Our First Family Trip to Disney!

There is much excitement in my house right now, over something happening during Spring Break of 2014. Our family will be taking our first trip to Walt Disney World, and I am absolutely geeked out and pumped about this!

It has been at least 13 years since I’ve been, probably more like 15. I went three times when I was younger, twice with our family and once on a high school marching band trip.  This is my first time planning a trip (obviously) and paying for it, so I’m in full-fledged Super Planning Mode!

Here’s the basics about our trip:

We’re leaving on Sunday, March 30th and driving to Orlando from Kentucky. We will meet up with my parents on our way down and spend the night somewhere on the way. We’ll be staying at the Art of Animation Resort on Disney property and spend five days (Monday through Friday) at Disney World, and driving home Saturday/Sunday.

Our boys don’t know anything about the trip yet, but we won’t be keeping it a surprise. We’ll going to tell them at Christmas, so that we have some time to prepare them for it and prolong some of the magic. I’ve seen some , like doing a Mouse in the House thing similar to the Elf on the Shelf leading up to a Disney trip, and hey, we’re spending a ton of money on this trip, might as well milk it for all it’s worth, amiright?

We’re working with , an authorized Disney vacation planner. Authorized Disney vacation planners are a free service to guests (they’re paid by Disney) to help you make the most of your trip, make your reservations, give tips and advice, and just generally make your trip as magical as possible. Check out the Off To Neverland Travel site if you’re thinking about booking a Disney vacation! (Note:  This is not a paid or unpaid promo spot or anything, I’m just using the service and finding it super helpful!)

So far, here’s what we have planned:

Monday we’ll be at Epcot. It’ll be a shorter day, since we’ll have travel time, arrival, and check-in to deal with, but I think we’ll be fine with about a half day there. We have dinner reservations for character dining at The Garden Grill Restaurant. We did decide to do the Dining Plan for this trip, mostly because you can do character dining and see a lot of characters that way. I don’t know if we’ll do the Dining Plan on future trips (oh yes. There will be future trips. Plural.), but for this trip at the boys’ ages, I think it’s the way to go. We have one character meal planned each day.

Tuesday we’ll be at Animal Kingdom. I haven’t been to Disney World since AK opened, so I’m excited about seeing it! We’ll start our day with a character breakfast at Tusker House Restaurant.

Wednesday we’ll be at Disney’s Hollywood Studios. We have character dining reservations for lunchtime at Hollywood & Vine, a Disney Junior character meal. One fun thing about this trip is that my co-worker and officemate will be at Disney World at the same time with her kids and parents. We’re staying in different resorts, but we’ll be at the same parks each day and on Wednesday we have reservations within 10 minutes of one another! As you can imagine, there’s a lot of Disney talk in our office these days.

We’ll be spending Thursday and Friday at the Magic Kingdom. I know we’ll need two days to see and do all that we want to, and this way we can take our time. We have breakfast reservations at ‘Ohana on Thursday and our final character meal is at Chef Mickey’s for dinner on Friday. I saved Magic Kingdom for our final days because I wanted to work our way up to it and end our trip in the most magical part of Walt Disney World.

In my next post, I’ll tell you about some of my favorite resources that I’m using to plan our trip!