The freedom of NOT doing Disney

[agavegirl1]

Just back from my multi-park, 16 day trip to the Orlando area. Nine Disney days, One Busch Gardens day, Two Sea World Days and Four US/IOA days. This was a slow time of year for everything except WDW.

All the obsessive planning, ADRs, FP+s etc. well, to be honest, my DBF was so turned off by the whole thing. We cancelled 2 ADRs, failed to show up at 5 of our FP+ reservations and kind of skipped a whole morning plan at DHS due to boredom with the park.

Our time at US/IOA with our on site hotel and Express Passes was totally awesome! Thankfully, we ended the trip there...checked out this morning from Portofino, Town Car to the airport and a Starbucks coffee for the road...

I'll post more later but kind of leaving WDW in my rear view mirror for a while.

 

[quantumottle]

<snip> I've given the Mouse the last dollar I will ever give him, and nobody in my family misses it one bit.

I suppose I should clarify... my family may well visit DL again someday, it's far better than WDW in my opinion. In fact, DL has many things in common with Universal Orlando - for example, Disneyland DOES NOT have the ridiculous FastPass+ system that WDW has (thank goodness).

So I may give the mouse more of my hard earned money in the future, but it will certainly not be at the Orlando park.

 

[HeddyRuth]

I suppose I should clarify... my family may well visit DL again someday, it's far better than WDW in my opinion. In fact, DL has many things in common with Universal Orlando - for example, Disneyland DOES NOT have the ridiculous FastPass+ system that WDW has (thank goodness). So I may give the mouse more of my hard earned money in the future, but it will certainly not be at the Orlando park.

We are a west coast family and have grown up here which is why we love universal so much ourselves.

 

[CTDisneyfan816]

It took me a good long while to get to the point where my eye doesn't twitch thinking that we are ONLY doing Universal for our next trip and skipping Disney....and believe me, I had guilt about it. The more I read about Universal from all of you, the more excited I keep getting.

I was out on the Disney thread about trip planning and reading that just raised my anxiety level... people are worried about waking up for making ADR's, booking FP+, will their kids be disappointed, will there be free dining, a whole host of issues. When I planned our last 2 trips, it was like a part time job. Now, the planning is fun... it's the obsessing that takes too much control.

Since we decided on an only Universal vacation, I feel free.... I feel like we're actually going 'on vacation'.... we don't have to make dining reservations, no fast passes, we're staying at Royal Pacific, so we will get the benefit of 'skip the line'. My husband said to me yesterday, 'you realize that if I don't go back to Disney, I'm okay with that?'. It just make me laugh... and sigh a sigh of relief that I can actually just RELAX and have fun instead of giving everyone their day's orders.

Does anyone else feel this way once you've made the decision to not do Disney ?

I do both Universal and Disney and do not do any ADR's I arrive and what I can see I enjoy. I refuse to have my vacation down to a planned itinerary.