We weren't supposed to go this year, but surprise! We changed our minds - December 2023, Land & Sea Adventure PTR

[Riss]

Hello everyone and welcome to my family's December 2023 PTR!

I have written a couple before, but they were always kind of last minute and sort of thrown all together. While some of the planning has already started, we're still around 8 months, 239 days exactly, away from our 2 week Disney World/Disney Cruise vacation! Honestly, I think this will be the longest we've ever gone before, including the last time we did both Disney World and the cruise, which was in September 2018. So come along with me for this ride as I will be detailing our family's adventures of planning a 2 week Disney World/Disney Cruise vacation for 9 people.

Let's get started!


Table of Contents
Introductions
How the trip came to be
Modifying the timeline and finding the perfect cruise room
Trying to plan Disney World
Some happy additions​

 

[Riss]

Introductions

So, as the title suggests, my family was supposed to skip Disney this year. For our Disney loving family, it may sound a little harsh, but we could understand. Last year, in 2022, we were fortunate enough to go on two trips. We had a 7-night stay at the Art of Animation in the Finding Nemo Family Suites for my nephew's 3rd birthday and then in September we had a literal 2-night stay at the Boardwalk Inn just so we could attend Mickey's Not So Scary Halloween Party and have one day in Epcot for Food and Wine. Yes, my family might have been slightly crazy with that one as we planned and booked the second vacation in July.

Still, since we had kind of just gone, and had two trips at that, we made the decision that we were going to skip this year and potentially go again in 2024 for my nephew's fifth birthday. But well...how things do change.

What ended up happening was I started saying we should go on a cruise for my mom's birthday as a joke. That turned into her agreeing, which then my youngest sister started asking for numbers. The one joking comment I made suddenly turned into me looking up prices and crunching some numbers for the family on what the price would be. Looking at the cruise then became looking at Disney World as well because, according to my mom, you can't go to one and not the other. Then I made the suggestion that we should pay for my parents portion as their anniversary gift and the spiral kept continuing. That's how we came across the dates for our two week vacation, from Monday, December 4 - Friday, December 15.

Before I get into actual details of the trip, let me introduce the people that will be going with us.

First, there will be my parents. Unlike in trips of the past, my parent's aren't going to be paying for the trip. Even the last time, when us children paid for our parts, they still paid for all of the food and didn't let us contribute anything for that. To repay their generosity, we are going to be paying for their portion of this longer vacation. As much as we would want to book them a nice dinner someplace for the two of them, as part of the celebration for their wedding anniversary, they just aren't those kinds of people. My mom would much rather prefer to have a quiet night in or go out to one of her favorite bars rather than sitting at a fancy restaurant. My dad is the same. They would also rather spend their time with family rather than spend it by themselves. And while my parents do love Disney, they don't always love talking about it. That means that once the trip is planned, we aren't going to really be discussing anything until it gets closer, which is completely understandable.

Next, in birth order, I am the oldest and a Disney lover. I just love mostly everything Disney with the parks probably being my ideal vacation location, honestly. All of my friends joke with me about how much I love Disney and have Disney merch, which admittedly isn't as much as one would think. I'm typically the planner of the family as I look into different options and do all of the numbers and spreadsheets for everyone. I also feel like I have the most Disney knowledge in the family, partly due to me always planning and watching videos so I know mostly what to expect.

For this trip, my best friend will be coming along with us. We were supposed to go to Disney in May 2020 and I'm assuming we all know what happened before that. This will be her first trip in over ten years with the last one being when we had traveled with the band to march down Main Street in the Magic Kingdom our senior year. Therefore she's very much looking forward to the trip. To give a perspective of how long it's been since she's gone, she never knew MagicBand and never had one because they weren't around the last time she had gone. She always lived vicariously through me as my family went to trips since then, but this time she gets to join in on all of the fun.

My younger sister is also a Disney lover and is in charge of being the list maker in our family. She always makes sure that everyone has everything they need and that we're not leaving things home that we might need. She does try not to spoil herself by looking at videos and experiences because she's one who likes to see things first-hand and to have a genuine reaction to what is happening rather than expecting it beforehand. Still, because I like to watch everything, I might give her a heads up on what she may or may not need, depending on what we're doing.

My brother is third and while he likes Disney, he's definitely not into it like the rest of us are. He's also not very in to cruising, but I know he goes along because it's what the family is doing. He's very family focused. So while he may not actively want to go to Disney, he does like the parks and he does like experiencing the festivals and the food. He and my dad are big foodies so they will always try things at the booths, whether it be something new or something that they've had a thousand times before. Either way, he will always be up to try something along the way.

Finally, there's my youngest sister and my nephew. She's probably almost as Disney obsessed as me, but in a different way. While I do like the characters, and the parks, my sister is more of a parks person. She loves going and the whole experience, especially now that she has a child. Going in May with him was incredible and seeing the way he looked at everything was definitely exciting. Now that he'll be a little taller for this trip in December, he's turning 4 at the end of May and is already measuring around 42" tall, we know he'll be able to ride some of the bigger roller coasters he's been constantly talking about.

