December 2020: Santa Barbara Sweethearts Honeymoon Pre-Trip Report

roxy72

Mouseketeer
Joined
Mar 30, 2009
Is the title of this thread too cheesy? Oh well! 🤷‍♀️

My fiance and I are planning our honeymoon at Disneyland for December 2020. We are getting married here in Santa Barbara in June, however we are deferring our honeymoon until December so we can enjoy the holiday season at Disneyland..as well as the cooler weather, and we'll have more time to save up money for our trip. Here is the local Courthouse, our wedding venue:
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A bit about us:
We both work at a local University - you can take a wild guess if you know the area, hah-- and we met each other on campus during the summer of 2013. I had seen him walking near the beach on lunch breaks, and I thought he was cute, so I walked up to him one day during lunch and introduced myself! He was so friendly and he offered to help me out with my first financial journals since I had just entered my first finance-based position on campus. That was his big pick-up line--"Let me know if you need help with financial journals someday, I can help you!" Haha.

My last trip to Disneyland was in December 2010. Yup, it'll be exactly 10 years between visits. I have a lot of catching up and research to do!! Overall, our goals for our honeymoon will be to try all the snacks, go on a few rides (neither of us are huge fans about going on rides), soak up the ambiance, and enjoy our time together. :)

We have a few furry pets, including Stitch, Figaro, and Slinky.
Stitch is my little orange rascal:
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Figaro is a my fluffy gray baby:
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and Slinky is our doggie- this was his recent Christmas picture:


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TRIP DETAILS:
We do not have the dates firmed up yet, however we'd like to visit for 3 nights in early December. I'm eyeing Tuesday, December 1 through Friday, December 4 or maybe Monday, December 7 through Thursday, December 10. We'd like to visit on weekdays to avoid crowds.
We plan to stay in a standard room at the Grand Californian Hotel, which is stinkin pricey!!! But the location can't be beat, the theming is beautiful, and for this once-in-a-lifetime occasion, we'll do it.

We are debating between buying a vacation package on the Disneyland website (just room and tickets), buying items ad-hoc on the Disneyland website, or going through Costco to buy a package. We are also trying to figure out if we should get 3-day parkhopper tickets for each of us, OR just get one of those and one of us buys a So Cal resident AP which will entitle us to the 10% discount on food and merchandise. I looked at the price difference between a 3-day park hopper ($355) versus a So Cal AP ($399- blockout dates will not impact us for this visit), so if we save over $44 with the AP discounts on food and merch, we would come out ahead. Since the discount is 10%, we'd need to spend over $440 on eligible food and merch to reach that $44 savings. I'm not sure if we will get a decent room discount w/an AP as well- I'm hoping that Disney will release some room rate discounts this fall, so maybe we can get 20% off a standard room that way?

Anyways, we have plenty of time to figure this out. We just registered with the Disney Honeymoon website last night actually, so we are hopeful that we may receive some financial support towards this trip. :)
 
I'm a UCSB alumni! Hi from a fellow Gaucho. I think your honeymoon plans sound great!!
Thanks for joining in!

I don't have many updates yet. Lately I've been watching a lot of Magic Journey/Wonderful World of Food videos on Youtube. We are going to have an extensive food wishlist since it's been SO LONG since our last visits to DL! Now we have things like MaxPass, mobile ordering, etc to learn about!

I am also wondering exactly how many nights we should stay. Initially I was thinking about 3 nights, but now I'm wondering if we should do 4 nights so we can really relax and take our sweet time exploring. We want to be able to meander through the parks, notice details, and soak it all in. Neither of us are huge fans of rides, but I want to try to go on some rides like Splash Mountain, Winnie the Pooh (Critter Country is my favorite, esp Pooh's Corner with the honey-pot apples), and those 2 Toy Story ones I get mixed up- Toy Story Midway Mania and Buzz Lightyear's Space Rangers.

We will probably get into more active planning after our wedding in June. :D
 
Thanks for joining in!

I don't have many updates yet. Lately I've been watching a lot of Magic Journey/Wonderful World of Food videos on Youtube. We are going to have an extensive food wishlist since it's been SO LONG since our last visits to DL! Now we have things like MaxPass, mobile ordering, etc to learn about!

I am also wondering exactly how many nights we should stay. Initially I was thinking about 3 nights, but now I'm wondering if we should do 4 nights so we can really relax and take our sweet time exploring. We want to be able to meander through the parks, notice details, and soak it all in. Neither of us are huge fans of rides, but I want to try to go on some rides like Splash Mountain, Winnie the Pooh (Critter Country is my favorite, esp Pooh's Corner with the honey-pot apples), and those 2 Toy Story ones I get mixed up- Toy Story Midway Mania and Buzz Lightyear's Space Rangers.

We will probably get into more active planning after our wedding in June. :D
4 nights because more is always better. :-)

I love that Magic Journey YouTube channel!
 


Well, we have settled on the dates for our visit! We will stay at the GCH from Monday, November 30 through Friday, December 4. Yeah! I'm hoping we will get a good promo, maybe 20% or 25% off a standard room during those dates as we near fall.

