Disney Planning

I decided against backdating these posts but for those of you wondering, we actually took this trip in 2010. :) I wrote these quite a while ago but never finished the photo uploads and got around to posting them.

I want to try and capture as much of our Disney trip as I can remember and recreate from the snippet of notes I made during our trip. It was such a special trip, we dream of going back and doing it all again.

The whole trip idea started when we had $800 in airline vouchers leftover from our honeymoon that were getting ready to expire. We were trying to figure out where we wanted to go and I suggested to Brent he needed to experience Disney pre-kids because it is a totally different experience. We *thought* he had never been before as he didn't remember ever going. Turns out that when he was a kid, he had a baseball tournament down there and visited one or two of the parks with his family in his free time. The way we found this out? When we were visiting his family at Christmas time (after we had made all our reservations) and sorting through family photos. I found a picture of him standing with his younger brother in front of the castle. Caught! :) Haha, regardless, he had no recollection of the trip and we still wanted to experience it together.

I had previously visited for a few days a number of years ago with my family and grandparents. My grandparents had bought us the trip as a Christmas present. They are retired military and own a house in Florida so they were able to get all sorts of discounts. On the trip with my family, we were supposed to stay at the Disney military resort, Shades of Green, but it ended up being closed for renovations so the resort transferred our reservations to the Contemporary Resort (major upgrade!). Needless to say, after staying there as a kid, I was hooked and knew I would want to stay there on future trips.

Once we had established the idea we wanted to visit "pre-kids" and we wanted to spend our vouchers, everything sort of fell into place. Disney was offering a "buy 4-get 3 nights free" deal at the time (spectacular deal) and it applied to your room, park hoppers, everything. We had free airline passes, didn't need to rent a car. It fit our budget perfectly. I still can't believe how cheap the trip was, I don't think we'll ever be able to come close to the price we paid. We researched the best times to go and found a week in March that was right after the Princess marathon and right before Spring Break peak times.

We departed Saturday afternoon, had a quick stop in Miami and then arrived in Orlando by 8pm. I loved arriving in the evening and we hope to always do it this way. It was a great way to get in the night before and take our time getting settled before taking on the parks. I can't imagine arriving, trying to get settled and then rushing out to do the parks same day.

On a side note, we both came down with a stomach flu right before leaving. In fact, Brent had it so bad that he had to stay home from work the day before we left (his first time ever calling in sick to work-it was that bad). The first couple of days we were definitely in recovery mode and a little wary of food but even that didn't put a damper on the trip!

We deplaned and headed off to the "Disney section" of the airport. Disney had already made arrangements to pick up our luggage (to be delivered to our room a few hours later) so we were able to skip carefree into line. I don't think we waited more than a few minutes before our Magical Express bus pulled up. We hopped onto the bus and the magic kicked off right away. Mickey, Minnie, Donald and other characters entertained us on the ride to the resort with an introduction to the parks and footage of all the different Disney resorts where you can stay. It was awesome and we totally felt like little kids. :)

We had chosen to stay at the Contemporary resort and it was a perfect choice. Frankly, we don't plan to ever stay anywhere else (except possibly the wilderness lodge once). I know that a lot of other people prefer to stay in homes with kitchens and laundry and like having a car to access the parks and drive themselves but neither of us had any desire to cook or do laundry on vacation. Plus, why drive when the monorail went right through our resort and could take us direct to most of the parks? They have an excellent bus system that covers the parks that the monorail doesn't go to and using Disney transportation completely eliminates having to wait in line for a long time getting in and out of the parks during peak hours. Plus, you often have to park so far away you still end up taking a tram to the park entrance.



(the bathrooms really show the "contemporary" feel of the resort"

The Contemporary is right next to Magic Kingdom, depending on your room, you can have a nice view of the park. The days we visited Magic Kingdom, it was a few minute jaunt over to the park in the mornings. Since we were there on our second honeymoon ;) Mickey and Minnie had a card and some treats waiting for us in our room when we checked in.