And to round out our party of 9, my youngest sister's boyfriend is coming along. He joined us for our trip in September, that being his first trip staying on-site and kind of his first time really seeing the parks, despite it only being one park for really one day. He's excited to do a longer trip this time and experience his first Disney Cruise.

But that is everyone attending this trip. It's a lot of people with a lot of logistics to figure out, such as, how are 9 people managing to take off 10 days at the same time? That's a mystery in itself, which also contributes to good bosses and excellent workplaces. That's a story for another time, though.

Up next, how we determined dates and what to do.

 

[DLo]

Following along. Looking forward to reading more .

 

[Riss]

How the trip came to be

As I stated in the introductions, this trip started as a joke pretty much. My youngest sister is always looking at wanting to plan another family vacation, with Disney pretty much always being our go-to faraway destination. She's been talking about possibly going for my nephew's 5th birthday ever since we were there for his 3rd birthday last May. Also, since we had the opportunity to go twice last year, she wanted to go this year. However, because we went twice, we thought why not give Disney a little break.

But what happened one day was that I jokingly asked my mom if she wanted to be on a cruise for her birthday. Now, we've been on a Disney cruise before, our first and so-far only family Disney cruise being 2018. We looked at different promotions that Disney had, such as the Disney+ deal, but never committed partly due to timing and only because we were curious as to what the prices would be.

Come a random day in March when I was looking up cruises and saw one whose embarkation day was our mom's birthday. I jokingly asked her if she would like to be on a cruise for her birthday and her immediate reaction wasn't no. She seemed pretty positive about it and so I began looking at all of the information surrounding it ultimately coming up with a plan.

After our experience last time, we didn't want to go to Disney second. Last time we did the parks after the cruise and were totally burnt out by the end. Not wanting to relive that, we wanted to have the cruise be after Disney World because we'd be able to relax more than trying to run around at all of the parks.

We started with the cruise being our base, going from Monday, December 11 - Friday, December 15. We liked the 4-night cruise last time and wanted to keep it the same length. After that, I began putting together and looking at potential dates for how long we should do Disney beforehand. My sister brought up the possibility of doing Mickey's Very Merry Christmas Party, something we wanted to attend, with the desire growing after attending Mickey's Not So Scary last September.

So initially we settled on flying in Tuesday, December 5 and being at the parks from Wednesday, December 6 - Sunday, December 10 and then we'd get on the cruise the following day. We figured we'd do the party on that Friday, December 8, figuring that a party date would fall on that day, and that that would be the only day we didn't get a ticket for. Other than that, we were going to do all of the days straight with no break in between.

We had agreed that we were going to be staying at Art of Animation in the Finding Nemo Family Suites, Nemo's House, as my nephew affectionally calls it.

But with a grand total of 9 people coming, we needed to sort out rooms and layouts, for both Disney World and the cruise portion.

 

[Riss]

Modifying the timeline and finding the perfect cruise room

Wow, it's been a while since I last gave an update. My family has been going through a lot of back and forth in regards to this trip and what we want to do. One thing that we had always promised to do, but never actually got around to doing it, was stopping by Universal. All four of us children, and also my best friend, were in the band in high school and we had made stops at Universal before ultimately going to Disney. So, we decided to go ahead and do that for this trip. We aren't changing our days or extending our stay, but instead of heading straight to Disney when we arrive on Monday, December 4, we're now going to be going to the Hard Rock Hotel at Universal Orlando for one night. Tuesday, December 5 is going to be our Universal and Islands of Adventure Day and then we're going to be moving to Art of Animation that night to kick off the Disney portion of our trip.

We went through plenty of back and forth on what we should do. While we would be open to extending the trip, maybe arriving sometime during the weekend, my friend has a choir concert she is participating in on that Sunday. Plus, extending it might just be a little too much vacationing for this family. So we agreed on cutting down a day at Disney to allow time for us to experience Universal.

But other than that, everything else is the same. We're still sailing on the cruise on Monday, December 11 - Friday, December 15, and we're still staying in Disney before that. Slowly, everything is starting together and while it is still early, according to Google we're 159 days out from the trip, there's kind of a sense of relief in knowing that things are starting to come together and that plans are starting to take shape along with being able to book things.

For one thing, I am glad that we were able to get everything with the cruise settled, well, most things. We still have to add the Disney transfers from the Art of Animation to the port, which is fine. I have been reading up on them and have been looking into all of the information I can about checking in and then how taking Disney transfers from a resort means that we wouldn't have to choose a PAT time and could potentially get on the cruise earlier. Our only other cruise experience was back in 2018 and we did have a travel agent. Things were also different back then. But, as a family, we had flown in the day of and honestly weren't that concerned with whatever PAT we were going to get or what time we were going to get on board. If I remember correctly, we had gotten there in the afternoon when it was essentially open boarding. This time, if I'm reading it right, we'll get there early and be part of one of the early boarding groups.

As for the cruise itself, we're going to be split pretty much in half for rooms. That's how it's going to be at every location we're at. It will be 4 adults in one room and then 4 adults and the child in the other. For the cruise specifically, since there was a room of 5, we were going to be looking for one of the rooms that had a murphy bed and could sleep 5. Then, we had to go back and look at those rooms and see if there were other rooms close by that would allow for us to stay near each other.

