Disney Tips

Alright, first of all I am incredibly bored. The kids are asleep and Brian's out at dinner with everybody from the park. So I decided to write a blog about some tips I've discovered that make Disney vacations more pleasant...since I've made a whopping 3 visits here in my whole life. And two of them have been in the last year.

Anyway, here are my tips:

1. Stay at a resort. I've stayed off property twice and on once. And my best experience, by far, was staying at the Wilderness Lodge last year. If you watch Jon & Kate Plus 8, which I only do as a form of personal self torture because she drives me nuts, the Lodge is where they stayed last year. It makes everything so easy! First of all, my only complaint (and it's not really a complaint) about this trip is that when you go to the park and leave, you leave the Disney magic. There was absolutely nothing like leaving the park last year and coming back to the Lodge. When you leave the park you're still surrounded by great Disney service and the great Disney feeling. It's really like you leave the outside world the entire week! The second great thing is the transportation. At the resorts there are buses that are waiting to take you to the parks and they take you right up to the front. And even better at the Wilderness Lodge, you get to take a ferry to the Magic Kingdom. It was awesome! With little kids it makes the experience better. There are extra hours for people staying on resorts. Plus it's significantly easier to park hop and to leave the parks mid day to take kids back for naps and stuff. We couldn't have done that if we'd wanted to over the last few days.

2. Get the Fast Passes...they make everything significantly easier.

3. If you're expecting to get the kids to bed "on time" - don't. We're not staying at a resort and I can hear the fireworks every night still! But they're totally worth it.

4. Plan what you want to do. We came here with a pretty concise plan of where we wanted to go and that made it easy. But we've talked since then and figured out when the kids are older we're looking at like, a 10 day trip to fit in everything. Eventually we'll want to go to the water parks (there's two Disney parks and a Wet n' Wild), Universal Studios and Disney of course! With little kids there's some places that will only take a day (like Epcot) and that others that you easily spend two days navigating (like Animal Kingdom and Magic Kingdom).

5. Make a budget of what you want to spend. Seriously, between the gift shops and Downtown Disney....this place is a cash cow. There is a ton of cool stuff to buy, especially memory related...scrapbooking, picture frames...it's easy to get distracted and spend, spend, spend!

Anyway, that's all I've got for now. But I'm still thinking!