Tickets are here..

With around four weeks to go, the tickets for our Great Mickey Adventure have arrived.  The pack contains lots of addition items such as luggage tags and helpful hints book.  This makes the holiday seem all the more real and it has raised the excitement level by a few more points.

I will have to have a read of the helpful hints book to see just how useful this actually is.  The first item we saw related to the breakfast experience at the Ankerhaus restaurant as a good way to meet all the Disney princesses without having to queue.  This has been highlighted in our research, particularly on YouTube videos. Most of these videos also recommend booking the breakfast as soon as you can as it gets booked up well ahead.  We took this advice and have already booked.  Is Disney telling us this hint only four weeks before departure really helpful?  After all we have been able to make reservations at Disney restaurants for the last five months.

The other surprise was that we are entitled to $200 Disney dollars.  We thought that this would be on the Magibands for us to spend.  It seems not.  We have a voucher, which we need to cash in at customer services at Disney Springs.  As we had not planned to go there in the first few days, selecting to go to the parks to make the most of the early opening hours because of our jet lag, we will have to wait before we can take advantage of our free Disney dollars.

Thoughts on Disney.

Writing a blog about travel makes you think about a myriad of things, raising many questions.  One that struck me was "Is going to Disney World really the actions of a free sprit traveller?"  I have to confess that I was one of these people who thought that Disney was not for me.  I was very reluctant on my first visit to Disney, but I was persuaded to go.  Now I am a complete covert. I love it, but possibly not for the reasons most people would think.  I should point out that am not big on Disney movies.

Firstly travel is about new experiences and a trip to Disney is a real experience.

There are many aspects that make a Disney holiday an experience that should not be missed.  The first thing that hits you is the scale of the place.  It is huge (47 sq miles)!  But not only is it big in area, but the whole operation is phenomenally big.  The first real impression of how big things are is when you first arrive at the car park for the parks. This is also where you first realise the organisation behind the enterprise.  There is a whole army of parking attendants to guide you to your parking bay.  The car park is so large that some of the attendants get around using Segways.  There are generally "trains" then to get you from the car park to the park entrance.

The thing that you notice next is how immaculate the parks are.  They are generally spotlessly clean. The planted areas are a mass of colour and manicured within an inch of their lives.

One of my dreads before visiting Disney was the though of queuing for hours to spend two minutes in a ride.  With a judicious use of Fastpasses and getting to the parks early keeps queuing to a minimum.  But that is only half of the story. Because of the potential length of the queues there is generally a fair trek between the ride entrance and getting on the ride, Disney has provided lots to see to on the way to build up the excitement for the attraction ahead.  The amount of thought that has gone into the whole thing is amazing.  At the end of each ride is a retail experience based around the ride (not to mention to see a photograph of you on the ride, which can be yours for a not too small fee).  The range of the merchandise available beggars belief.  It all adds to the experience.

As an engineer, I really love and appreciate the work that has gone into design, manufacture and maintenance of these rides.  My favourite engineering feat is the wave machine in Typhoon Lagoon which throws out a 5 foot wave every 90 seconds.

The different themed areas of the parks are incredible and the best example of what I mean is best illustrated by Epcot - Around the World.  This is a representation of the world according to Disney.  It is all very twee.  I have visited several of the countries (and live in one) represented and they are nothing like this Disney vision.  I don't have a problem with this as I look at it as entertainment but it is interesting to see the cliched views of these countries.

The staff in the parks are, on the whole, very friendly and helpful.  It is marketed after all as the happiest place on earth.

I am also impressed that there are people there from all over the world. In researching this trip I could not believe the number of people who have blogs completely dedicated to Disney World and who are making a living from it.

Disney may not be everyone's cup of tea, but an awful lot of people love it and as I started with it is a real experience.

Disney Dining Plan.....the saga continues

We managed to book the Rainbow Cafe at Animal Kingdom after all. The only time we could book was at 8pm, but as the park is open until 10pm that evening it is not a problem.  Now there are the other six days to go.

We ended up booking T-Rex, Nine Dragons and the Correl Reef and then left a couple of days free to play it by ear (and hopefully find somewhere).

It was amazing (to me at least) that on a Monday six weeks from now there were over 40 -Disney restaurants which were fully booked.  The essence of a Disney holiday, particularly with the Dining package is clearly to plan ahead and make the bookings as early as you can.

