To start out, I just want to say that I started planning this trip about 6 months before we actually took it. As hard as it is on me that my little girl is growing up, I was so excited that she had reached the perfect age for her first trip to Disney World. Craig wasn't quite as enthusiastic as I was but he eventually came around (and was even a little bit excited I think). It has probably been 10 years since I had been to Disney World and about 8 years since Austin had been. Craig had never been and of course, neither had Addison.
After talking to others about Disney and my hopes of going, Lyndi's neighbor recommended a lady named Christina whose job was to plan Disney vacations (how fun). She worked for a company called Mickey Adventures and was so helpful in making recommendations, making all of our dinner and character meal reservations, and making sure that we got the absolute best price available if Disney offered any discounts during the time of our stay--and she didn't cost us ANYTHING. It was so nice to have someone to work with who had knowledge of all the resorts, parks, dining, etc...
The next step was to figure out when we wanted to go. I checked out a book at the library called "The Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World." This book was amazingly helpful in the planning of a Disney trip and offered so many tips related to children and packing and restaurants--this book became another wonderful tool that I used in planning everything. From reading the book and doing some research online, I definitely wanted to go during low crowds with a 4 year old. Waiting in long lines in the heat of summer did not sound appealing at all and I knew that my husband would agree. As much as I wanted to keep the trip a secret and surprise the kids at Christmas, I knew that we had to tell Austin since he's a college boy now just to make sure that he kept his schedule clear for that week. I checked his college calendar to determine when classes started back after Christmas and we nailed down January 11th-January 16th which was a Sunday thru Friday. From the research I had done, the weather in Orlando in January was typically 60-70s and that sounded perfect to me. The next decision was whether we were going to stay on Disney property or off the property. I had never stayed in a Disney resort and had heard that to get the "true Disney experience" you needed to stay on the resort so I talked to Christina and she recommended and quoted us some Disney value resorts. I had heard and read that a value resort was equivalent to a standard hotel room and since I knew that we probably wouldn't be spending much time in the room anyway, we may as well save a little money on the resort. After research and looking at pictures online, we ended up choosing a resort called Pop Century and officially booked our trip with Christina and paid our deposit on August 7th. We planned to get to Orlando on Sunday and hit the parks Monday thru Thursday and then leave on Friday morning. When asked if we wanted to use the Disney dining plan and after getting the quote, I decided not to. After all, we are PICKY eaters and when I estimated what we would spend on chicken fingers, pizza, and cheeseburgers (which is typically the food we order), I figured that we would come out ahead paying for our food on our own versus spending another $1,000 for the dining plan. Christina told us though that if we changed our minds, we could always add the dining plan to our package later on. Christina contacted me in October to let me know that Disney had just announced a discount on their dining plan during the time that we would be there. The cost of the dining plan for our family would be $600 so we would save $400 by taking advantage of this discount. After doing some calculations and estimations (because that's just who I am), it turned out to be a no brainer. I began to get super excited about the dining plan as this would mean, I would be ordering sodas (instead of water) and desserts at all our meals since drinks and desserts are all included on the dining plan. I loosened up my belt and planned to take full advantage of the dining plan. Character dinners, which are super expensive but are the best way to get up close and personal with the characters, are included on the dining plan also. Initially, when I had planned to decline the dining plan, I only budgeted for us to do one character meal while at Disney. After making the decision (thanks to the discount) to purchase the dining plan, I wanted to take advantage of as many character meals as we could fit in during our time there!
Next up was deciding on our transportation--would we drive or would we fly? I began obsessing over airline rates and checking them daily. Allegiant easily had the cheapest flights and one day as I was checking, the flights for all four of us were a lot cheaper than I had seen before. I called Craig to make sure he was on board and within minutes, I had booked 4 seats leaving Lexington on 1/11 and returning on 1/16 for under $600! We were so excited at the thought of not having to drive 12 hours and were instead going to be hopping on a plane on a two hour, direct flight from Lexington to Orlando! All that I needed to do now was rent a car but I didn't end up doing that until about a week before we left.
So by this point, most of the BIG planning was done. Now I just had the little details to take care of like booking dinner reservations, character dinners, and fast passes. Dinner reservations can be made six months prior to your trip. We ended up booking a character dinner called "Chef Mickey's" in the Contemporary Hotel for Sunday night (the first night we were there). The characters at the Chef Mickey dinner are the "original" Disney characters--Mickey, Minnie, Goofy, Donald, and Pluto. For Tuesday night, I booked a character dinner called "1900 Park Fare." It was in the Grand Floridian Hotel and featured Cinderella, Drizella and Anastasia, the wicked Step-mother, and Prince Charming. We also did a character breakfast on Friday morning before we left called "Citricos" at the Grand Floridian Hotel. It was a breakfast with the Disney princesses including Cinderella, Ariel, Belle, Jasmine, and Snow White.
