decorating and the money we spend on candy totally worth it. 95% of the kids we got were very polite as well!

Now, onto November and my FAVORITE time of year. I love the holidays and my birthday is coming up at the end of the month. We are also huge Christmas fanatics so I'm sure I'll have some fun photos with that, along with more Disney updates as we get closer. Only 79 days away from being back in our favorite place!

YAY FOR NOVEMBER! Today I got all the nov. decorations out at the Daycare I work at and starting hanging them up! Yay for big fat turkeys everywhere! I just cant believe Halloween and October are already OVER! Time flies. Christmas is the best time of the year! I live for Christmas time!

 

[danimaroo]

We are now 79 days out! Can you believe it? I sure can't. Halloween was awesome; the kids were adorable and really loved our Eeyore and Stitch pumpkins. As much as I loved Halloween, I am beyond thrilled that it's November 1st. November is one of my favorite months of the year; the weather gets much cooler, I LOVE Thanksgiving and how much of a cozy holiday it is, I enjoy going out on Black Friday and then decorating our house for Christmas... and oh, my birthday is on the 28th! I'm turning 27, which I'm feeling pretty indifferent towards. Definitely weird to be closer to 30 than 20, because I seriously do not feel I am mature enough to be anywhere near 30. It always makes me laugh when I think about where I work, the office that I'm blessed to have, that I have a husband, that I own a house... Sometimes it just hits me really hard that I'm an adult and this is my life. Anyway, enough of my reflections about getting older... I'm just really in love with November and that we're so much closer to CHRISTMAS (my absolute favorite time of year)!

I thought I would update with some Day 3 plans. I was debating on whether or not I thought I wanted to plan out the rest of our trip. I am going to warn you that more than likely, these plans from here on out will most likely be way different, but it's still nice to have a general idea of when I'd like to do things, etc. It'll probably get much more difficult to do that by the end of our trip, since by day 10 you've seen and done everything, and at that point are just going with the flow and are enjoying the end of a fabulous vacation.

Before I go into our plans, I have to admit something. I decided to check out touringplans.com after hearing people rave about it, and I was curious to see what the differences were between them and easywdw.com... I was shocked! Day One easywdw suggested Epcot at the most recommended park, and their explanation made complete sense. Touringplans, however, has Epcot as the least recommended park, saying the crowd levels will be a 7 that day.

Um, what? A 7 at the very end of January? What the crap? What blows my mind is there is literally no reason given by TP as to why they're saying it will be a 7. I'm not going to lie, I was pretty disappointed by TP and how they predict crowds. I really really like that easywdw actually gives reasons as to why they've predicted the parks the way they have, and it allows me to understand it. So that being said, I think I'm going to stick with easywdw over TP (and hey, it's free), because their reasoning seems a lot better than TP. I spent a few bucks for TP, but what are you gonna do? I got a Mouse Savers discount so it's all good.

DAY THREE

Day 3 is kind of a tougher day. On my nifty spreadsheet, I have Epcot and Animal Kingdom as the most recommended parks for the day. Having just been to AK the day before, I'm not sure we'll be back the following day (though trust me, if I want to break my EE record, we will be back at AK many times ). What I'm thinking we'll probably plan to do is wake up and either eat breakfast in our room (last time we had cereal and bagels, since we tend to eat our CS meal around 11-12ish or so), or maybe head down to the Boardwalk Bakery to get something tasty there. I'm also glad to hear that the BC Marketplace has hot breakfast items as well. I just remember having the bacon egg and cheese croissant sandwich at Grand Floridian a few mornings and it was delicious (but also monstrous). So we have many options for that morning, and I think it's always great to have options.

After that, I'm thinking we'll stroll over to Epcot for a bit, and maybe hit up TT or Soarin', and of course Spaceship Earth. I'm thinking this might also be a good day to go to DTD if we didn't make it the night before. In fact, it might be fun to go there for the late morning/early afternoon, so we can look at fun stuff we might want to buy and also eat lunch at Earl of Sandwich. I have been DYING to eat here after seeing photos and hearing how tasty it is on the DIS, so this might be a perfect opportunity!

If we don't go to DTD, I'm thinking we might relax by the pool in the afternoon if it's a nice day out. One of my items on my bucket list is to go down the slide at Stormalong Bay! It looks like so much fun and I haven't been down a waterslide in years, so this should be a great opportunity.

Our ADR for this evening is at Whispering Canyon over at WL, so we'll make our way there either from DTD via bus, or take a bus from Epcot. I'd say we'd just take a boat from MK, but I'm not sure we'll be there that day. If we somehow magically end up in MK that afternoon, we'll take the boat over from MK, because I'm a huge fan of the boat rides!

After dinner, we might make our way to MK since it's open until 10pm, or maybe just head back to our room depending on how tired we are.

This is one of those days that I'm just so unsure of, outside of ADR. A lot of our plans really depend on the weather, if we made it to DTD the night before, and how we're feeling about checking out MK that day. It's a Saturday so I'm sure the non-recommended parks will be a bit busier than during the week. Having the knowledge that we have so many days left on our vacation, if we feel overwhelmed by crowds we'll have the ability to either head back to our resort or go somewhere else. January crowds aren't too awful though, so I'm not too worried about it.

Those are the plans for Day Three! You'll probably discover that I'm totally going to be wishy washy on our plans for some days. I can't help it though. I do have more items for my bucket list, so be on the look out for another update on that front!

Hope everyone is having a lovely day. It's beautiful outside right now of my office; I love these types of fall days!

 

[okw19]

I just found your PTR link in the January thread, and I'm so glad I did! I am all caught up and I'm loving your plans! We will be there at the same time staying at OKW. Cute pumpkins and your Jack yard decoration was so cool!

 

[danimaroo]

I just found your PTR link in the January thread, and I'm so glad I did! I am all caught up and I'm loving your plans! We will be there at the same time staying at OKW. Cute pumpkins and your Jack yard decoration was so cool!

Really happy you popped in here! It's always nice to know that more people read these silly updates of mine. I wouldn't be shocked if a lot of these plans fly out the window, especially after Day 2. We are just totally not super into planning every second of every day because we never had to last trip! I am glad we are planning out our meals though this time as it's kidn of nice not having to scramble to make last minute ADRs (unless of course we decide we want to! ).

OKW is so fabulous. I really really loved it there last trip. I'm excited to try a new resort but can totally understand why people adore OKW so much! And thanks for the compliments on our decorations; it was sad taking down Jack and throwing away our pumpkins, but we're starting to get into Christmas-mode so it's okay. I LOVE Jack and was so excited my in-laws gave him to us!

 

[Lady Lallie]

I wouldn't worry too much about touring plans in January, it usually is such low crowds!

I like your touring style, very much like ours, go with the flow/up in the air type.