Araminta18
DIS Veteran
- Joined
- Mar 11, 2016
- Messages
- 3,139
Hi all! I'm back with yet ANOTHER trip report, this one focused on Festival of the Arts! I just finished up the TR for our bucket list trip in November (club level at the Grand Floridian...we're bougie people sometimes 
), so of course, time to do this one! If this is your first time joining me on a trip report, I go SUPER extra with the photos #sorrynotsorry - I used to use imgur to host 30 photos per post but I got burned when that whole thing went weird, so now I just upload directly to disboards, but that means each post only gets 10 photos. So that's why you'll see days broken up into like 10 or 12 posts, cause ALL the photos.
And guys, I have no other Disney trip planned! Both Trevor and I are federal employees and all the chaos that's been happening recently has very much put us in savings mode and being worried about our jobs. So we'll see what happens - in the meantime, I'm gonna enjoy reliving this trip!
The details:
who: me and my husband Trevor
when: Friday Jan 24th through Friday Jan 31st
where: Beach Club!
Introductions:
I'm Tiffany, I'll be your ghost host for this trip report.
I'm 37 and while I'm a librarian by education, I currently do federal records management, since records management is where the pay is, and I gotta pay for Disney! Favorite princess is Sleeping Beauty, but I also love Mary Poppins and Beauty and the Beast and Rapunzel. Favorite rides are Haunted Mansion, Jungle Cruise, Guardians of the Galaxy Cosmic Rewind, Expedition Everest, Tower of Terror...I feel like I should stop before I just list all of them.
My traveling companion is my husband Trevor. He's 39, and loves Star Wars and Marvel, but has grown to love Disney--his favorite characters are Boba Fett, Vader and Stormtroopers, and on the non-Star Wars side, Grumpy. I recently turned him into a roller coaster fan (after him not riding them for our first several trips), so now he likes Cosmic Rewind and Everest...I think Rise of the Resistance and Star Tours are his favorite rides though.
This picture is way more true to our personalities though
Trevor saying "hey wait what are you doing" and me being like "ha ha I did the crazy thing!" (like buying ALL the art). But make no mistake - that's not Trevor being mad or upset, just catching up to the crazy that I've done. He's always (usually ) on board.
Ok, let's get started! Festival of the Arts is my absolute favorite festival and so when we renewed our APs last August, a FARTS trip was a given. And after how much we loved staying at Beach Club last year because of the proximity to Epcot, that was our first choice. Then because the Festival is our priority and we'll spend most of our days there, I booked us Disney After Hours at both MK and HS. Then it was pretty much just on hold planning-wise until Disney released the artist signing schedule, the broadway concert schedule, and the food booth menus. Which they did SUPER LATE! And so our dates ended up shifting a bit. Originally it was Sat Jan 25th through Thurs Jan 30th, but then they announced the artist schedule, and Ashley Taylor, one of my favorite Disney artists, had her last day of signing on the day we'd arrive. And I didn't want to miss her, so Trevor and I chatted and decided to fly in the night before (late) and use his hotel points to stay for free. And for those who've read my recent TRs and are thinking "wait this sounds familiar..." you're right, we did the same thing before. Maybe I should just start planning that way originally!! Anyways. Then a week or two before the trip started, Trevor and I were going over the plan and he was like "uhh why are we coming back on Thursday? why not Friday?" and honestly that's all the encouragement I needed, so I added on an extra day. It was a little bit weird - it seemed like almost all the Disney resort rooms were sold out! I wanted us to stay at Beach Club (not interested in switching resorts), and the only room I could grab was a club level room. You'll have to wait to see if we keep that - I was checking a lot to see if a regular room would open up!
The other thing that was throwing off our planning a bit was the new benefit that you could use on your checkin day: going to the water park! Trevor and I have never done a Disney water park and we figured this would be a decent trip to try that. The first day wouldn't work for us, but we had a split stay (still at Beach Club, in the same room category so we'd asked to have them linked so we didn't have to move rooms- I don't remember quite why I split those, I think maybe cause I could get a discount for that one night but not the whole time? Don't remember. It was a while ago), so our next check in day was Wed the 29th. And then for the night we added on, we had a check in day on the 30th. So several options! We hadn't decided which day we'd use that on - we figured we'd wait and see how the weather shook out and how we felt. But we definitely wanted to use it!
Anyways, by the time we were ready to go, I'd gone through all the food booth menus and highlighted the ones we wanted to try, figured out the artist schedules of who I wanted to meet and when, and otherwise we were pretty set for a mostly relaxing trip. We'd even planned out our outfits a few days before, so that the night before and day of we'd just have to do regular packing. This is my pro tip, by the way, if you want to have outfits planned out: plan them out before you go, and then take pictures of what y'all are going to wear, so that when you're there you don't have to worry about that, you just pull up your picture and can be like "ok I'm wearing this, you're wearing that, these are the ears I'm wearing, boom done". So much easier than trying to decide in the moment - or remember what the plan was.
