Minnesota here! We're in Oakdale, just east of St. Paul.
My wife used to work at
Disneyland as a teenager and we just have a love for the parks overall, so we did WDW as our honeymoon in 2018. My dad was jealous so we planned another trip for February 2020 with my parents and brother, and it was around that time that I had done a bunch of research into DVC because we foresaw more family trips to WDW now that we've hit a point where we can just
do that. Toured at Riviera with dad, and it was actually him that just said, "at this point it would be dumb not to buy in."
Despite hemming and hawing about resale/direct, which home resort, what UY, we decided on buying 100 at Riviera to start. Since then we did a March 2021 trip - we had gotten vaccinated in February - and did a split stay between BLT and RIV. They were also offering tours at all the DVC resorts with the grand villas so we took a look at Poly's bungalows, CC's cabins, and VGF's 2800 sq ft gigantovilla.
And like the
two other folks in this thread already, we will also be taking a trip in January of next year! We'll be doing another split between OKW and Boardwalk, as I start on my quest to try every DVC resort and decide where I'd want to add on points (so far, BLT is in the lead because of proximity to MK and availability/point-cost of rooms). But we may just miss people because our trip is around MLK. Typically our trip time will be around MEA, like a bajillion other Minnesotans, but October is a super fun time to be at Disney and we have yet to try a
MNSSHP if it comes back!