A Disney December with a side of USO, DC & NYC

[lffam]

I have been enjoying reading some of the pre trip and trip reports here so I thought I would write one also. I started a planning thread over at the Aussie boards, but am now quite well developed in the final bookings I thought a Pre-trip report here would suit well and get a wider variety of views on things.


I thought I would start with the Who, the Where and the Why...


The Who


DH, DW, DS(12) from Australia. Pictures from WDW 2013

We have had two prior Disney experiences, one in 2010 at Disneyland and in 2013 at Walt Disney World (trip report for WDW in signature). Both experiences for us as a family were magical, and we definitely enjoyed the Disney bubble . Our Disneyland experience in 2010 was onsite at the Grand Californian Villas which we rented DVC points. WDW in 2013 we stayed at the Wilderness Lodge, not in the villas.

We really did not know what to expect at WDW, as only had Disneyland to compare. We read as much as we could but we had trouble fathoming the size of WDW and traveling 20 mins from resort to park. Dining was something else quite different, or at least the emphasis on ADR's and the amount of dining locations.
We got “free dining” for our dates so really got into the dining and ADRs which is obviously as big part of WDW.

I (DH) am the most avid of the fan’s in the family. I do most of the planning and research and yes I do love it, a feeling which I know many of you here completely understand. That's not to say DW & DS are not fans they are, they just let me do my planning thing chip in where they like and leave the rest to me. We are the type of travellers who finds balance between a schedule and just "winging it”. We have some parts really planned and usually make it to most of those, but if we don’t we don’t stress to much about it, we are on holidays after all !! If something new or different catches our eye or we want to take some chill out time then we do so.


The Where

Well this holiday is most definitely Disney Centric. I titled my thread “Disney December” and when you see the itinerary you will see why. In 2013 we experienced the beginning of Christmas in the WDW. We started there at Halloween and had MNSSHP on Halloween itself, and then through to early Christmas in the park. That was a great experience, especially Halloween for us. This time we will be there early December so Christmas should be in full swing.

We did start out with the idea of a White Christmas somewhere. Various twists, turns and reasons then morphed that idea into this itinerary :

- Brisbane to Los Angeles 30 Nov
- 6 Nights Disney Grand Californian Villas
- 4 nights at Universal Studios Orlando
- 8 nights at WDW Boardwalk Villas
- 1 night Cape Canaveral
- 7 night Cruise on Disney Fantasy - Christmas Cruising - Disembark Boxing day
- 3 nights Washington DC
- 7 nights in New York including NYE
- 3 Nights LA
- Los Angeles to Brisbane arrive 9th Jan (lose a day)

It’s quite a long trip as you can see and we will be in Disneyland, Disneyworld or on Disney Cruise for most of December, hence my Disney December comment earlier.

The Why

Well do I really need to say anything as to why?!

This trip was borne out of my no travel blues which hit me hard at the 12 month mark after our 2013 trip. I was going back over photos , reposting pictures to Facebook, much to the chagrin of my Facebook friends. DS chipped in to help with my blues by doing a mock “plane boarding” with meal service and the inflight entertainment was watching some of the videos. This really got me reminiscing. I hadn’t written a proper trip report so this was the catalyst to do so. I went over my notes I had, the pictures and videos and some of the blog that my son had kept and made a start at writing a Trip report, some 12 months on.

If was to try to pin point what action it was that lead to me eventually booking another trip, it was this, writing the report for WDW 2013. It allowed me to remember, to share again to get feedback and questions from other Disboarders which all fed my travel itch. Within a few weeks of starting to write the report my writing was distracted and planning for a new trip begun! Within a few weeks we went from a spark of an idea to some plans which then firmed up over a few weeks.

As of today we are 110 days out from leaving. I have booked most things, but still have a few exceptions which I will get to over the next month or so.

 

[lffam]

**** I'll keep this post for an Index soon ***

 

[lffam]

So for this post I thought I would share some of my thinking preparation when it came to working out what to do first.

