And to that I would ask, why would someone drop thousands of dollars on a once in a lifetime trip and also not do research before they go?
Respectfully that's I think where people are talking over each other. It's a tried and true argument that people use over the years. No one would debate you have to look up things about your destination but when you're only using that argument you're failing (and I say this with no hint of rudeness) to capture what is being discussed.
It's not that I'm saying don't research for your trip, I'm saying what I'm having to research is on another level than most would agree is necessary...for a theme park and it's complicated, confusing, a lot to absorb and when you have a large learning curve borders on ridiculous.
Of course I'm going to look up Tokyo
Disneyland because that's how I am, but does that mean I won't find it difficult to grasp, plan and utilize their system? And that's the point that gets so glossed over in these discussions. We, here, take for granted what it's like out there for people without such vast knowledge and often many trips under our belt.
To me, that would be like paying thousands of dollars to travel to Europe but then not taking the time to learn how public transit works, how far my hotel is from the attractions I want to go to, or even looking up reviews on restaurants I might want to go to and waiting until I am already there and trying to learn on the fly. Not only does that sound stressful, but also would take away from my enjoyment while I am there because I am on my phone reading yelp reviews and struggling to understand things in a different language.
To touch on this......that's a bit what we're doing in a few months. No I'm not saying we're going in blind we've done a TON of research but working on train schedules means we have a lot of "on the fly" stuff. We don't know when we're going to arrive in Ghent, Belgium after we stay in London, England because we don't know when we'll be finished with things in London.
We don't know when we'll arrive in Kronberg, Germany after leaving Luxembourg City, Luxembourg because we don't know if we'll opt to stop in Trier, Germany in addition to Cochem, Germany.
I don't have a clue what restaurants we're going to eat in because it's really hard to plan all that. The most I've done is looking at Krongberg, Germany for what restaurants are available in that tiny town.
We did try to strategically place our hotel in the various cities we'll be in to a point but you can only do so much.
Despite what you might say there's actually a vast amount of our trip that is on the fly even with all the research we've done because that's how it has to be with dealing with using trains that take you from country to country and city to city.
This is the same for our Japan trip that is also train reliant. We've looked up the cities we want to go to, the sites we want to see but again a lot of it is up in the air.
I agree with understanding how does public transit works similar to figuring out that at MK you arrive by bus, ferry or monorail (unless you're within walking distance and choose to do that). But the level of planning down to the hour/minute, the ADR reservations people make, etc is actually very much more present in Disney than any of my trips have ever been. Even our European cruise and stay over in Venice and Athens was less to the minute planning than Disney.
