So we didn’t think we’d go to Disney this year. Let me explain: I had a new baby niece AND a professional but not-related-to-my-current-job conference this year which together ate up a huge chunk of my vacation time. The taxman hit my self-employed wife hard, which meant a huge IRS bill. And for most of the year we thought that we might be moving out of state (we still might, just probably not this year.) I got a quick Disney fix at the aforementioned conference in January, when I spent a day at MK before heading back home, but my poor wife was left out because she stayed home to work and watch the furkids. But we had made that epic anniversary trip last year, and after all, it's silly to go two years in a row, isn't it? ISN'T IT????
Wait, let me back up and introduce ourselves.
I’m Liz (with the glasses), and this is my wife H. We’ve been married three years this August, and live in Chicago with two cats and a wonderdog. Last year we went to WDW to celebrate our 2nd anniversary. It was amazing. H had gone as a 5 year-old with her family for their Once-in-a-Lifetime trip. I’d grown up visiting grandparents in Southern California, so I’d gone to DL dozens of times (haven’t been in a good 14 or 15 years, though, so I should probably make my way back out there.)
So, like I was saying, we weren’t going to go. But of course we talked about it every week or so. And then when the discounts for fall started coming out I started number crunching. Long story short, the first week of May we decided to go for it and plan a trip for September!
Last year’s trip was a whirlwind of trying to experience everything in the parks. It was amazing, and we fell in love with Walt Disney World and knew we had to go back. This year, it’ll be nice to slow down and take some time to smell the Disney roses.
Another change from last year: No dining plan. Last year we sprung for the deluxe dining plan. I honestly have no recollection of how that happened. I think that I may have intended to do the regular dining plan and accidently selected the deluxe dining plan, or maybe I thought “Well, we eat 3 meals a day at home, we definitely need 3 meals at Disney.” Whatever my reasoning, it was way too much food for us, plus we felt like we had to have a lot of table service meals in order to get our money’s worth (in fact, whenever we tried to eat QS meals CMs would look at us funny and make comments about the fact that we were using TS credits for QS meals). That many sit-down meals during the week ate up a lot of time. Plus, since it was my first time and H’s first time as an adult, we had no concept of how long it would take to get from place to place, and it seemed like getting to a meal, eating, and then getting back to a park or back to our hotel ate so much of our day. Finally, H is a vegetarian who very occasionally verges into pescatarianism, and we found the vegetarian entree options at most restaurants to be pretty limited, and she wasn’t keen on eating fish every single day. There were meals where she would have been better served ordering an appetizer and a side, for example, instead of having yet another pasta dish. The dining plan didn’t allow that flexibility. So this time we’re trying it without and seeing how it goes.
Day One: Arrival
Leave eaaaaarllllly from Midway. We have a 6:30 a.m. flight. Since we’re car-free and live on the opposite end of town from Midway, that makes getting there in the wee hours complicated so we’ve decided to go all fancy and stay over Saturday in a hotel near the airport. We arrive in Orlando at 10 a.m. and hop the Magical Express for Port Orleans French Quarter!
We love this resort! When we were talking about this trip we threw around a few options. We could go Value this time, I suggested, maybe at Pop, save some money on hotel to spend on something else. Or we could go bigger, take advantage of the room-only discount and stay at ALK or WL. Our practical nature quickly decided against deluxe for this go ‘round, even with the discount. I decided to run the numbers staying at FQ. We have a winner! Plus, how could we pass up a chance at another Gator Parade?
On tap for Sunday afternoon: Afternoon Tea at the Grand Floridian! We love tea, and we love fanciness, and we’re excited to dress up in something classy yet still costumey, because we hop on the monorail to the Magic Kingdom for MNSSHP! We still haven’t worked out our wardrobe quite yet, but we’re playing with an idea for a disneybound Figaro and Cleo from Pinocchio. We’re so excited for the party. It’ll be odd getting in a Halloween state of mind more than a month beforehand. Anyway, we plan to party the night away with rides and meet and greets and the parade and Hallowishes until close.
Day Two
With Sunday’s late night, the plan is to sleep in, then get up for our late breakfast ADR at ‘Ohana. Last year we did breakfast at Tusker House on our last day, and were a little shy about being two adults at a character meal. We had a great, time, though, and our server even brought us a happy anniversary card signed by the characters. (O.K., it was a birthday card where she crossed out “birthday” and wrote in anniversary. We still loved it. So many CM.s did so much to make our anniversary awesome last year.) I love Lilo and Stitch. It’s seriously my favorite movie. Stitch is hilarious, of course, but I really love Lilo. Do you know that Lilo stuff is nearly impossible to find? Stitch is on everything, but Lilo?
