travel dates: January 2024
Warning: I’m about to spend a lot of time talking in excruciating detail about Disney World. At least it will be excruciating to those who hate and/or have no interest in Disney World. Feel free to skip these posts, which will be interspersed with Newfoundland RVing content!
Flashback: In September, August was invited to go to Halloween Horror Nights at Universal Studios with his friend Jack. He had a great time; I was glad he got to go and that I did not have to go with him, and…it also got me started thinking about how, if my older kids can go to theme parks without me, maybe I could also go to theme parks without them.
Whoa.
When my big kids were much less big, we went to Disney a lot–every year for quite awhile. But then they got bigger, Disney got more expensive, we started wanted to branch out and see other things….by the time Abe showed up, our trips were much less frequent. We went when he was four months old and not again until he was five. And we hadn’t been back since. We nearly planned a trip for 2020, but we all know what happened then.
Disney kept getting more expensive. High school and college kid schedules kept getting more complicated. I had pretty much given up on the idea of making it back at least until all the older kids were out of the house.
But then August got to go to Universal! Abe should get to go on a fun trip, too! (and also me!) My first thought was to take him to Universal for Harry Potter stuff for his 11th birthday, which is what we did for August. But…I don’t like Universal nearly as much as Disney. And I didn’t think Abe would, either, particularly since he hasn’t had nearly as much time at Disney as his older brothers.
The original plan was that I would drive down with Abe for the week and then Dave would fly down to join us for a long weekend that included Abe’s birthday. One huge advantage to not trying to take all the kids is that we can fit in a regular old hotel room that way. Options (especially the most affordable ones) start to get limited at Disney once you hit five people, and they really get sparse when you have six. But three people?! We could fit in any hotel room at Disney World!
But also? I do like taking all my kids to Disney World. Long story short: Abe and I were the only ones who could get away for the whole week, but August ended up joining us for a few days at the beginning and Ari for a couple of days at the end, in addition to Dave being around the second half of the week. Oh, and also my brother, Sean, was there for a few days at the end (in his own hotel room)…so everyone except Milo, who was already back at college after winter break, got at least a little Disney. I’ll have to take Milo soon. HAVE TO.
The Plan
Abe’s birthday is in mid-January, which was awesome because I’ve always wanted to go to Disney World when it’s not one zillion degrees out. And it was fabulous. I loved being there in January. Temperatures ranged from a little warmer than I would have liked to downright cold, and cold was my favorite. Crowds are also relatively low in January, once you’re past the holiday rush, but it’s pretty much always at least sort of crowded at Disney World these days, and that was true on this trip. But it was fine because I was mostly resigned in advance to paying even more money to Disney for stuff like Genie+, the replacement for the old, free Fastpass system that makes me very mad about how much Disney nickel and dimes you now but also which, I have to admit, worked really well for us. If you want to learn all about Genie+ I highly recommend Ear Scouts YouTube channel. I’ve watched a lot of Disney YouTube over the past few months, and he’s my favorite.
I very briefly considered surprising Abe with this trip but I abandoned the idea quickly because 1. Abe is the sort to get anxious when things are sprung upon him and 2. I thought he might really love helping to plan. I was right about #2. He was very into the planning process and decided he wanted to try to do every attraction at Disney World (or in the four parks at least). There are a lot of attractions at Disney World. I told him we could try, but that we needed to keep having fun and being flexible as priorities over checklists. I will let you know how this part of the plan went.
The itinerary kept changing over the couple of months before the trip so that it looked kind of weird and pieced together in the end. But it worked out! Here’s the basic outline:
Friday: drive down and check into All Star Music
Saturday: move to Pop Century, skyliner hop day, dinner at Beaches and Cream
Sunday: Hollywood Studios and move to Port Orleans French Quarter: poor Gus–he was with us three nights, and every night was in a different hotel.
Monday: EPCOT then Gus flies back home
Tuesday: Magic Kingdom for me and Abe, lunch at Skipper Canteen, Dave arrives late at night
Wednesday: Abe’s birthday! Magic Kingdom, dinner at Hoop Dee Doo Revue
Thursday: Animal Kingdom, Sean arrives, dinner at Boatwright’s, Ari arrives late
Friday: EPCOT
Saturday: Hollywood Studios, lunch at Sci-fi Dine-in
Sunday: Abe and I to Magic Kingdom, then drive home
Notes here:
*All the hotel moving around happened for reasons, not just because we wanted to see so many different hotels (although that was kind of fun, too). At first I was going to drive part way Friday and the rest of the way Saturday, but then the All-star Music room was going to be just as cheap as a hotel a few hours north, so I figured we might as well push through in one day. We were going to be at Pop for the whole rest of the week, but then we found out the Skyliner was going to be down for most of the trip. So we switched to Port Orleans French Quarter, but kept the one night at Pop to get a couple of days of Skyliner-ing in (this was our first trip since it opened).
*Our first day was a non-park day because we booked a package that came with a dining gift card…but to get that deal the package couldn’t start on a Saturday….so our park tickets weren’t valid until Sunday.
*Plane tickets to and from Atlanta were SUPER cheap (like as low as $30 sometimes), which made the whole rotating cast of vacation-goers make sense.
I think that’s all I want to explain in advance before I get into the excruciatingly detailed day by day! Yay! In past Disney posts (both here and on my other blog) I’ve done more thematic, tips for planning your Disney trip kind of posts. This is going to be more straight up trip report for assorted reasons: like that there are lots of people out there going to Disney way more than I am these days and doing a great job with that kind of stuff. And that everything Disney changes so fast that such posts have a very limited shelf life. And that I just feel like writing a trip report!
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