Walt Disney World Vacation Planning: 72 days to go!!!
Holy Toledo! Just put a countdown app on my phone and lo and behold…SEVENTY TWO DAYS until our trip to Walt Disney World. My goodness, how the heck did that happen?? I thought we were more in the neighborhood of 90 days! Whoops. I guess time flies!!!
So let’s review. Here’s what is done so far:
- DVC Room Reservation: Bay Lake Tower, 5 nights, Studio, Theme Park View. I pretty much NEVER spring for the extra points for the Theme Park View, but….it’s been THREE YEARS since the wedding trip and we are both in SERIOUS Disney withdrawal (ok, I admit it…it’s ME and my castle obsession with the major withdrawal symptoms…) and while I did NOT spring for a one bedroom, the few extra points per day for the view seemed worth it to me. We’ve never had a theme park view room at Bay Lake before…I’m hoping it will be as good as I’m picturing in my head!
- Book the airfare: This was tough as it was the first place I had to spend ACTUAL real money (Our DVC is a regular monthly payment at this point, so when I book the stay I don’t FEEL the spend). And there’s that whole should I pull the trigger thing. Airfares from Chicago to Orlando can vary WIDELY over a period of months. I can’t tell you how many times over the years I found a great fare, debated about it for a few days and it was GONE when I decided to buy, never to be found or matched again…So I played the check the airfare every week game for awhile and finally bit the bullet in May. Good price, not great, but at least the money was spent and not available for life’s little challenges…we’ve had more than one trip over the last few years derailed by unexpected car repairs or other expenses. And of course, since I booked the airfare, I’ve seen better prices at least 4 times. AY YI YI. Oh well. What’s done is done and at least WE ARE DEFINITELY GOING THIS YEAR.
- Plan a tentative schedule. This is always when things start to get fun for me. I use the Crowd Calendar at https://touringplans.com (this site is an annual subscription, but is an automatic YES every year for me at renewal time. TONS of great content, but honestly, the Crowd Calendar alone is worth the subscription cost. These folks do TONS of research and studying and in the field tests and use all that data to predict crowd volumes. I have found them to be a pretty accurate predictor over the years. Nothing is perfect, and occasionally I have seen some dissenting opinions, but in my experience, they’ve done a pretty good job at predicting crowd levels and making updates when things change. I usually do my planning of our schedule in a couple of phases:
- Go to touring plans and write down the park hours for each park for each day of our trip. Make notes of which park will have extra magic hours and when. I also note nighttime show times at each park (fireworks, fantasmic, illuminations, etc.)
- I then take a look at our flight times and make some basic decisions: will we visit a park or Disney Springs on arrival day? Will we visit a park or Disney Springs on departure day?
- A couple other driving factors: How long has it been since we’ve been to Disney? Do we have another trip planned in the next year? For this trip, there’s a little extra pressure because it’s been so long since our last trip. One of the benefits of being DVC for us was that we went at least once per year, and I usually got down to Disney 2-3 times a year, by including a girl’s weekend and mom/Brooke weekend. I did Annual Passes every year in those days, and between DVC, Annual Passes, and KNOWING my next trip was never more than a few months away, I didn’t feel that pressure of HAVE TO SEE AND DO EVERYTHING that you feel when you are planning a trip that may not be repeated any time soon….
So this year’s trip is a little tough for my planning instincts: We haven’t been since our wedding trip…and while that trip was AMAZING, it was a very busy trip, full of family activities and oh, I don’t know, A WEDDING DAY and all the wedding related mumbo-jumbo and trying to coordinate with everyone so it wasn’t really one of our normal vacation trips. Add to that, I didn’t do my mom/Brooke trip that year because we were saving for the wedding, and my girl’s trip didn’t happen that year for the same reason. Frank and I DID make an extra trip down for a quick 3 days to do our wedding planning trip but that was very rushed and crazy. And then of course, after the wedding trip, the bottom started dropping out of our business and our incomes dropped and trips to ANYWHERE became out of the question for a few years…
But things are getting better now, and happily, this year’s Anniversary trip is a GO!!!!
Happy Dreaming!
Brooke