As i mentioned in my original post, the itinerary that we now have certainly wasn’t the first. i don’t know how many iterations there were, but I would say at least a dozen until we settled on this one. After ruling out a true White Christmas (we will have to do that another time) our main consideration was, where do we want to be for Christmas. We considered one of the parks, but thought that was likely to be the busiest time of year. We thought New York, but we didn’t really want to be in hotel room with nor one else we know around us in s strange city for Christmas and going to a restaurant for Christmas lunch/Dinner. We then thought about doing a cruise. We knew it would be busy, but it was going to be limited by the number of people on the ship. All the activities would be taken of, as would dining and it would be be Disney actually on Christmas day. We thought that was a pretty good result. There was of course one big down side, the price. The cost of the Christmas cruise was significantly more than the same cruise a couple of weeks earlier. In the end we weighed it all up , and this was our choice. Not matter what we did at Christmas it was going to be expensive, whether it be in New York Hotel rooms and dining or the Cruise. We are happy with our choice in the end.

The planning for the trip started in Late October early November of 2014. Because we knew we wanted to go for more than three weeks, we knew the only option for us was after the school year ended as we did not want to take DS out of school. He finishes a week earlier than most schools which I thought was going to help with getting flights. Speaking of flights, I was planning to use a combination of frequent flyer points and pay to get us three upgrades seats. It was all theory at that stage as I would not be able to attempt to book any flights until February 2015. I was getting my frequent flyer points balance to where it needed to be so that when the time came I could attempt. It could of course all fall in a heaps if there were not seats available but I didn’t let that stop any of the other ducks I had to get lined up in a row.

 

[lffam]

We then started looking at which resorts to stay at. We knew we wanted to stay on site. We really loved Grand Californian at Disneyland from 2010, so there was little other consideration. Something about that resort, I don’t know if it is because it was where we stayed for our first Disney experience or something else, but it is just a special place to us. We actually drew a lot of similarities between the Grand Californian to the Wilderness Lodge, where we stayed in WDW in 2013. The lobby in particular, the tall open space. We are really looking forward to going back to Grand Californian.

Where to stay at WDW was quite a dilemma. We absolutely loved the Wilderness Lodge. We would have been more than happy to go back there. But we did want to try somewhere different. We considered many resorts. I was pretty sure we were were going to rent DVC points again. just wasn’t sure with who. I couldn’t really start making enquiries as it was too far out. We considered Wilderness Lodge, Grand Floridian, Bay Lake Towers, Beach Club and last but not least Boardwalk Villas. We ended up booking Boardwalk Villas. I can’t quite recall if that was because it was on our short list and we were able to make contact with an Aussie DVC owner who could rent us points or if we decided on it first and then went looking for someone to rent off. In the end it doesn’t matter, we are very happy with our choices.

I did try to rent from a couple of brokers but none had owners who had points for either VGC or Boardwalk. So in the end we rented from two individual DVC members we found on Disboards. By Early January, which was the 11 month we had our first two confirmed and paid for bookings. The payment ws important as not only was it significantly cheaper than buying retail (as anyone who has done DVC rental knows) with the falling Australian Dollar, paying this significant part of the holiday now meant i was protected from the drop in the currency which was predicted to, and did, happen.

So at this stage the itinerary looked like this :


- Brisbane to Los Angeles 30 Nov
- 6 Nights Disney Grand Californian Villas - BOOKED.
- 4 nights at Universal Studios Orlando
- 8 nights at WDW Boardwalk Villas - BOOKED.
- 1 night Cape Canaveral
- 7 night Cruise on Disney Fantasy - Christmas Cruising - Disembark Boxing day
- 3 nights Washington DC
- 7 nights in New York including NYE
- 3 Nights LA
- Los Angeles to Brisbane arrive 9th Jan (lose a day)

Flights were still a month away from opening up.