I am back

Ok- I just made an early new years resolution for myself I am going to attempt to keep up with this blog. I love Disney and I am always thinking about it at some point in my day so why not share a quick story or tip or piece of planning info each day. My goal when I started this blog is to help other families enjoy their vacations to Disney as much as my family enjoys ours which is a lot! As people read my posts I would love for them to comment any questions they have and if I have any answers I will most defiantly share them with you. Also if there are any topics you are especially curious about please let me know those too because I can certainly do a post about specific questions people have. Looking forward to a year filled with Disney information

Schedule Underway

So this past weekend my husband and sat down and began planning out our tentative schedule for the big October Disney Trip. We are figuring out mostly what parks we will go to when so we can decide when to eat at the restaurants we want to go to so that it makes sense with our schedule. The first thing we usually do is go through the restaurants and decide where we want to eat and then from there we plug them into the schedule where they make sense. It is good to have a variety of place like try not to pick all Epcot restaurants and when you are looking at resort restaurants think about how long it could take to get to that restaurant and if you think you want to take that much time out of your day for dinner. We usually stick to resorts on the monorail if we are going to a resort restaurant. That is just a little bit of the process- I will talk more about this when we finish our scedule

Hours

Finally the hours are up for our October trip- well most of the hours. I checked on July 1st nothing. Then I checked back on July 2nd and the hours for Magic Kingdom and Hollywood studios were up, but nothing for Animal Kingdom or Epcot I thought it was strange. I went back again to Disney's site on July 3rd and they had posted the rest of the hours for our trip, but not all of the extra magic hour days and nothing was listed for the World Showcase part of Epcot. Today when I looked everything is up except World Showcase hours. The next step now in our planning is to plug the hours into our Excell planning worksheet and decide what our general schedule will be what parks we want to go to when and then plug our dining into that so when we hit the 90 day mark we can make our dining reservations. I know I have mentioned earlier in the blog that Disney has made it so you can book dining reservations online which we are looking forward to trying out. I will let you know when we make our general schedule I think our 90 day mark to do our dining is July 17th or so.

The waiting game

We are anxiously awaiting Disney to put up the hours for October so that we can begin making our schedule for our trip. We can book our dining in Mid-July so we want to figure out where we will be which days so that we know what days we want to eat where because as soon as you can book your dining you want to book so that you are able to get all the restaurants you want. Certain restaurants are harder to get into so we always book those first. The two hardest that we like to eat at are Cinderella's Royal Table (also known as CRT) and Le Cellier which is in Canada in the Epcot World Showcase.

One thing we are excited about is that Disney just launched online Dining reservation making on their site. We will definitely be trying this out. It looks like it might be a little time consuming, but when you do it on the phone it also takes awhile. I will be sure to write about the experience. I will say I am a little nervous about how the new system is going to affect the availability of reservations- we will just have to wait and see!

All Ears....

This morning I have spent just purusing the all ears site to just see what all will be going on while we are at Disney in October and just seeing if there is anything else we do not know that might help us in our vacation planning. The biggest thing going on that we have never experienced is the Epcot Food and Wine festival. We are looking forward to this event. The past two vacations we have taken to Disney World the Epcot Flower and Garden Festival has been going on and we have really enjoyed that. I do not even think we scrapped the surface of what there is to do during the festival, but it has still been fun. We have never done Flower Power Concert which goes on during the flower and Garden festival. There are also concerts during the wine festival and I am thinking that we might try to go to one this time. There is so much to do at Disney that you will never be able to do it all in one trip. Although if you plan it right you can do a lot. We call Disney our Adventure Vacation because we stay so busy while we are there. If you want a nice peaceful relaxing vacation Disney is just not that- I think instead you will feel very frustrated at the amount of money you paid if you sleep in late and spend a majority of your time at your hotel or pool.

We go to the beach to relax and we go to Disney to Have FUN!

Have a Magical Day!

Something my Husband and I have always looked forward to when talking to the Disney Travel Company people was at the end of the conversation as they were about to hang up they would say "Have a Magical day!"  Over the past year or two they have started to not say it every time and we have missed it.  While changing our reservation for our past trip we had a Cast member named Blair who went above and beyond what we expected from her.  She was extremely helpful with everything.  She did her best to find an answer to our questions.  She even told us to have a magical day as we wee getting off.  I tell this story because after we got off the phone with her my husband decided to send Disney an e-mail telling her how helpful Blair was and that he hoped she would get some recognition for her hard work.  When we got back from our trip there was a message from Disney saying that they appreciated the time we took to tell them about Blair and her hard work, and that she would be receiving recognition for a job well done.  

The Disney Cast members are almost always very helpful.  It means a lot when you get one who really and truly goes above and beyond to make your trip more magical!

Food, Parties and More

I have spent a little time this afternoon trying to get what info I can about things that are going on while we are at Disney that come into play with our scheduling.  I have looked up the Not-so-scary Halloween party dates and there is also a Tower of Terror night time 13k and 5k race going on October 24th the Saturday after we plan to leave.  The Food and Wine Festival will also be going on at Epcot while we are on our trip.  We have never been to it before.  We will probably look into checking it out.  I will need to look into it further a different day.

I have also been looking at Menus and trying to decide where we want to eat on this trip to Disney.  This is definitely one of the fun parts of the vacation planning.  We have always done the Disney Dining Plan when we go.  Sometimes we have been able to get it free and other times we just pay for it.  One thing to note be prepared for lots of food when you do the dining plan.  We like to at least try a new restaurant every trip we take to WDW.  This past time we tried several new restaurants and found some new favorites.  Garden Grill is a new one we tried that we will definitely be going back to.  I have been looking for a new character breakfast for our trip in October.  We usually do Chef Mickey's but we just wanted to try something different on our upcoming trip.  The breakfasts I am looking at right now are Cape May Cafe and the O'hana breakfast.  We also want to try a different dinner- we are considering Coral Reef, The Wave and maybe Kouzzina (Cat Cora's new restaurant) we will just have to wait and see if it is open when we go they have not released a opening date for it yet.  I will be sure to let everyone know what our final dining choices end up being.

Planning....

We have the trip booked now the next step is we like to get the park hours so we can start figuring out when we want to schedule our dining reservations.  We used to be able to do all this as soon as our trip was booked but Disney has changed some things around.  First of all you used to could book your dining 180 day out and now it is just 90 days which for this trip is better since we booked it closer to the actual trip dates as we have in the past it will mean we can still get the reservations we want.  Also the park Hours are not available as soon as they used to be.  I just check this afternoon hoping that I would be able to start filling in our schedule for October, but they are not posted yet :( I will just have to keep checking back periodically.  They should be available before the 9o day mark when I can book our dining.  My husband and I just get anxious about making our schedule after we have trip booked it is just a fun part of the whole trip experience we like to do to together.

Booking Our Next Trip to WDW

We have already booked our next trip to WDW!  While we there this past week we received a bounce back deal at our resort.  We had already been talking about going for Madalyn's fall break in October with our friends the Douglas' and as sort of a celebration for my 3oth Birthday which will be two weeks before our trip.  The deal we got was 30% off a moderate or Deluxe resort of 40% off some of DVC Villas.  we decided to book at  the Port Orleans French Quarter which is where we stayed this past week.  We did some price comparisons and decided it made the most sense.  We are still just not in the room enough to pay the extra money for a deluxe that is not on the monorail.  The Bus transportation just has always seemed better at our Moderate resorts than the times we have tried to go on a bus from a deluxe resort.  We are excited only 5 Months till our next WDW trip!  Now onto figuring out our schedule and dining reservations.