Prologue, Part III
Bumps in the Road

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(Originally posted September 10, 2012)

The next day, we went ahead and booked the trip to Disneyland through the Costco Travel website. We found good times for flights and were able to use miles to pay for the flights in one direction. Overall, we were satisfied with the cost of the trip as it was less expensive overall than the WDW trip would have been anyway! Our dates were to be September 17-22, though of those dates we would only have park tickets for four days. We would be staying in a Standard View room at Paradise Pier.

Ironically, right after booking the trip to CA, we got a call from our travel agent letting us know that some free dining rooms had opened up again at Port Orleans French Quarter. While we were a little disappointed, we decided that things had played out the way they had for a reason. Plus, we were already starting to get excited for Disneyland and all the new experiences this trip would bring.

I should start off by noting that we were never against the idea of going to Disneyland because we thought it in any way inferior to Walt Disney World. We were just creatures of habit, and having always been to WDW, we didn’t really take all that much time out to consider the alternative. As an avid listener of Lou Mongello’s WDW Radio Show, I had heard the episode from many years ago when Lou recapped his first adult trip to Disneyland, aptly titled “Why Every WDW Fan Needs to Visit Disneyland.” From the moment I listened to that show years before, I knew I wanted to take a trip out to Disneyland someday—it just came down to finding the right occasion. As we started planning our trip, re-listening to that episode was one of my first forays into learning all about the differences between the two resorts. I also turned Tracy onto that episode, and that became her first real introduction to Disney podcasts. In addition, we bought the Unofficial Guide to Disneyland as well as Birnbaum’s official guide, and we bought a subscription to the Disneyland half of the Touring Plans website.

Our planning thoroughly underway, we didn’t expect that our luck would take a turn for the worse about a month before our scheduled trip. Anyone who has read my other trip report will be familiar with the health issues that have been plaguing me for the last year. It all started in mid-August 2011 when I ended up in the emergency room twice in the matter of two weeks. The ultimate issue was that I was getting these extreme bouts of dizziness where I would almost pass out in a variety of places like on the subway or walking to work. At the time, every doctor I went to was basically clueless about what was going on with me. As doctors are prone to do, when they have no idea what is wrong, they blame stress and try to tell you there is nothing wrong with you physically. What I have found out since this time is that I have one of a set of disorders that falls in the category of dysautonomia. Put simply, my nervous system gets out of whack when triggered by various events and once out of equilibrium it malfunctions for a while. At the time of this trip, however, we were at the point in time when basically all anyone could tell me was that they had no idea what was happening. At first, we just hoped it would only last a week or so and then go away. Then we hoped maybe it would be longer term but still go away before our trip. Then we finally realized it was probably something we were going to have to do our best to deal with.

With all the ER and doctor visits having happened right after we booked our trip, combined with the fact that I had to miss a lot of work whenever I was feeling bad, we found ourselves in a stickier financial situation than we would have ever foreseen going into our vacation. We thought briefly about canceling, but didn’t want to be out our airfare and stuck at home feeling sick. I figured if I had to be sick, I’d rather it be somewhere happy…

So we got our trip planned as well as we could, realizing that there may be a few bumps along the way. We made our “Priority Seating” arrangements (why Disney can’t agree to call reservations ADRs on both coasts is beyond me), mapped out a basic idea of which park we wanted to spend the majority of our time in each day, and got basic touring plans ingrained into our minds. We also made plans with Tracy’s brother Steve who lives in L.A. and would not only be picking us up from the airport and driving us to Disneyland, but with whom we would be spending our entire arrival day.

Thus, with things at least shakily in place, we finished packing and went to bed on the night of September 16th. We were determined to have an awesome vacation no matter what life decided to throw at us, and it would start EARLY on our first morning.

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