Following breakfast, we’ll head to our favorite park: Animal Kingdom! I’m excited about the potential for Fast Pass Plus on late-start days like this one. We’ll also take some time to wander the trails and look at animals, maybe see Festival of the Lion King and/or Flights of Wonder, and stay til close, when we’ll hope the bus to AKL for our ADR at Jiko! I’m counting this as our fancy anniversary dinner, even though it’ll be a month late
Last year Boma was our "fancy" anniversary dinner, and look what they brought us
That was the meal that made us fall in love with AKL. We'll stay there someday ... just not this trip.
Day Three
Our first Magic Kingdom Day! We’ll be there for Rope Drop. The welcome show makes me cry every time. In fact, I was on hold with Disney last month and the music from the welcome show came on and I started to get misty. I’m planning on focusing on Fantasyland (7DMT!), Frontierland and Liberty Square on this day, then lunch and maybe an amble down Main Street. We learned on our last trip that we can only take a certain amount of park time before we need a break, so we’ll head back to the resort for a nap and pool time. In our workaday lives, we’re pretty early retirers -- most nights at home we’re in bed by 9. A nap in the afternoon means we can keep going past our bedtime In the evening we’ll probably head to Epcot for a snacky dinner of Food and Wine goodies, and find a good spot for Illuminations, which we missed on our first visit!
Day Four
I am super nerdy excited about Wednesday, because I booked the Marceline to Magic Kingdom tour for this morning! I love Disney history, and learning behind-the-scenes stuff. Plus, I'm excited to see Main Street devoid of people for a minute. After the tour, we’ll finish up our MK stuff, focusing on Tomorrowland and Adventureland (once again, I’m excited that Fast Pass Plus means that we can take this tour and not sacrifice Space Mountain and Buzz Lightyear). After our afternoon nap and swim, we head to DHS for the evening. The plan right now is to ride ToT at night (one of H’s must-dos) and see the second Fantasmic! show.
Day Five
Epcot Day! I haven’t really planned out what we’re doing specifically today. Friday is also an Epcot Day, so there’s no rush to get everything done today. My must-do’s in Future World are Soarin, Spaceship Earth, and Living with the Land. I like Test Track o.k., but H can take or leave it, so I may FP it for our second day, but may not. We sort of rushed through Innoventions last time, because H thought it was “too much like video games” and she HATES video games, so I might make her slow down We can also take our time with Food and Wine fare.
Thursday evening, we have an ADR at ‘Ohana for dinner! Here’s where I’m nervous -- Like I said earlier, H is vegetarian/pescatarian. She will happily subsist on side dishes, but I worry that the meat-centric nature of Ohana (which I’m super excited about) will mean her meal is less than awesome. I feel like last time we were at WDW CMs were super nice about her being vegetarian, and tried really hard to be accommodating, but that in the end the options she was offered were kind of dull. Last year, the WDW website said that I didn’t have to note “lifestyle dietary needs” in advance, just inform a CM when we came for our meal. Would we have better luck if I called and had them note it on my reservations?
Day Six
This is Epcot Day 2! I’m worried that it might be crowded because it’s a Friday during F&W, but we’ll have done a lot the previous day. We have a 12:15 ADR for Biergarten. I feel like we rushed Epcot last year and as a result were not terribly impressed by much. This time, I'd like to slow down (the theme of the whole trip, if you haven't caught on yet!) and maybe figure out why so many of you guys love it so much! We may actually stay in the park all day, just to make it easier to get to the 6:15 Hoop-de-Doo Revue! When we originally planned this trip, Friday was going to be our last full day, so I made sure to schedule it for this night. Then we decided to extend our trip a few more days, but I kept the same ressie. So, yay! Mid-trip dinner show! One of our favorite memories from last year was the HDD, even though we went on our first night for the late seating and we were exhausted and starving. When they asked who was celebrating anniversaries, etc., we raised our hands and three performers positively RACED over to us at our table in the very back of Pioneer Hall, shoving each other out of the way to get to us. Any nervousness we had about being a lesbian couple at Disney completely disappeared.
