Category Archives: Trip Reports

10 Days in October: Day 2

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Good morning, Florida!

Against the advice of all pundits we slept in this morning – after all, we had endured a lengthy travel day and a late check-in. We’d survive.

First on the agenda this morning was a trip to the lobby to get the park tickets we’d purchased through Undercover Tourist added to our room keys.  Then it was off to the Mara, the Animal Kingdom Lodge’s quick-service food location.  We purchased refillable mugs, made a concoction of coffee and hot chocolate (about the only way to suffer through the Nescafe that Disney sadly insists upon selling throughout WDW), and grabbed a couple muffins to eat while we got dressed.  By 9:30, it was off to the bus stop.

Hello, soul-crushing bus line!

This is the point at which we want to cue the sound of a record scratch. All feelings of first-day giddiness came to a screeching halt upon seeing the bus line. Isn’t this supposed to be the low season, I thought?  We joined the masses and felt a surge of hope when the Magic Kingdom bus pulled up, but those good feelings were quickly dashed by the line-cutters and those who legitimately had waited longer than us who then piled on and quickly filled the bus. Eventually we squeezed onto the second Magic Kingdom bus – does know one know what “move back” means? It’s really easy to tell that most people don’t use buses regularly outside of their Disney vacations – commuter etiquette was not in play this October morning.

In any case, we finally got moving and were let off outside the Magic Kingdom by 10:45 a.m. So, our first Disney morning wasn’t off to the quickest of starts, but hey, we were finally there, right?

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Our 10-day October Extravaganza: Day 1

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Ah, departure day. The BEST day of vacation.

Our departure day was on a Thursday, so CP and I both took the day off from work, as our travel plans were a bit convoluted. Door-to-door, our travel would take almost a full day.

Sound crazy? Well, it is, a bit. Where we live in Connecticut you have a few options for flying:

a)Fly out of Hartford (BDL), which is 1. sometimes very expensive 2. offers far fewer nonstop flights and 3. at the time had no JetBlue service (my favorite airline – somehow having a tv to watch during takeoff and landing distracts me from the thought of plummeting five miles out of the sky).

b) Fly out of JFK or LGA, which would mean either taking the MetroNorth commuter train to Grand Central, and then taking either a shuttle or a loooong subway/AirTrain ride to the airport. Conversely, we could take  an overpriced shuttle from where we live to either airport.

c) Fly out of Newark airport. To get to EWR, take aforementioned expensive shuttle, or take Amtrak directly to the airport.

We chose option “C.” Sort of. JetBlue flights out of Newark were cheap and nonstop.  Amtrak fare was pretty reasonable, although we had to make a brief stop at Penn Station in NYC to change trains. For our return trip, however, fares TO Newark were ridiculous, so we decided to fly back into LGA and take a shuttle home. That is until JetBlue canceled our flight and rebooked us on one that left several hours earlier, thereby eliminating day 10 of our 10-day extravaganza. With one call to JetBlue, I rebooked us, for free, on a flight that left Orlando at the same time as our original flight, except it arrived at JFK. I even found a not-too-ridiculously priced shuttle home. Sold.

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Our 10-day October Extravaganza Trip: Introduction

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The idea for our October trip was born sometime during the sultry, humid days of last summer. I think we were feeling a bit stir crazy, a bit too chained to our desks and confined to the house in the air conditioning at night. We were a few months off our incredibly successful April family trip, and I can’t remember which one of us had the itch first, but oh, did we have the itch.  It also didn’t hurt that I possessed both a) a highly sought-after Disney PIN code (What’s a PIN code, you ask? Read this.) for free dining, and b) knowledge of an upcoming 40% off (!) room-only discount at deluxe Disney hotels. So, a game of Disney discount roulette began. When to go? Where to stay? Which discount to use? Which discount would save us more money?

Originally we began planning to book a December trip. In fact, we *did* book a December trip (everything except the airfare, that is. Good decision!).  And then I started to feel….weird about it. December was shaping up to be a busy time at work. I don’t exactly love to fly, and wasn’t thrilled about the idea of airport delays or cancellations or de-icing procedures.  Granted I had always (and still do!) wanted to see Disney at the holidays, but for some reason it just didn’t feel right.  I tweaked. I tinkered. I moved our days slightly, and then panicked when I realized I had lost all of our dining reservations and it was impossible to get new ones in our new week.

