ashw100
DIS Veteran
- Joined
- Jan 2, 2014
Important Details
The Who
Ashley
I am the wrangler of children, Disney trip planner extraordinaire, Disneyoholic, and narrator of this here trip report. I have loved Disney all my life. I was lucky enough to live in California until I was 8 and visited Disneyland a few times. My family took our one and only Disney World trip in 2001. Once I entered high school I became too cool for Disney and didn’t really pick up the obsession again until my second baby was born and I decided we had to go to WDW. Planning that trip, I of course got bitten with the bug, and I have been obsessed ever since. Even turning my hobby into a career.
Joe
C
J
J is my sweet middle child. He is the classic middle child, quiet, peacemaker, and enjoys his solitude. He loves sports and reading, and is starting to warm up to some of the thrill rides.
N
The What
A trip to Disney of course.
When
February 5-9, 2021
Where
Art of Animation Resort
Why
This one’s a little bit convoluted, but here we go. J and I had just been to Disney in August. We had an absolutely amazing time. As the real world became a little toxic in the fall, I dreamed about getting away again. The trick would be…how to convince DH. See we have a trip to Hawaii, hopefully, coming up this summer. My mom and dad are treating the whole family after the crappy year and a half or so. Even though the big things are paid for, do you know how expensive Hawaii is just for activities and food??? $$$ Well Southwest came out with $49 fares, and we still had airline credits for DH, J, and myself. Then I remembered that we still had around $350 in Marriott gift cards left over from our summer road trip. If we ate most of our meals offsite, the biggest expense would be park tickets, we would just go for two days, no park hopping. I laid out my plan, and it was a big fat no.
I am not one to give up so easily, so I would casually mention Disney here or there. Always the same response…no. About a month after I hatched my plan, I got a nibble. We were watching the Disney investor day announcements and I said, “Doesn’t this make you want to go to Disney?” His response, “Well actually I’ve been thinking about that all day.” And that folks was all I needed, the trip was booked that night.
Based on the above description, our plans changed along the way. Thanks to amazingly generous Christmas gifts and a crazy good visa discount from Disney, we were able to upgrade to staying on site. Also, thanks to working my behind off in January, we were going to be able to not have to penny pinch when it came to meals. This wouldn’t be an extravagant trip by any means, but it was nice to not have to stress about the budget too much.
There was one little hitch in the plans though, the boy’s school. When we booked the trip, the boys had been in remote learning by choice since the beginning of the year. A few days after we booked the trip, we got some news that pretty much forced our hands in putting the little boys back into school. C was given the option and he chose to stay virtual, so we let him. This presented a problem though, I cannot in good conscious travel to Disney on an airplane, and then the next day plop them back in the classroom. The school district’s COVID policies are lackluster to say the least, N doesn’t even need to wear a mask in school, for example. So I didn’t want to be a potential spreader of COVID if we were unknowingly exposed and asymptomatic. Thanks for Southwest’s policy, we were able to rebook our flights for different dates for the same price. Now we would come back and there would be only two days left in the school week thanks to a four day weekend. This meant that they would only miss a total of 6 days of school. Per CDC travel guidelines, you should restrict activities for 7 days after travel and get tested 3-5 days after travel. Those seemed like reasonable guidelines, we’ll just do the whole remote learning for those other days. In reality, we came back and had a huge snow storm that caused school to be cancelled for a week after our quarantine, so we were really good when they finally got back into the classroom.
With all that background and boring stuff out of the way, let’s go to Walt Disney World!
. So in keeping with normal tradition, we ran around like chicken with our heads cut off trying to clean everything up. I was super concerned about our cat, but I texted my SIL to see if she would make an extra check in on her.
. We see all the TSA agent roaming around, while all passengers needed to stand still. I found out from another person that this was just a drill, but even still, the following minutes were stressful. We were finally given the go ahead to move around again and we were on our way to our gate. I stopped in the shop to get some water and gum for us. Then we found a nice uncrowded spot near our gate and settled in for the wait.
