Prologue, Part II
What Do You Think About Going to Disneyland?
(Originally posted September 7, 2012)
Our inspiration for planning the trip that would eventually morph into our trip to Disneyland came at the end of the summer of 2011. Tracy and I were both employed in jobs that we kinda sorta hated. Luckily as it turned out, she was able to quit that job only a month after we got back from Disney. I stuck mine out for almost another year, but am finished with that now! The point of all that, however, was that we were both gainfully employed for the first time in our lives. After graduating from college, we had done the whole floundering thing for quite a while, but were finally feeling like we were on our feet and could fund the first Disney vacation we would be paying for by ourselves.
We fully intended this trip to be a return to Walt Disney World. We hadn’t been since our honeymoon over a year before, and were feeling Disney withdrawals. Once free dining was announced for these dates, we decided to start planning possible dates when we would be interested in going. Long before we even knew whether we would be financially able to go at this time or whether it would work out with vacation days, we started making ADRs for the restaurants in WDW that we knew we wanted to go to. I’d heard several times that getting ADRs during free dining periods was next to impossible the closer you got to your dates, so I figured that I could make them early and cancel if necessary. Finally, as we settled on a set of dates and started thinking that we actually wanted to make this trip happen, we got in touch with an agent at MouseFan Travel who gave us the rates we were looking for along with all the options we wanted. Our dates seemed perfect to us because in addition to being free dining, we would also be able to go to Mickey’s Not So Scary Halloween Party, which we were dying to attend.
Once we got our quote in late July or early August, we made the mistake of letting a little too much time pass. As August began unfolding and we realized that we really wanted to make this trip happen, we started scrambling trying to move from the quote stage to actually booking the trip. We picked out our flights, settled on exact dates, and emailed our travel agent to tell her we wanted to go ahead with the quote she had sent us. She took our credit card information, told us everything was still open, and that she would get back to us in a couple of hours once everything was processed. We considered that as good as done, and we even immediately ordered a copy of the current Birnbaum guide to WDW from Amazon because we always like to peruse that as part of our build up to a trip.
Having squared everything away, we went for a walk. I never leave my phone at home, but after all those calls about the trip, it was dying, so I left it to charge. When we got back I had several missed calls and a voicemail. As we dreaded, it was from our travel agent. She didn’t know what had happened but between that morning and that evening, all of the free dining rooms at all of the value resorts had suddenly become unavailable. She said it was the first time she’d ever seen that happen and truly couldn’t figure out any explanation. She even called the other agents she worked with and no one could figure out why that exact week had suddenly become unavailable for us. Even the moderate resorts, which we couldn’t afford anyway, were suddenly all booked up for free dining. There was availability for both the week before and the one after, but Tracy had already been approved for vacation from work for those exact dates and they were sticklers about not allowing it to be changed.
At first we started panicking a little… We came up with two contingency plans revolving around keeping our WDW vacation. In the first, Tracy would ask if there was any way to change her dates. In the second, we would keep constantly checking the Disney site to see if anything opened up. Neither idea seemed like it would have guaranteed success. Suddenly, out of the blue, Tracy said, “What about if we went to Disneyland?” I paused for a few minutes to consider the matter. When we were booking our Disneymoon, we were working on a very tight budget and briefly considered Disneyland. We knew that if we went to WDW on that trip we would have to stay at a non-Disney hotel, which we were wary about, so we did some research into Disneyland. While it was a viable option, we decided in the end that Disney World had always been such a special place to each of us and to us as a couple, so we made it work to go there.
Now, however, here we were with Disneyland seeming like the soundest of options. The only problem was that we knew practically nothing about Disneyland. We started doing our research. On the official Disneyland site, they were offering a special where you could save up to 40% off one of the Disney hotels. We knew the only one of those that we could likely afford was Paradise Pier, so we started pricing out options. After we had settled on a decent quote, Tracy had the idea to check out Costco Travel and see how their rates compared. While the actual price was quite similar, the Costco Travel package had several added perks—among them were two character meals included as well as vouchers for priority seating at several attractions, AND admission to Mickey’s Toontown Morning Madness one morning. The Costco package seemed to be the way to go, but we wanted to wait one more day to pull the trigger. After all, there was still a small chance that WDW would open up. Plus, we needed a little time to learn all we could about vacationing to Disneyland!
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