Frozen Parade (2015)

The Disney web-site allow multiple options for searching for restaurants of all sorts.  You can search by date and time or type of meal (breakfast, lunch or dinner).  Searching by type is a slightly better option as it will give a range of times available, which may not appear if you sea have by time alone. There a numerous filters that can be applied, these also can help narrow the options down particularly if you know which location you want to search.  The search system is a little slow at times.  Sometimes links did not work and you are greeted with a picture of Stitch with the message that someone ate this page.  We suffered a number of system not working properly type messages.  But with a little bit of persistence and quite a bit of time we got there.

Magic Kingdom Parade (2015)

There were a lot of places we would have liked to have eaten at, but hay, we are only there for two weeks and as one YouTube informed us "You can eat breakfast, lunch and dinner everyday for four months without having the same meal twice".

Past visits to see Mickey.

As the planning progresses, we spent yesterday evening looking over the video that was shot on our last visit to see Mickey in 2015. We stayed at the Riverside Resort Port Orleans.  Although not our first visit, it was the first time that we had stayed at a Disney resort.  We had a great time.  There was so much more to do and see than what had been on offer at the non-Disney hotels we had stayed in previously.  Although the holiday was more than we would have paid before we felt it was reasonably good value for money.  In previous visits we had a hire car and the cost of insurance and parking ($15 a day at that time) helped offset the additional cost of staying at Disney.  Our only regret was that we had not booked a little earlier and taken advantage of the free dining plan.  We are planning to take advantage of this this time around.  There are a number of new attractions we are looking forward to trying.  There will be some old favourites that we will miss (Shark reef and Mission Space (closed for refurbishment)).

Blizzard Beach (2015)

Night Time in the Park (2015)

Epcot (July 2015)

The videos brought back happy memories and we had a good laugh watching them.  It has whetted our appetite for our visit.

Disney Dining Plan 2....

We have planned out half of our table service meals for most of the first week.  We need to sort out the second of our two weeks.  We are starting to panic, that everything will be booked up or we will be left with poor time slots.  Tonight we sat down to have a strategy meeting to plan the rest of our meals for table service.  After an hour and a half we have only managed to make one booking.  The process is very slow.  We know our plan for the parks and where we will be on any given day.  The next step is to check our options for restaurants,  check the menu and then check availability.

Animal Kingdom (2015)

We tried to book dinner at the Rain Forrest Cafe in Animal Kingdom.  This appears to be fully booked up and we still have five weeks to go.  But then doing a search by time suggests that there are some slots at 8pm. So we head back to the booking web page and try for those slots to be given the message that there was difficulties with the booking system at the moment. A message we are getting all to familiar with.

We tried to book the T-Rex restaurant in Disney Springs (for after a day at Typhoon Lagoon),  once again no joy - no slots available.  But this was not the message we were given...oh no!  Firstly, there was there are no slots between 6 - 8pm so we tried 5pm. The reply was that there was no slots between 3 - 5pm.  So for each time we tried we were given a message back that there was no availablity in a time period.  It took us about 15 minutes to work out that there were no slots available.  One simple message telling us this would have helped save our sanity.

All was not lost, as we did manage to book a dining package with VIP seating for the parade in Magic Kingdom.

We will try again tomorrow. Only 6 more bookings to go.

The Mickey Adventure the countdown continues...

The days to departure are ticking down and most things are in place.  The pre-flight hotel, airport car parking and the cat's holiday are all arranged.  The next stage is to sort out the ESTA's visa waver forms.

The planning now includes booking Fastpasses as well as meals. This is proving more difficult the further into the holiday we get.  The first few days were relatively easy as we will be awake early, we have looked into the parks that have the early magic hour.  We will hit the parks early and leave mid-afternoon.  As we are staying at the Disney Yachtclub if we have any energy left we can take advantage of the "water park" shared with the Beach Club hotel.  There is no thought of trying to stay awake for the firework displays which are a nightly occurance in the parks.

As we get further into the holiday and our body clocks adjust then the early mornings starts are less likely and we would be looking at afternoon evenings or a day at Typhoon Lagoon (the wave machine is awesome and I always smile as the boom goes off to herald the next wave and I am old enough to know better) and Blizzard Beach.  There is also Disney Springs to consider and normally we have a day away from the parks to do some shopping at the Malls.  This will not be the bargain hunting that it normally is due to the current poor exchange rate.

There are new features this year that we have not experienced before, particularly Disney Springs and the evening opening at Animal Kingdom with the new Avatar area.

There is just so much to do and only a limited time to do it.