Day Seven
Dapper Day at DHS! We’re still working our outfits out, but we’re excited to step out in style. Other than looking awesome, this will be a regular park day for us: show up at rope drop, tour til after lunch, and then head out for our afternoon nap. I know I probably don’t need to continually mention our napping, but as H says, “Disney Naps are the best.” We really enjoy our Disney naps. And we’ll need one today because in the evening we’ll head to MK for the MSEP, Wishes and evening EMH. I hope to close the place down but we’ve already mentioned how early we like to go to bed so we’ll see
Day Eight
Taking a break today after last night’s late night fun. This is our resort and DTD day. We’ll wake up when we wake up, maybe take a morning swim, and eventually hop the boat to DTD. We also have ADR for Raglan Road because I’ve heard so much about the bread pudding. Then it’s back to the resort to pack up our stuff in anticipation of our departure on Monday, and maybe get a drink and catch Tom Casey at Scat Cat’s Club, or take an evening amble down to POR. Mostly we’ll spend tonight being boring and married
Day Nine
Departure day I’m already sad! Except that I know that by this time I’ll be ready to get home to my pup and the cats. We always miss our furbabies when we travel! Whenever I’m in a hotel I’ll wake up in the middle of the night and reach out to pet Mud, our tuxedo cat who always sleeps between us in bed, and then remember that she’s not there and miss her. So, mixed emotions. Those will have to wait, though, because our flight doesn’t leave til after 8 p.m., which means we actually have a full day before leaving! It’s up early for us to check out and store our luggage and get to AK for rope drop. If we feel like we’ve done everything we need to do, we may hop to another park, but basically it’s just play til it’s time to get back to FQ for the Magical Express, which somehow seems less magical when it’s taking you AWAY from Disney.
There's actually a small chance we'll rent a car while we're there instead of using Disney transportation. That way we can grab some breakfast groceries on the way from the airport and spend more time in the parks on our last day. That's still up in the air.
And that’s it! I’ll probably tweak and shuffle things around. Now I spend all my time reading up, working on my spreadsheet, and counting the hours til I get to make my FP+ selections (rapidly approaching, actually). There are costumes to plan, new swimsuits to buy, new shoes to get and break in, swagbucks to convert to Target gift cards to convert to Disney cards …. a whole host of to-do’s to keep me busy.
Wait, let me back up and introduce ourselves.
I’m Liz (with the glasses), and this is my wife H. We’ve been married three years this August, and live in Chicago with two cats and a wonderdog. Last year we went to WDW to celebrate our 2nd anniversary. It was amazing. H had gone as a 5 year-old with her family for their Once-in-a-Lifetime trip. I’d grown up visiting grandparents in Southern California, so I’d gone to DL dozens of times (haven’t been in a good 14 or 15 years, though, so I should probably make my way back out there.)
So, like I was saying, we weren’t going to go. But of course we talked about it every week or so. And then when the discounts for fall started coming out I started number crunching. Long story short, the first week of May we decided to go for it and plan a trip for September!
Last year’s trip was a whirlwind of trying to experience everything in the parks. It was amazing, and we fell in love with Walt Disney World and knew we had to go back. This year, it’ll be nice to slow down and take some time to smell the Disney roses.
Another change from last year: No dining plan. Last year we sprung for the deluxe dining plan. I honestly have no recollection of how that happened. I think that I may have intended to do the regular dining plan and accidently selected the deluxe dining plan, or maybe I thought “Well, we eat 3 meals a day at home, we definitely need 3 meals at Disney.” Whatever my reasoning, it was way too much food for us, plus we felt like we had to have a lot of table service meals in order to get our money’s worth (in fact, whenever we tried to eat QS meals CMs would look at us funny and make comments about the fact that we were using TS credits for QS meals). That many sit-down meals during the week ate up a lot of time. Plus, since it was my first time and H’s first time as an adult, we had no concept of how long it would take to get from place to place, and it seemed like getting to a meal, eating, and then getting back to a park or back to our hotel ate so much of our day. Finally, H is a vegetarian who very occasionally verges into pescatarianism, and we found the vegetarian entree options at most restaurants to be pretty limited, and she wasn’t keen on eating fish every single day. There were meals where she would have been better served ordering an appetizer and a side, for example, instead of having yet another pasta dish. The dining plan didn’t allow that flexibility. So this time we’re trying it without and seeing how it goes.