So, well, we kind of said to heck with it. Let’s not going in six months, let’s go in three months!  It turned about to be a good plan – the discounts worked out better, we could attend the Food and Wine Festival, and neither of us would face much difficulty getting out of work for seven days. Because yes, my friends, this was to be a trip of epic proportions, ten days of eating and drinking and riding rides and taking photos and not checking work e-mail. Go big or go home, that was our motto.

Once again, we did the Disney discount math.  We eventually decided on the Animal Kingdom Lodge. We splurged a tiny bit for a pool view. Both of us were excited to book this reservation; after all, we had loved AKL in April, and this time we would have a chance to stay in the main (Jambo) building and be closer to the food and the action. We decided against the dining plan (too much food, too expensive, vegetarians can’t really get their money’s worth, etc), but booked a lot of good meals.

What can we learn from this? Well, spreadsheets are your best friend. Before deciding whether or not to buy the dining plan (regular or deluxe version), I actually figured out by hand the cost of each meal we intended to eat, so as to compare the out-of-pocket cost to the cost of each dining plan:

Ultimately, we decided that neither the regular nor deluxe dining plans offered us the savings or flexibility we were looking for. I can’t tell you how many hours I tinkered with the above spreadsheet, but it was in the long run completely worth it.

Your game of Disney discount roulette will depend greatly upon what discounts are available and at which resort(s) you intend to stay.  It’s worth calling a few Disney reservations employees and having them run different scenarios for you. For us, a 40% room discount outweighed the value of free dining, but for others – especially with larger families – free dining could be worth its weight in gold.

Lastly, I think it’s worth mentioning here (although I’ll subsequently discuss it in more detail, I’m sure) that we did not rent a car. This came back to haunt us. At the time, though, CP in particular was enamored with the idea of being sort of benevolently trapped on Disney property, forced to enjoy the magic 24/7. Well, let’s just say that fantasy was short-lived. We are now committed car-renters, and this nerd advocates that you should be, too.

Up next: Day one of our ten-day odyssey.

In which the nerds visit WDW with an entourage

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The plan for our April, 2010 trip was hatched shortly after we returned from our trip in 2008. This time, however, the nerds would have an entourage. Although the plans weren’t formalized until February, 2010, it was decided that this would be a family trip. In attendance, besides CP and me, were my grandparents, aunt, and youngest cousin, T. The trip was planned to coincide with T’s cheerleading world championship, which was held the last week in April at Disney’s Wide World of Sports.

Since returning from our 2008 trip I had become something of a WDW trip planning savant. I had spent countless hours (days, weeks, months?) reading guide books, websites, and message boards, making spreadsheets and creating custom touring plans, and I wasn’t shy in sharing my opinions. Several marathon planning phone calls with my grandparents ensued, and I lobbied them into staying at a different DVC than they at first might have chosen. Since five of the six on our trip were women, a 2-bedroom, 3-bathroom (hallelujah!) villa at the Animal Kingdom Lodge would provide the most space for the fewest number of DVC points. They were convinced, if a bit dubious. Would it be a good decision?

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On seeing Disney again…for the first time…again.

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By July, 2008, CP and I needed a serious break from the drudgery of daily life. We were done. It was time to go. The only thing to figure out, then, were the logistics.

Let’s just say that during this period neither CP nor I were flush with cash. We were both in (or had recently dropped out of) grad school, the economy was tanking, and we had for several months been attending to a series of family issues that had sapped us of both energy and funds. In spite of these things, we were determined. The wheels in my head started spinning, and we decided to take a kill-two-birds kind of trip to Florida – we would first visit my mother on Florida’s east coast, and then we would drive to WDW, stay in a DVC studio courtesy of my grandparents, and find ways to have a cheap yet enjoyable vacation.

The plan worked reasonably well, with a few exceptions. First, I had perhaps suffered a bout of amnesia at some point, since I had clearly forgotten in the time following my employment at WDW that August in Florida offers breathtakingly horrible weather conditions. Hot, humid, and stormy – the trifecta. This might not have given us much pause, but I had also never in my adult life been in charge of planning a full trip; thus, I was unfortunately ignorant of the need to get up early to beat both the crowds and the heat. Thus, we spent many mornings sleeping in, and many afternoons in the parks fighting both crowds and ridiculously hot and humid conditions. We also didn’t eat particularly well (save a fantastic meal at the California Grill), both on account of the heat and our desire to keep it a cheap trip.

Our splurge meal of the week...dinner at the California Grill.

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