Walking the line of knowing it all but not being a know it all – A Pre-Trip Report Part 1

[aliciamakino]

I have thoroughly been enjoying all the trip reports I have read on Disboards the last 2 months and decided I would give it a whirl. Please be gentle this is my 1st attempt, here we go.

As I start this report I am T-Minus 12 days till my happy feet hit the beautiful state of Florida. This morning waking up in Northern IL to snow… SNOW on April 9th! Are you kidding me!?!? So needless to say, I am counting down the days until I get to the sunshine state and the happiest place on earth.

A little about my travelling crew: My husband (35) who we shall call The Beast, not that he resembles one, but one of his favorite past times includes jumping out and ROARING at my daughter and myself, scaring the life out of us. I swear one day he is going to give me a heart attack. Then there is the light of my life (well, most days) daughter who will be 4 in July. We shall call her Chip. Chip is her favorite character from Beauty and the Beast. She is hoping to play Chip in Enchanted tales with Belle. Also, she can’t sit still and asks questions excessively. That leaves myself, Hi, I’m Alicia. I’m 34 years old, love to travel, take pictures, shop and scrapbook. And I am a crazy planner by nature. I am the “I make lists of all the lists I need to make” person. So it’s only natural that I am the vacation planner.

No good trip is complete without hours upon hours of research. I shudder to think of how many hours I have spent over the last 3 months planning this Disney trip. Between UTube videos, Vlogs, and Disboards I have spent countless hours researching. It’s a good thing they don’t track that sort of thing at my job, because some research has been done there “on break”. I just want to know everything there is to know. I can’t tell you how many restaurants/snacks/rides are on my to-do list now that I have gotten recommendations from all of you- so thank you.

I should say, I’m not a rookie, this will be my families 4th trip in the last 4 years. But prior trips we have always split the trip 3-4 days at WDW and then a 4 day Disney Cruise. Which is my preferred vacation, but not so great on the wallet. So this trip we decided to do a “budget” trip (don’t laugh too hard) to WDW and actually hit up all the parks. Up to this point we have exclusively gone to Magic Kingdom. But I’m dying to experience Epcot; World showcase, eating/drinking around the world, some great rides and of course Figment! So we will be doing Epcot, Animal Kingdom, and 2 days at Magic Kingdom.

So back to this knowing it all. The beast pretty much knows nothing about Disney. He will expect at any given time in any given park that I can give suggestions on to where to eat, what to ride and so on. I don’t know how he thinks I know this all….. Perhaps he has seen all my UTube activity and heard my non-stop Disney talk since booking this trip. But—and it’s a big but, I need to KNOW It all if he asks and not be a know-it-all. Big difference. One lesson I have learned the hard way over the 18 years we have been together. So, with that knowledge, I have planned our trip (probably in too much detail) but I shall keep that plan from beast, I have to hear him roar enough, I don’t want to go invoking it.

So this post is getting super long, so I will start a new one covering all the joys of planning a Disney vacation less than 90 days out, fun activities to keep Chip excited about the trip and general madness that goes along with planning a magical vacation.

 

[aliciamakino]

One of the 1st hurdles I have every time we book a magical vacation is that it’s always last minute (60/90 days out). While it’s great in some ways, in more ways it’s a pain. This year we had a hard time deciding on what property to stay at. Beast and I are huge advocates of staying on property, we hate driving in Orlando. Which says a lot considering we lived in the area for 5 years. While we have stayed at both moderate and value resorts, for our budget and needs the values work. Although I have a dream that one day I can stay at the Grand Floridian. But alas, the Beast is extremely frugal and doesn’t think it’s “worth” it. So this time around we agreed to All Star Movies or so I thought. Less than 3 days after we booked Beast started talking about switching over to Caribbean Beach Resort; due to the construction they were offering an incredible deal. So we switched, as long as the pool is open and we could get to the parks, I’m happy. Then I started reading the reviews… and they were 50/50. Not wanting to chance it, I suggested we switch back to Movies, or to my favorite: Art of Animation (wink wink nod nod). So that got us to our final resort resting place: Art of Animation and the end of “budget trip”.

So with booking 90 days out, you can all but forget about getting great ADR’s. So that leaves me to stalk the reservations page night and day in hopes of someone cancelling. After 2 months of doing that, I threw in the towel and told Beast “we are winging where we eat, I can’t get into anything we want”! He said, “no big deal, we will figure it out when we get there”. This earned him an eye roll from me, is he delusional? Does he really think we can walk up to Be our Guest at lunch time and get a table? Even Houdini couldn’t pull that magic trick off. But I decided to be like Elsa and let it go. The next day as if by magic (thank you, Houdini) I received a dining reservation for lunch at BOG. Wait, what? I immediately text the beast and inquire and asked how did you get that? One word answer: Magic. Magic indeed. But he didn’t stop there, I then received dining reservations for Bon Voyage breakfast, Princess Lunch @ Epcot and Cindy’s. He was on a roll, and blowing our budget big time!

The one thing I was able to book on time, was Fast passes. And although I am not a morning person, I was happy to roll out of bed at 6 am and get us the coveted FP+ we wanted. And while I was successful for all of our must do rides, I failed to do my touring plan and/or look at a map prior to booking things back to back. Rookie mistake. I think I have it fixed for the most part. I am concerned about the amount of running back and forth at Epcot. We are planning to Rope drop FEA and meeting Anna & Elsa before our 1st FP of the day in Future World. Pretty sure Beast and Chip will not be too happy about that. And I’m hoping to hit up Test Track in the single rider line at some point. Next trip, I’m springing for the subscription to Touring Plans, seems to be the smart thing to do.

After all that was booked it was time for the pre-trip fun! Shopping for new Disney shirts, and making a personalized Autograph book! Can’t forget about watching all the Disney movies. I will fill you in on the Autograph book drama in my next post.