Day One: Arrival
Leave eaaaaarllllly from Midway. We have a 6:30 a.m. flight. Since we’re car-free and live on the opposite end of town from Midway, that makes getting there in the wee hours complicated so we’ve decided to go all fancy and stay over Saturday in a hotel near the airport. We arrive in Orlando at 10 a.m. and hop the Magical Express for Port Orleans French Quarter!
We love this resort! When we were talking about this trip we threw around a few options. We could go Value this time, I suggested, maybe at Pop, save some money on hotel to spend on something else. Or we could go bigger, take advantage of the room-only discount and stay at ALK or WL. Our practical nature quickly decided against deluxe for this go ‘round, even with the discount. I decided to run the numbers staying at FQ. We have a winner! Plus, how could we pass up a chance at another Gator Parade?
On tap for Sunday afternoon: Afternoon Tea at the Grand Floridian! We love tea, and we love fanciness, and we’re excited to dress up in something classy yet still costumey, because we hop on the monorail to the Magic Kingdom for MNSSHP! We still haven’t worked out our wardrobe quite yet, but we’re playing with an idea for a disneybound Figaro and Cleo from Pinocchio. We’re so excited for the party. It’ll be odd getting in a Halloween state of mind more than a month beforehand. Anyway, we plan to party the night away with rides and meet and greets and the parade and Hallowishes until close.
Day Two
With Sunday’s late night, the plan is to sleep in, then get up for our late breakfast ADR at ‘Ohana. Last year we did breakfast at Tusker House on our last day, and were a little shy about being two adults at a character meal. We had a great, time, though, and our server even brought us a happy anniversary card signed by the characters. (O.K., it was a birthday card where she crossed out “birthday” and wrote in anniversary. We still loved it. So many CM.s did so much to make our anniversary awesome last year.) I love Lilo and Stitch. It’s seriously my favorite movie. Stitch is hilarious, of course, but I really love Lilo. Do you know that Lilo stuff is nearly impossible to find? Stitch is on everything, but Lilo?
Following breakfast, we’ll head to our favorite park: Animal Kingdom! I’m excited about the potential for Fast Pass Plus on late-start days like this one. We’ll also take some time to wander the trails and look at animals, maybe see Festival of the Lion King and/or Flights of Wonder, and stay til close, when we’ll hope the bus to AKL for our ADR at Jiko! I’m counting this as our fancy anniversary dinner, even though it’ll be a month late
Last year Boma was our "fancy" anniversary dinner, and look what they brought us 
That was the meal that made us fall in love with AKL. We'll stay there someday ... just not this trip.
Day Three
Our first Magic Kingdom Day! We’ll be there for Rope Drop. The welcome show makes me cry every time. In fact, I was on hold with Disney last month and the music from the welcome show came on and I started to get misty. I’m planning on focusing on Fantasyland (7DMT!), Frontierland and Liberty Square on this day, then lunch and maybe an amble down Main Street. We learned on our last trip that we can only take a certain amount of park time before we need a break, so we’ll head back to the resort for a nap and pool time. In our workaday lives, we’re pretty early retirers -- most nights at home we’re in bed by 9. A nap in the afternoon means we can keep going past our bedtime
In the evening we’ll probably head to Epcot for a snacky dinner of Food and Wine goodies, and find a good spot for Illuminations, which we missed on our first visit!Day Four
I am super nerdy excited about Wednesday, because I booked the Marceline to Magic Kingdom tour for this morning! I love Disney history, and learning behind-the-scenes stuff. Plus, I'm excited to see Main Street devoid of people for a minute. After the tour, we’ll finish up our MK stuff, focusing on Tomorrowland and Adventureland (once again, I’m excited that Fast Pass Plus means that we can take this tour and not sacrifice Space Mountain and Buzz Lightyear). After our afternoon nap and swim, we head to DHS for the evening. The plan right now is to ride ToT at night (one of H’s must-dos) and see the second Fantasmic! show.