OK! So finally it was Friday - travel day!
), so of course, time to do this one! If this is your first time joining me on a trip report, I go SUPER extra with the photos #sorrynotsorry - I used to use imgur to host 30 photos per post but I got burned when that whole thing went weird, so now I just upload directly to disboards, but that means each post only gets 10 photos. So that's why you'll see days broken up into like 10 or 12 posts, cause ALL the photos. And guys, I have no other Disney trip planned! Both Trevor and I are federal employees and all the chaos that's been happening recently has very much put us in savings mode and being worried about our jobs. So we'll see what happens - in the meantime, I'm gonna enjoy reliving this trip!
The details:
who: me and my husband Trevor
when: Friday Jan 24th through Friday Jan 31st
where: Beach Club!
Introductions:
I'm Tiffany, I'll be your ghost host for this trip report.
I'm 37 and while I'm a librarian by education, I currently do federal records management, since records management is where the pay is, and I gotta pay for Disney! Favorite princess is Sleeping Beauty, but I also love Mary Poppins and Beauty and the Beast and Rapunzel. Favorite rides are Haunted Mansion, Jungle Cruise, Guardians of the Galaxy Cosmic Rewind, Expedition Everest, Tower of Terror...I feel like I should stop before I just list all of them.My traveling companion is my husband Trevor. He's 39, and loves Star Wars and Marvel, but has grown to love Disney--his favorite characters are Boba Fett, Vader and Stormtroopers, and on the non-Star Wars side, Grumpy. I recently turned him into a roller coaster fan (after him not riding them for our first several trips), so now he likes Cosmic Rewind and Everest...I think Rise of the Resistance and Star Tours are his favorite rides though.
This picture is way more true to our personalities though
Trevor saying "hey wait what are you doing" and me being like "ha ha I did the crazy thing!" (like buying ALL the art
). But make no mistake - that's not Trevor being mad or upset, just catching up to the crazy that I've done. He's always (usually ) on board. Ok, let's get started! Festival of the Arts is my absolute favorite festival and so when we renewed our APs last August, a FARTS trip was a given. And after how much we loved staying at Beach Club last year because of the proximity to Epcot, that was our first choice. Then because the Festival is our priority and we'll spend most of our days there, I booked us Disney After Hours at both MK and HS. Then it was pretty much just on hold planning-wise until Disney released the artist signing schedule, the broadway concert schedule, and the food booth menus. Which they did SUPER LATE! And so our dates ended up shifting a bit. Originally it was Sat Jan 25th through Thurs Jan 30th, but then they announced the artist schedule, and Ashley Taylor, one of my favorite Disney artists, had her last day of signing on the day we'd arrive. And I didn't want to miss her, so Trevor and I chatted and decided to fly in the night before (late) and use his hotel points to stay for free.
And for those who've read my recent TRs and are thinking "wait this sounds familiar..." you're right, we did the same thing before. Maybe I should just start planning that way originally!! Anyways. Then a week or two before the trip started, Trevor and I were going over the plan and he was like "uhh why are we coming back on Thursday? why not Friday?" and honestly that's all the encouragement I needed, so I added on an extra day. It was a little bit weird - it seemed like almost all the Disney resort rooms were sold out! I wanted us to stay at Beach Club (not interested in switching resorts), and the only room I could grab was a club level room. You'll have to wait to see if we keep that - I was checking a lot to see if a regular room would open up!The other thing that was throwing off our planning a bit was the new benefit that you could use on your checkin day: going to the water park! Trevor and I have never done a Disney water park and we figured this would be a decent trip to try that. The first day wouldn't work for us, but we had a split stay (still at Beach Club, in the same room category so we'd asked to have them linked so we didn't have to move rooms- I don't remember quite why I split those, I think maybe cause I could get a discount for that one night but not the whole time? Don't remember. It was a while ago), so our next check in day was Wed the 29th. And then for the night we added on, we had a check in day on the 30th. So several options! We hadn't decided which day we'd use that on - we figured we'd wait and see how the weather shook out and how we felt. But we definitely wanted to use it!
Anyways, by the time we were ready to go, I'd gone through all the food booth menus and highlighted the ones we wanted to try, figured out the artist schedules of who I wanted to meet and when, and otherwise we were pretty set for a mostly relaxing trip.
We'd even planned out our outfits a few days before, so that the night before and day of we'd just have to do regular packing. This is my pro tip, by the way, if you want to have outfits planned out: plan them out before you go, and then take pictures of what y'all are going to wear, so that when you're there you don't have to worry about that, you just pull up your picture and can be like "ok I'm wearing this, you're wearing that, these are the ears I'm wearing, boom done". So much easier than trying to decide in the moment - or remember what the plan was. OK! So finally it was Friday - travel day!
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