When we were 60 days out, I could start requesting fast passes. I am one of the crazies who was up at midnight on Wednesday, November 12th, scheduling fast passes! It definitely paid off though because I basically got fast passes for every single ride that I wanted one for!
At this point, the planning was basically done. I still did research on restaurants within the parks to look at the menus to determine what would appeal to our picky-eating family. With the dining plan, you can eat anywhere so I just had to find places that served the kinds of food that we would eat. Other than that though, the planning was done just in time for me to kick in to high gear on holidays--Thanksgiving was right around the corner and was going to be at my house and then decorating for Christmas and then a few short weeks later it would be Christmas and a couple weeks after Christmas, we would be heading to Disney. It was definitely an exciting time!
Fast forward 8 weeks.....
Sunday, January 11th was an exciting day. We were packed and ready for Disney! We got up that Sunday morning and went to church and ran to Burger King for a quick lunch before heading home. Craig's parents were going to pick us up around 1:30 to take us the airport. The flight was SUPPOSED to leave at 3:20 but it was actually closer to 4:30 before we took off. They never announced a delay or even acted like anything was wrong but we left an hour later than we were scheduled. Not a big deal except we had a dinner reservation that evening at 8:10 PM for Chef Mickey's character dinner. We got our rental car at the Orlando airport and buckled up! We were on a mission to get to our dinner on time--we followed the directions from the GPS on Craig's phone and thankfully there was no traffic at all at that time. We walked into the dinner about 5 minutes early. We had planned to be able to check into our hotel and at least carry our luggage into our room before going to dinner but with our flight delay, that didn't happen. Dinner was a buffet and the food was great and we really enjoyed it and really ate too much. The excitement and pure awe in Addi's eyes as she looked at the characters was pure preciousness. SIDENOTE: at the rental car place, we had paid for an economy car. We knew we probably wouldn't use it too much and we aren't really large people. Our luggage, however, was large. So large that it wouldn't fit in the trunk of an economy car so they upgraded us to a mid-size for free. It was a Chevy Traverse and was really nice!
After dinner, we made our way back to Pop Century to get checked into our room. There are several buildings in Pop Century devoted to different decades--we stayed in the 70s building. It had very cool, life-size decor such as Rubics cubes, Twister boards, Mr. & Mrs. Potato Heads, Foosball tables, etc... We stayed in room 6401 and I have to say, it was perfect. It wasn't fancy but it was all that we needed considering how little time we actually spent in the room. And the water pressure was RIDICULOUSLY wonderful. It was hard to get out of the shower because the water pressure was so amazing.
Monday morning after putting on our matching gray t-shirts that I had gotten monogrammed for all of us (much to Craig's dismay), we went down to the food court at Pop Century and each used one of our snack credits for breakfast. After breakfast, we waited for the bus to take us the Hollywood Studios for Day 1 at the park. We got to the park right when it opened and it wasn't crowded at all. We got on a ride called the "Great Movie Ride" which was cool and took you on a little tour of some old, classic movies. Addison got a little freaked out during a few parts and we sort of raised our eyebrows as to how she was gonna handle some of the other things we had planned. I think she was just a little anxious about everything but she calmed down and did great. She even rode Tower of Terror which we had a fast pass for. Also, that day, we had a fast pass for Toy Story Mania which was a very cute ride that we all enjoyed and a Frozen sing-along show called "For the First Time in Forever" which of course Addi loved. We also met several characters (Chip and Dale, Max, Sofia, Jake, Woody/Buzz, and Mike & Sully) at Hollywood Studios and went to a Muppet Vision 3-D show and a Disney Jr. show that featured Sophia, Jake, and other cartoon characters. We ate lunch at Pizza Planet which was really good. Hollywood Studios was cool and has lots of shows to go to but there weren't a whole lot of rides. Austin was cracking us up by taking selfies with a lot of the characters!! At around 4 PM, it started raining. We put on our rain ponchos that we had brought and planned to wait it out because there were a few more shows that we planned to go to but the rain just got harder and harder and harder. It was raining so hard that there was just standing water everywhere and even with the ponchos, we were pretty soaked. We laughed it off and decided to call it a day.
We took the bus back to the hotel and rested a little bit and got dried off and decided to go to Downtown Disney for dinner. (The Rainforest Cafe at Downtown Disney is also on the dining plan so I called to see if I could get a reservation on the fly and I did.) After dinner, we walked around for a little while but it was still raining so we didn't stay too long especially since we had another full day ahead of us!
Despite the rain, Day 1 was a huge success and we were all excited and ready for Day 2 at the Animal Kingdom and thankfully there was no rain in the forecast and temps projected in the 70s!
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