We each decided to buy Southern California Select Passport's at the current $399/yr price. This will help us spread out the cost over the year, and the pass will activate once we go to the parks, so it will be valid for 1 year from then in case we want to plan return trips during 2021.

The crazy thing is that I bought a Premium Annual Pass back around 2009-2010 for $400!! The same price as what I can get for the lowest-level AP now!! Isn't that wild? In only 10 years, they've jacked up the prices a lot. Also, I looked back through my Facebook and found pictures from an old visit to Club 33 (my dad's employer at the time was able to get us access) in March 2009:

Our waiter reminded me of Cameron from Modern Family:
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And from the last visit with my Mom and Dad in December 2010 (sorry, blurry picture!):
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Ta-ta for now!
 
YAY! You'll get to see DL in all of its Christmas decorations! That's going to be so much fun!
 
Surprise, surprise! Andy and I have become obsessed with planning for Disneyland, and we decided to add in a trip for my birthday this year. We will visit from Monday, April 27 - Thursday, April 30. My actual bday is Friday, May 1, but it's going to be busy in the parks that day (Grad Night I think), and we prefer quieter days with smaller crowds. We will still visit in December for our honeymoon, but now our 'Disney countdown' is shorter!

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Yeah, yeah!!

This morning I was thinking about all the old trip reports that I used to read when I was more active (er, lurked more often) on the boards. I used to read LurkyLoo, and there was also a nice couple that drank a LOT at the Food & Wine Festival- the wife wrote the reports, and they were hilarious. I don't remember her username though. I recently caught up on Taylor (TayAllTheWay) and Tracy- I remmber when they were moving out to Anaheim, and I didn't know they had moved back to Boulder. One of my favorite TR's is FranAndAJ- and they keep writing reports, yeah!

Anyways, this honeymoon PTR will likely become intercepted with our birthday trip- hope that's alright with ya'll!
 


Time for a mini-trip update! Andy and I are less than 60 days out from my birthday trip. We hit the 60 day mark on Thursday, 2/27, so I booked the Tangled Tea at Steakhouse 55 at the Disneyland Hotel for our arrival date, Tuesday 4/27 at 1:40PM. I am pretty excited about the tea, although it means we'll have to leave our home earlier than planned to get to Anaheim by then. We do not plan to make other ADR's. We want to take a relaxed, see how we feel approach to the park meals.

I also bought a few Disney t-shirts to wear at the parks. We both got Pizza-Planet themed shirts, and the matching Carl & Ellie shirts. I also got a Disney Cat Lady one, lol. We will wait until we arrive at the parks for Andy to pick out a lanyard, and of course to activate our AP's, hah.

Each day we tell each other the countdown until our DL trip. :) 56 days!!
 
Hi all- Well, I last left off on March 2, 2020 before everything hit the fan with COVID. Wow, a lot has happened since then.

We ended up getting married via Zoom in our backyard on our original wedding date, June 5, 2020. We re-scheduled our in-person Santa Barbara Courthouse ceremony with family, and we actually had this celebration on May 7, 2021. We got two weddings out of Covid, yahoo! Below is a picture from the Courthouse ceremony.
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My brother-in-law and nieces wanted to visit Disneyland shortly after the April 30, 2021 reopening, and my sister asked me to accompany them. I was hesitant to go, but my husband and I decided to go for our FIRST trip to Disneyland together, and both of our first visits in over 11 years! My husband and I drove down a day early, then we surprised my nieces (my brother in law was in on the surprise) when they showed up at the parks! We spent May 20, 2021 together in Disneyland. The kids were so rambunctious and full of energy- I couldn't keep up with them, and I had to briefly leave for a work Zoom commitment from 4-5. I was spent by the evening, and the walk to-and-from the Residence Inn at the Convention Center stunk after a long day in the parks.

From DCA- we took PhotoPass pictures! Each day we wore matching couples t-shirts (so cheesy but I honestly loved it), and matching themed-ears. On this day, we wore Up shirts and ears:
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Now, my husband and I are planning a potential Halloween-time visit to the parks! We'd like to go in mid-September when the hotel rates are good. We could attend the Oogie Boogie Bash on a Tuesday which has the best party ticket price, and then we'll get 2-day park hoppers for the following park days (Weds/Thurs). We want to stay at a hotel across from the DL entrance, such as the new Hilton Garden Inn.

However, we've had a really awful diagnosis in the family. My father-in-law was diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer in October 2020. He went through 2 full rounds of chemo, and he just started a third round in June before deciding to stop all treatment. None of the chemo was successful in stopping the cancer growth, which was already in both his lungs and in his liver before treatment begun. We were concerned that it had spread to his brain but that didn't happen, thank god. Recently his doctor said he may have weeks-to-months left, and that his decline will be very quick when it happens. So right now we are hesitant to schedule another visit such as the September one mentioned above. But- planning this trip, talking about it, watching YouTube vlogger videos, thinking about the food and fun we'll have...this is what gives my husband joy and something to look forward to right now. So we'll keep planning as if this trip will occur but we know there's a chance everything may go south beforehand.

Oh, we still want to do the honeymoon in December and stay at the Grand Californian if all goes well. WHATTA YEAR!
 
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