Grim Grinning Ghosts Come Out to drag our butts back to WDW! *October PTR*

[onnawufei]

Hi hi! This will be my first PTR so hopefully my attention span holds out. More on that later. I've been having fun reading other people's TRs and PTRs, so I figured I'd try one of my own.

For the sake of simplicity, call me Onna. I'm 29, a total kid at heart, and hopelessly addicted to the internet, Disney and photography. This will be my third trip to WDW. I'd never been able to go when I was a kid, so I'm clearly making up for it now that I'm an adult.

Unfortunately between my first and second trip I developed fibromyalgia, so I have to take it a little easier than we did the first time around. It sucks, but what can you do? That's also the reason I made the comment about my attention span. Between the fibro fog and the medication I take for my fibro, my memory and attention span have dwindled to pathetic proportions. There are times when I find it frustrating, but most of the time it's kind of funny. I do in fact, get distracted by shiny things. I also like to ramble, a lot. My posts should come with tl;dr summaries, but I'd probably ramble in those too.

This is me on my first trip in 2008. I'm a big fan of Chip and Dale.

The other person in this cast o' two is my DH Ryan. He's 31, a computer nerd and not quite as addicted to Disney as I am but pretty darn close. He's also probably going to read all of this and make fun of me for bits of it later. He's the one who introduced me to this forum and can frequently be found lurking in the trip reports. This will be his fourth trip, but he doesn't really remember much of his first when he was a kid. I'm terribly jealous that he got to go on 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and he doesn't even really remember it. [cue me weeping silently.] Ryan does a great job of putting up with me, and we have loads of fun every time we're at Disney. He can be a butthead sometimes (what DH can't?) but he's my butthead, and I love him.

He is the obsessive planner of our little duo. He's not the type to plan things down to the minute, but he gets all the ADRs in order, he makes sure we know what parks we're going to which days, and he's just generally the man with the plan. This works for me, since if we left that stuff up to me we'd be screwed. It'd be a whole lot of:
"Well why don't we just eat over here?"
"That isn't a restaurant. That's a bathroom."

Here he is on our 2009 trip. He's a big fan of khaki.

We don't have any kids, but we do have three cats, Gambit, Gadget and Tex. We'll be celebrating our third year wedding anniversary (a little early) on this trip, but we've been together for... ten years? Something like that.

So now that you know entirely too much about me and the hubs, I guess I can talk about planning for our- Oh look, a quarter.


Links!
Post 1 - Introduction
Post 2 - I'm a bad person... but I'm going to Disney!
Post 3 - Look! A distraction! Oh and details.
Post 4 - A change of plans? Awesome!

 

[onnawufei]

Originally we were skipping Disney this year. We'd gone for Halloween in 2008 (for our wedding/honeymoon) and Christmas in 2009, so we figured we'd skip 2010 and go in 2011. It seemed like a good enough plan, until I got bored at work and somehow or other stumbled upon doombuggies.com. We're both Haunted Mansion fans, but I love it, and I also love reading random useless facts about it (as well as other things) so I spent days going over this site. By the time I was done I was pining for Disney. Pining. Italics were necessary there, that's how bad it was. I'm sure some of you know the feeling. I mentioned this to my DH a couple of times and he seemed like he was wanting to go more and more as well, but there was only one problem.

At the end of last year we'd been told that we had to go to New York for Christmas this year. The entire family was going to be spending Christmas at my sister in law's house. Now this is the part where I sound like a bad person. I'm not hugely family oriented. I love my in laws, they are really fantastic people and have gone out of their way to make me feel loved in times when I really needed it. But the thought of being somewhere really cold, with a large amount of people, including five kids, two of which are hyper active boys who like doing that "boy thing" where the whole point of the game is to see how far they can push you until you get really mad, did not make me happy. And as much as my DH loves his family, it didn't make him all that thrilled either. The cold makes my body ache, and stress makes it ache worse, so I knew that if we went I was going to be a ball of pain trying to put on a happy festive face while wanting nothing more than to crawl in bed and hide. So we decided to see if this was really mandatory, and as it turns out it wasn't. Sooooooo...