Day Five
Epcot Day! I haven’t really planned out what we’re doing specifically today. Friday is also an Epcot Day, so there’s no rush to get everything done today. My must-do’s in Future World are Soarin, Spaceship Earth, and Living with the Land. I like Test Track o.k., but H can take or leave it, so I may FP it for our second day, but may not. We sort of rushed through Innoventions last time, because H thought it was “too much like video games” and she HATES video games, so I might make her slow down
We can also take our time with Food and Wine fare.Thursday evening, we have an ADR at ‘Ohana for dinner! Here’s where I’m nervous -- Like I said earlier, H is vegetarian/pescatarian. She will happily subsist on side dishes, but I worry that the meat-centric nature of Ohana (which I’m super excited about) will mean her meal is less than awesome. I feel like last time we were at WDW CMs were super nice about her being vegetarian, and tried really hard to be accommodating, but that in the end the options she was offered were kind of dull. Last year, the WDW website said that I didn’t have to note “lifestyle dietary needs” in advance, just inform a CM when we came for our meal. Would we have better luck if I called and had them note it on my reservations?
Day Six
This is Epcot Day 2! I’m worried that it might be crowded because it’s a Friday during F&W, but we’ll have done a lot the previous day. We have a 12:15 ADR for Biergarten. I feel like we rushed Epcot last year and as a result were not terribly impressed by much. This time, I'd like to slow down (the theme of the whole trip, if you haven't caught on yet!) and maybe figure out why so many of you guys love it so much! We may actually stay in the park all day, just to make it easier to get to the 6:15 Hoop-de-Doo Revue! When we originally planned this trip, Friday was going to be our last full day, so I made sure to schedule it for this night. Then we decided to extend our trip a few more days, but I kept the same ressie. So, yay! Mid-trip dinner show! One of our favorite memories from last year was the HDD, even though we went on our first night for the late seating and we were exhausted and starving. When they asked who was celebrating anniversaries, etc., we raised our hands and three performers positively RACED over to us at our table in the very back of Pioneer Hall, shoving each other out of the way to get to us. Any nervousness we had about being a lesbian couple at Disney completely disappeared.
Day Seven
Dapper Day at DHS! We’re still working our outfits out, but we’re excited to step out in style. Other than looking awesome, this will be a regular park day for us: show up at rope drop, tour til after lunch, and then head out for our afternoon nap. I know I probably don’t need to continually mention our napping, but as H says, “Disney Naps are the best.” We really enjoy our Disney naps. And we’ll need one today because in the evening we’ll head to MK for the MSEP, Wishes and evening EMH. I hope to close the place down but we’ve already mentioned how early we like to go to bed so we’ll see
Day Eight
Taking a break today after last night’s late night fun. This is our resort and DTD day. We’ll wake up when we wake up, maybe take a morning swim, and eventually hop the boat to DTD. We also have ADR for Raglan Road because I’ve heard so much about the bread pudding. Then it’s back to the resort to pack up our stuff in anticipation of our departure on Monday, and maybe get a drink and catch Tom Casey at Scat Cat’s Club, or take an evening amble down to POR. Mostly we’ll spend tonight being boring and married
Day Nine
Departure day
I’m already sad! Except that I know that by this time I’ll be ready to get home to my pup and the cats. We always miss our furbabies when we travel! Whenever I’m in a hotel I’ll wake up in the middle of the night and reach out to pet Mud, our tuxedo cat who always sleeps between us in bed, and then remember that she’s not there and miss her. So, mixed emotions. Those will have to wait, though, because our flight doesn’t leave til after 8 p.m., which means we actually have a full day before leaving! It’s up early for us to check out and store our luggage and get to AK for rope drop. If we feel like we’ve done everything we need to do, we may hop to another park, but basically it’s just play til it’s time to get back to FQ for the Magical Express, which somehow seems less magical when it’s taking you AWAY from Disney.There's actually a small chance we'll rent a car while we're there instead of using Disney transportation. That way we can grab some breakfast groceries on the way from the airport and spend more time in the parks on our last day. That's still up in the air.
And that’s it! I’ll probably tweak and shuffle things around. Now I spend all my time reading up, working on my spreadsheet, and counting the hours til I get to make my FP+ selections (rapidly approaching, actually). There are costumes to plan, new swimsuits to buy, new shoes to get and break in, swagbucks to convert to Target gift cards to convert to Disney cards …. a whole host of to-do’s to keep me busy.
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I used to read on the forums about people going to Disney for 14 days and think "How in the world are they going to fill that time up!" Now I'm figuring out when I'll have enough vacay time to take that long of a trip ... 
It's slowly getting better ... it's definitely better now, four weeks later, than it was in the immediate aftermath. But it still gives me trouble if I sit too long 
So much for THAT surprise.