Customs and More

In between advanced dining reservations and fastpass+ selection, there is quite a bit of waiting lol. Once you get your dining reservations done I would suggest starting to order any custom made shirts you would like. I dropped the ball on this part of my planning. I did manage to get one custom shirt for our trip, but I plan to do much better our second trip. I used Etsy to find shirts I liked and then favorited them so I could easily find them. Part of the reason I ended up dropping the ball on custom shirts is because I thought closer to our trip there would be more Christmas Disney shirts...I was wrong. If you are new to ordering custom shirts, especially on Etsy, it can take a minimum of 6 weeks just to ship. I do plan to show more detail of things once we get back, so with that said I will not be posting a picture of the shirt I got for Maddy.

The next thing I had to figure out was the stroller situation. Maddy is tall for her age, and has outgrown all of her strollers. I searched for a stroller that could accommodate her height and weight for what seemed like forever. I did find some online, but they were all around $250. I am not paying that much money for a one time use. I ended up going with a rental company in Florida that carried a stroller that met our needs. For the stroller and insurance it was just a little over $100 for our entire stay. They even give you the option of getting a cooler and rain cover for free. They deliver to Disney resorts, so it is there waiting on you when you arrive and at the end of your trip you take it to the hotel bell stand and they will come and pick it back up. I will also be updating on this once we get back and will give you more details of the company I used and will give my review.

I am hoping to do a what I packed video soon, but if I don't get to make it before we go I will either do one when we get back or just talk briefly in a post what we took. Once you make it to this point all you can really do is wait. You can start making lists of things you may need to do or get prior to your vacation.

Planning Phase II

Now that you've booked your reservations, you can begin planning other aspects of your trip. If you are staying at a Disney resort, 180 days away from your vacation you can begin making dining reservations. If you are wanting to dine at Be Our Guest for dinner it is a must to be online and ready to click submit the minute they open. These reservations go fast and often even at 180 days away are already booked. I completely forgot to do this when our 180 day mark hit and I was SO upset! After a bunch of googling I found a way to get a fastpass for lunch. It is not advertised very well at all and I'm sure that's done for a reason. I believe since it is a fastpass it will only work 30 days away from your vacation, but don't hold me to that. The site is: https://beourguestlunch.disney.go.com/ I was able to book mine the same month I left for vacation.

If you are not staying on Disney property I am not sure how the dining reservations work, What I do know is you can google it and find out those answers. I will probably post all our reservations in a different post once we are back. 

Making dining reservations may sound easy, but it was no easy task for me. There are so many restaurants to choose from and trying to narrow it down to our vacation days was extremely hard. We worked on our dining reservations one full Saturday and only got lunch and dinners planned for two days. We wanted to have reservations to cut down on wait times. I recommend reservations if you have kids because they are already going to be exhausted from all the excitement of being in Disney, I am sure come dinner time they will be quite grumpy and not willing to wait very long for food. 

The next exciting thing to plan for is your fastpass+. If you are staying on Disney property you get 3 fastpasses per person per day I think it is. You can start choosing your fastpasses 30 days in advance. These go quick, so make sure you plan out what rides you want fastpasses for each day prior to the 30 day mark, If you get a fastpass for Be Our Guest, it does not count as one of your fastpasses. We were able to get fastpasses for everything we selected. 

I think this is all for dining and fastpass+ reservations. I think this phase is fun. It can be time consuming, but it helps keep the excitement level at bay :)

Planning a Walt Disney World Vacation

I know there are a lot of YouTube videos on planning a Disney vacation, and I'm sure there are some blogs out there as well. I thought I would go ahead and share how I planned our vacation. I have been to Disney a few times, but was never in charge of the whole nine yards. I actually started planning for our trip in August 2013. Disney is out of my budget, so I needed a lot of time to save. Planning has felt very overwhelming. There is a lot to consider. I'm going to try to break this down the best I can.

Step 1 is to decide when you want to go. Everybody is different and everybody's schedules are different. Some people have flexible schedules while others may not. For our trip I could pretty much go whenever I wanted, so I did not have a lot to factor in. I had two time periods I was trying to decide between. While trying to decide when to go I stumbled upon a crowd sheet. I have no idea how I found it, but it tells you the most crowded times and the least crowded times. Here is what that looks like:

For most of our trip the chart showed light crowds. One of the times we wanted to go was considered not a peak time, while the other time was. Something else I looked up was when the best time to go to Disney World was. The results were September, October, and November. With everything I looked up we just kind of pieced together an ideal week to go. We contacted a few travel agencies to get quotes on a resort we really wanted to stay at, but it was way over the budget. We had to let go of our ideal room and move to a resort other people we knew really liked. 

Along with figuring out when you want to go, you will need to figure out what your budget is. Prior to making your reservations you will also need to decide if you want to include any of the dining plans. I found that some people really liked the dining plans while others did not. As a first timer I thought it would be a great idea to purchase a dining plan. I purchased the deluxe dining plan that gives you 3 table/quick service meals that include an appetizer and dessert as well, and 2 snack credits. At the time of purchasing I did not know how much the plan was a person. It wasn't until I started researching it that I found it was $100 for adults and I think $29 for kids. While we are there I plan on tallying up my totals to see if it was worth the money to purchase the plan, or if it is cheaper to not purchase. Sometimes you can get the dining plan for free, but if you get free dining then you are not eligible for any room discounts. 

Other factors to consider are how you plan on getting there. Do you plan on flying or driving? This question was not answered right away for me. I really wanted to fly to maximize our time in the parks, but flying out of my town is really expensive. After looking online for a few days my mom found a great deal and just like that it was decided we would fly.  The last thing I can think of to consider are how do you want to tell your kids or family they will be going to Disney for vacation. Do you want to surprise them? If so, how? When should you tell them? I will talk more about what I did in another post. 

This concludes the initial planning/reserving stage. I may have missed something, but for now this is all I can think of. Google and Pinterest have been my best friend in the planning stage. I will have a few more Disney posts that will be coming :)

Jeremiah 29:11