Less than a week after we started saying that we could probably swing a trip in October, we had it booked and our ADRs made. And we've now been told that next year we have to go to WDW, since the whole family will be taking a trip there. That I think I can live with.

Picture from MNSSHP 2008.​

 

[onnawufei]

So to draw attention away from the whole "bad person" thing, have some details.

Where: Port Orleans French Quarter
When: October 3 - 9
Which Parks: All of them!

Picture of the POFQ pool from last year.​

In theory we'll be leaving home at 5:30 - 6:00 on the morning of 10/3, and driving to WDW. It's too short of a trip to fly and I really hate flying anyway, plus driving is cheaper. I don't drive, so DH will be behind the wheel while I play with my phone, fiddle with my laptop, take pictures, probably take video, and control the music for the trip. DH humors me and lets me play Disney music, though we usually revert to "Weird Al" at some point. I've got a lot more Disney music this year though, so we'll see.

Once we get there we'll check out our room and head off to DTD to wander around and eat at T-Rex, which is our first ADR of the trip. I love T-Rex, but the last time we went it was so late in the trip and so late in the day that I was too exhausted to really enjoy it, so I love that we're doing it first. I'll get to take lots of pictures and video, and hopefully we won't be seated in the bar area again, like we were the past two times we were there. Don't get me wrong, I love the giant octopus, in fact it's my favorite thing there, but I feel jipped not being able to see the meteor shower from there. But anywho, I'm getting off topic.

T-Rex says stay focused!​

We'll probably do some more wandering after we eat, and I'm most likely going to be trying to find a cute tiara to "go with" (and I use the term loosely) the pirate costume I plan on wearing to MNSSHP. Once we've had our fill of DTD it's back to the room, then off to MK. As it just so happens we also booked MNSSHP for the first night were there, so I get maximum fun within hours of arriving. Hurray for Disney! The plan is to just bring my costume in DH's backpack, and I'll change when it's the acceptable costume time. DH will not be wearing a costume, but I've been told that if I buy him one of those Jack Sparrow hats he'll wear it, so I just may do that. Disney even brings out the kid in computer geeks.

I've started a list of things I want to do this trip that I've never done before:

* Go through the Tower of Terror queue so I can see it and take pictures. Don't feel bad about "chickening out" at the end.
* Go on Splash Mountain.
* Get my picture taken with as many characters as possible. Also get as many pictures taken with DH as possible.
* Go on the Liberty Square Riverboat. Somehow I missed that this was an option.
* Go on the monorail.
* Visit at least one hotel I haven't been to before.
* Give the Cosmic Cafe a second chance. >_>
* Take a picture of the castle during the daytime. I have oodles of pictures of it at night, but none during the day.
* Take a picture of the Partners statue. How have I not done this before?
* DH has decided we're going on EE. So um... that.

 

[onnawufei]

DH was a little worried that we weren't going to have enough time since we're pretty sure we're going to have to stop so I can rest more than we did on the last trip. That led to us discussing adding some extra time to the trip. A few days later and we've booked it so we're leaving for Disney a day early!

So now the plan is to arrive at the hotel, then head to DTD for a T-Rex lunch since we were able to move our reservation. While we're no longer doing MNSSHP our first night, DH was able to get us reservations at The Garden Grill! I won't lie, I'm not too impressed with the menu there, but I am so excited about my first character dinner. If the food isn't to my liking I can always get a snack later anyway. And you never know, it might surprise me and I could end up loving it.

We've also made some headway in buying all the little this and thats "needed" for the trip. A bigger memory card for my camera, a bigger memory card for the video camera and a charger for the video camera's batteries have been bought. All I need now is my costume for MNSSHP and the microphone I want for our video camera.

1 month and three weeks to go! it's getting close! I'm excited!

Okay really I was just showing off my new glasses. First new pair in 10 or 12 years!​