AlliGirl
Mouseketeer
- Joined
- May 6, 2011
Hello and Welcome to our Walt Disney World Vacation!
Hi! We are Alli and Scott (alligirl and FreddyMercury here on the boards). We have written three other trip reports about our Disneyland and Walt Disney World trips:
"It's So Clean!" First Timer's July 2014 Trip Report
Former Cast Members Take Back the Parks! (A June WDW Vacation TR)
How to Plan a Disneyland Trip in One Hour (Labor Day 2015)
We are just about to leave for our trip to the vacation kingdom, and we wanted to start this right before our departure, so we’d be all ready to start posting upon returning.
First, in this post, I’ll give some information about how our trip came to be, and then I’ll break down our more specific plans in the following post, and throughout the trip report, we'll see how they compare to what we actually do throughout our trip. We are rope drop to park close types, but we always leave room to change our plans based on what we feel like doing next. We also have a couple fun surprises that we planned for each other to share with you guys, and since I love reading about how people get themselves and their bags ready for their trip, I'll share some information about that as well.
Your Ghost Hosts:
Scott and I at a very different castle, one that serves wine.
Scott and I met while on a Disney College Program starting in January of 2013, and we’ve been stuck to each other’s hip ever since.
When you live at Walt Disney World, you even get your haircut on Main Street.
I opted to get my hair done at the Whispering Canyon Salon instead.
I sunk, I mean STEERED, boats at the World Famous Jungle Cruise (just don't ask about the whereabouts of the Kissimmee Kate, and we're all good) while Scott swabbed decks and raised sails at the Pirates of the Caribbean. We worked at Walt Disney World from January 2013 – January 2014. We left Orlando so that Scott could finish his degree and I’m proud to say that we are both educating the moody pre-teen youth of this country. Sure, it may not be quite AS fun as dressing in head-to-toe khaki and training elephants to speak on command, but hey it’s paying for this awesome trip to our favorite place and we didn’t even have to ask for a single day off, because we just get weeks of work off at a time.
You may have seen Scott and I moonlighting in various other roles. Including the ever fulfilling stroller parking shifts.
You may have even seen us in our favorite role, highly enthused Disney fans who spent every waking moment at a park!
When and How This Trip Came to Be:
Scott and I last visited WDW in May of 2015 with a friend who was on our DCP with us. Since then, we have visited Disneyland twice. We always crave magic, and we had a big trip in mind: Tokyo Disneyland. I adore Japanese food and culture, and TDL is the international park that we’ve most desired a trip to see, mostly because of DisneySea, and because Tokyo is somewhere we’d love to vacation anyway. The trip we had in mind would be around two weeks long, and going SO far away from home, we wanted to bring some friends for that journey. We had friends who were down for the adventure, until they found out that they had eight…EIGHT weddings to attend in 2017, with some of them being at out of country destinations! Oof! Scott and I were still considering going to Tokyo just us, but that would have to wait until June or July. Fast forward to January 2017, the spring semester at our respective schools had just started and we made it to about Wednesday of the first week of the semester before we had our trip for spring break booked! We have a trip to Key West planned in June, so this way we have something to look forward to mid-semester and this summer.
Throughout this school year, we’ve had many conversations deciding when we would return to WDW. We kept wondering if we should wait for Pandora to open. But when it came down to it, there were plenty of new and exciting things for us to do and we NEEDED THAT SWEET, SWEET MAGIC! We teetered back and forth about actually pulling the trigger, I was constantly checking package prices and room availability and then one night I saw that all of the packages with a room discount for our resort had been booked! I quickly figured out that the package without the discount was less than $200 more, and I took this as a sign that we needed to book NOW!
Scott went to take a pre-bed shower and I quickly made the reservation without him knowing and then I saw THE most glorious screen!
I showed Scott the laptop screen and he asked me with wide eyes, “what does this mean?!” I was very pleased to tell him that this meant that WE WERE OFFICIALLY GOING BACK TO DISNEY WORLD!
The timing of our booking was great because we only had to wait less than a week to make our Fastpass Reservations. However, because we booked fairly close to our departure date, flights were STEEP! In fact, the cost of both of our round trip flights was only slightly less than our 7 night hotel stay and 6 day parkhoppers! OY VEY! I tried looking at departure from several different locations, I thought about flying in to a different city in Florida and driving in, but nothing I considered was going to produce savings worth sacrificing that much trip time. I booked our fares through Southwest, and all of the cheapest category of tickets were sold out, for both travel days, which is why they ended up being so pricy. However, I checked Southwest’s website daily and I was able to find tickets for both of our flights in the cheaper category! Each time I found the cheaper fare, I just called Southwest and then we were refunded a couple hundred dollars, TWICE! So now I had more reasonably priced flights, AND both were non-stop flights, with our arrival day flight getting in at 9:45am! We’re so excited to be arriving in Orlando so early!
We plan to take a lot of pictures, and have a ton of fun, which is easy for us always, but a guarantee at Disney! I really hope you'll be along for the ride(s)! I have a feeling this is going to be one of our best and most special experiences at the parks yet!
So, our final details:
When: March 11th – 18th
Where: Pop Century (but let’s be real…the room is only for sleeping, we are here to park, park, PARK IT UP!)
When: March 11th – 18th
Where: Pop Century (but let’s be real…the room is only for sleeping, we are here to park, park, PARK IT UP!)
Thanks for reading and I hope that the story of our Disney trip brings you joy, wherever you are reading this from!
Isn't the lighting at Disney always the best?
-Quick Links-
MagicBand Scavenger Hunt
Pre-Trip Itinerary
The Night Before...
Travel Day
Disney Springs
Dinner at Sanaa
Magic Kingdom Park Day - Pt. 1
Magic Kingdom Park Day - Pt. 2
Magic Kingdom Park Day - Pt. 3
Animal Kingdom Park Day - Pt. 1
Animal Kingdom Park Day - Pt. 2
Epcot Park Day - Pt. 1
Epcot Park Day - Pt. 2
Hollywood Studios Park Day
Park Hopping Adventures - Pt. 1
Park Hopping Adventures - Pt. 2
Park Hopping Adventures - Pt. 3
Last edited: