Ok, let’s go back to Florida! August 2022- pre trip plans

[missdopey]

Exactly 2 and a half years since our last trip and we’re about to return to Florida. I’m still on the fence about doing a trip report - I love reading them back but this trip is going to be full on and I don’t know if I’ll find the time to keep up.

There will be:
Myself (36): planner, rearranger and generally the holiday decision maker.
DH (38): Let’s me know his must do’s and I facilitate them but doesn’t like the admin and decision making.
DD (9): Her 10th trip, this will be the first one she’s tall enough for all the Disney rides.
DS (2): His second trip but was just a baby last time, he’s currently on the cusp of being tall enough for SDMT, KRR, SDD etc.

So the plans:
16th August - we travel to Glasgow and stay overnight in the premier Inn, this cost £150 for one nights stay and 19 days parking at the sky port parking about 5 mins from the airport.



17th August - We are flying with Aer Lingus via Dublin, we leave GLA at 8.35am and have just under 5 hours in Dublin. We went for the longer layover so we weren’t rushed and to reduce the stress of missing the connection, it will give us time to get something to eat before heading through immigration pre clearance. We arrive in Orlando around 7pm as domestic passengers so no immigration which means we can go straight to check in for our overnight stay at the Hyatt international in the airport, this cost £169 for the night but at the time of booking it meant it saved us £100 on car hire and saved us a night of DVC points, also meant we don’t have to battle with cases/car pick up/tired children when we first arrive.

18th August - car hire is booked for a 7am pick up so we’ll get some breakfast and collect the car early. Car hire was booked through DFCH and has been amended a few times, we currently have a standard pick up truck for 17 days which has cost £796. Now I’m currently not convinced by the pick up option but DH has always wanted to hire one so here’s me being the facilitator. We’ll go and check in at our first ‘home’ of the holiday, Bay Lake Tower, this is our home resort and one we’ve stayed at 4 times previously. Our room won’t be ready but we’ll leave our luggage with bell services and head to Magic Kingdom.
We have 14 day magic tickets with Genie+, we were torn between getting genie+ and trying to do without but I’ve always loved pounding the app for fastpasses and feel like we could make it work well for us with DS not being tall enough for many of the rides.

27th August - we leave Bay Lake Tower and check into Beach club for 5 nights. This is for the proximity to Epcot/Hollywood studios and the pool! Stormalong bay is our favourite pool on property and after 10 days of hitting the parks we’ll be after some proper pool time.

1st September - We check out of beach club and into our final home of the holiday - 2 nights at Animal kingdom lodge club level. This is almost impossible to snag with DVC if you’re not an AKL owner but I managed to get our final night a while back when I was checking availability. We did a night here on our last trip and absolutely loved the convenience of grabbing food when we felt like it. DD was very excited about staying here again as she loved using her magic band to select the 6th floor in the elevator to get up there. I popped in a cheeky waitlist for our penultimate night on the off chance it might become available. Completely forgot about it and much to my shock it came through so we’ve ended up with our last 2 nights here.

3rd September - our flight isn’t until almost 9pm so we’ve got most of the day. We’ll leave our luggage with bell services except a small case and we’ll hit the pool and use the club level lounge for food and drinks.

Extras:
Universal and RPR -
We’d been considering visiting seaworld as we enjoyed it last time. We had done discovery cove and felt we didn’t need to do that again until DS is old enough to appreciate it and do the dolphin swim. After some thought and pricing up our options I decided we should give universal a go this time. DH and I last went 14 years ago and now DD has read most of the Harry Potter books and was tall enough for a lot of the rides I felt now may be a good time before we need a ticket for DS as he won’t be tall enough for most of the rides for a while. So this is how I ended up buying us 14 day 3 park universal tickets. We had a few days where we wouldn’t be able to do Disney as our tickets only allow 14 days of visits so this was our solution to fill them gaps. Then I was worried I didn’t want to do too many days at universal and we’d want to go to volcano bay too, but we wanted to get as much done as possible and summer queues were likely to be long. I started looking into the express passes for us, wow these are expensive! I priced it up at $400 for us for 1 day. So I looked into one of the universal hotels that comes with unlimited express passes. I settled on 28th August as it cost £350 for the night through Virgin and will get us early entry both days and 2 days of unlimited express passes. Bargain!

MNSSHP - we did this a couple of trips ago and DD loved it. It’s quite expensive at $99 each ($10 DVC discount) but DS won’t need a ticket being under 3 so we decided to go for it. This will work well during our BLT stay so we can just walk over and back at the end of the night and if it’s too much of a late night for DS one of us can take him back.

Moonlight magic - we were thrilled when Disney announced the return of moonlight magic and that there would be an event at Animal Kingdom while we were there. We’ve done 3 of these before and really enjoyed them so we were pleased to get reservations to the AK event on the 31st August.
Disney then announced a further event at typhoon lagoon for the 23rd August. We’ve done moonlight magic at TL 6 years ago and it was great being in the water park at night when it’s much cooler and the slides were walk on so we were all pleased to get signed up for this event too.

KTTK tour - DH has always wanted to do this, he did the Marceline to the magic kingdom one a few years ago and thoroughly enjoyed it. We had planned to all do the keys to the kingdom one eventually but DS will be too young for a long while yet so I decided to book this for DH to do on his own.

Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutique - I was so pleased to hear this will be returning on the 25th August. This will probably be the last time DD would want to do this so I’m planning on trying for a reservation when this opens up.

Dining - we’ve booked a few dining reservations throughout our holiday, we have:
Ohana breakfast
Beaches and cream lunch
Space 220 lounge dinner
Ale and compass breakfast
Cape may cafe breakfast

So putting this all down I’ve pretty much convinced myself the trip reports gotta happen so we’ve got 7 days until it all begins and 8 days until we arrive 😊

[Loobylou_82]

Will be following along. All sounds good.

[Buggles94]

Sounds like an amazing trip! Have a fantastic time 😀

[jothp]

It sounds like a great trip. We'd love to stay at BLT and club level at AKL sounds brilliant.