Still trying to find a magical way to make time move faster. So far, no luck.

In any case, CP and I embark on our September trip in less than a month.  Once you hit the 30 day mark in a countdown, the trip starts to feel real. I’ve even started my soft packing, stashing away goods (mostly from the trial size aisle at Target) I’ll need when I start really packing early next month.

This trip has really come together nicely, and if all goes well, it might prove to be our best trip yet. Here’s a quick overview of the plans as they exist today:

-Our trip will span 12 days, with 10 full days in WDW, a mostly full day on our arrival day, and a morning departure on the 12th day. The first three nights we’ll spend at the Contemporary (with a Magic Kingdom view, for my birthday!), and the last eight we’ll spend staying club level at the BoardWalk.

-I’m thinking of concentrating our first three days at the Magic Kingdom and Epcot, so that we can best take advantage of the Contemporary’s close proximity to the Magic Kingdom, as well as the easy access we’ll have to the monorail.

-Our first three days at the Contemporary I booked as part of a package. This is our first package stay, and our first time trying the dining plan. The deluxe dining plan, in fact.  After countless hours playing around with dining scenarios and calculating relative costs, I’ve decided we’re going to use our dining credits primarily on signature dinners, and then round out our meals with 1-credit breakfast, lunches, and dinners that provide the best bang for the buck. For those of you who really like details, here’s the final dining roster for our first three days (well, technically it’s four days, since the dining credits will expire at midnight the first night we’ll be staying at the BoardWalk):

• Dinner at Jiko
• Dinner at the California Grill
• Dinner at Le Cellier
• Breakfast at The Wave
• Lunch at Tutto Italia
• Dinner at Les Chefs de France

-We’ll be attending our first Mickey’s Not-So-Scary Halloween Party, and are debating what costumes, if any, we might wear for the occasion.  There is a strange part of me that really is excited to dress up, but an equal part that is terrified of overheating on a hot, humid September night.

-We’ll also be attending a Tomorrowland Terrace Dessert Party. We’ve done this once before and weren’t over-the-moon about it, but there’s something to be said for tasty desserts, reserved fireworks seating, and crowd avoidance, especially with the off-season price for the party.  If we aren’t wowed this time, it might be our last dessert party.

-We’ll be taking not one but two backstage tours – Keys to the Kingdom at the Magic Kingdom, and the Undiscovered Future World tour at Epcot. The former is a wildly popular tour; the latter, I’m not so sure. In fact, when I called the BoardWalk IPO (itinerary planning office) to book the tours, the Cast Member who helped me said it was her first time booking this tour for anyone. We shall see.

-On our arrival day, we’ll head straight from MCO to this restaurant for lunch. Then we’ll head to the Orlando Premium Outlets to do a little shopping, including a stop at the Disney outlet to search for some discounted pins or other merchandise. After that, we’ll make a quick trip to Target and Whole Foods for any food/sundries we’ll want for the trip, and then we’ll head to the Contemporary to check-in. All this is to say, after our arrival day my hope is that we won’t have to venture much (if at all) off of Disney property for eleven days.  With mounting work stresses and several months of going at a breakneck pace, I think we’ll both be happy to be in the Disney bubble and out of the real world as much as possible.

-Things left to do before our trip: book PhotoPass (like the dining plan, another first for us that we’ll be giving a trial run), pay off our BoardWalk reservation, figure out the costume question.  As I said – this trip has really come together!