Thankfully, we were able to find a room that had the murphy bed and then also have a connecting room for the other 4. I believe we're on Deck 7, which I don't think will be that bad. As far as sleeping arrangements in the room go, we're not entirely sure of that, at least the room of 4 adults isn't quite yet, but I'm assuming for the other room, my parents will sleep in the bed, my sister's boyfriend will sleep on the pull-out couch, and then my sister and her son will sleep together on the murphy bed.

Honestly, I was expecting there to be more difficulty in trying to find rooms that were close enough together, but I'm thankful that it didn't turn out to be an issue for us and may have even worked in our favor. I'm excited to go on the Wish, and while it may not actually be my first choice of ship for the Disney fleet that I want to go on, I think it'll be an amazing time. I'm already looking at videos and on the internet about things that I should know before we get on. I like to be prepared, what can I say.

 

[Riss]

Trying to plan Disney World

One would think that with my family having been to Disney multiple times before, that it would get a little easier in planning. Well, not always. It's not like we had any blatant difficulties in attempting to plan the trip, but it was more like trying to figure out what we want to do since we were also taking my best friend and my youngest sister's boyfriend, both of who haven't really been to Disney before. For my best friend, the last time she was there was when we were in high school, before the first edition of Magic Bands even existed. My youngest sister's boyfriend, on the other hand, went with us in September 2022, but we had literally only stayed for 2 nights and only went to Epcot and MNSSHP. This time, we were looking at staying for much longer and hitting all of the parks.

My dad is a strong supporter of park hoppers, so no matter when we go, we're always going to get them. Whether we have a need for them or not, my dad will always suggest we get park hoppers. They're like the non-negotiable part of the trip for him. Therefore we knew we were going to get those. But with the adding in of Universal, we started to think about when we should go and what we should do to go back and forth from Universal to Disney. We landed on staying at the Hard Rock to utilize the Express Pass Unlimited and then use a car service to head to Disney. In those discussions, we also expanded the trip to start on December 4. The original day was Tuesday, December 5, but according to my youngest sister, she pointed out that everyone would probably take off the day before, so why not try to go down a day earlier and extend our time? Everyone was in agreement, so the decision was made.

The other thing that my family has done in every trip after high school, besides the September 2022 trip, is stay at Art of Animation. We love the big characters around the resort and for my nephew, who turned 4 in May, every turn brings something new and amazing to his eyes. It also helps that he really likes all of the movies that are showcased in the different sections. We have stayed in the Finding Nemo section every time, due to its close proximity to everything and the fact that he probably loves Nemo the most, but we do find ourselves walking the rest of the property to see everything else.

We also knew, with the amount of people we have on the trip, that we would need two rooms. We needed two rooms last time we had gone, in May 2022, and had the rooms next to each other. When making that request, I had forgotten that the rooms were so large, as they're family suites, and that having rooms right next to each other was pretty far away from each other. This time, I've modified my thought process and our request to put in that we want to be across from each other. The doors of the suites across the hall are much closer than being next door to each other and it would make going between rooms much easier.

But figuring out the room configuration, the dates, and where we were going to stay at Disney might've been the easy part. The next thing we had to do was figure out what we should do for park days and also about MVMCP, which will be our first time attending.

 

[Riss]

Some happy additions

In the last couple of things, some things have definitely changed and for the better and that is that we're adding one more to this trip to round out our number to ten! No, no one has had a baby, but rather we're bringing along another child that is practically like family to us!

To give some background, my family started watching this little boy since he was six months old. He is now seven, going to be eight by the time we go on the trip. Recently, we haven't been watching him as much as we had in the past, due to a multitude of reasons, and so, we decided to go ahead and plan this trip without him. Well, over the weekend, we were toying with the idea of him potentially coming. So, we reached out to his mother, who then asked his father, and who then approved him coming with us! We then asked him and while he initially rejected, since he has watched scary movies and is slightly afraid of airplanes and being on the ocean, he eventually changed his mind and wanted to go with everyone. So, we have officially added him on.

Now with that, everything was actually set up for us to be able to add an additional person on all of our reservations. At the Hard Rock at Universal, we booked two rooms that sleep five, he just has to be added on, and then for Art of Animation, we have two family suites, so it's easy for him to be added on there as well. The difficult part, which I told my family in the beginning, was if we added him, we would have to change our cruise plans and that was because we booked connecting rooms that only slept a total of nine people.

So began my search in seeing what the other possibilities were. We could split and do three different rooms, but then that meant we'd have to find three together, instead of two, and who knew if there was even going to be anything close. But then I started looking at the verandah rooms. My family had briefly discussed the possibility of getting a verandah or maybe attempting to upgrade to a verandah. Also, I had to look in there since it says that all of the Oceanview rooms are sold out for our sailing, all of the ones that sleep five at least are. When I began poking around in there, I was surprised to find four neighboring rooms on Deck 10 with the two middles ones connecting, on what is referred to as the bump out verandah. What was even better was that they both slept five.

I have successfully booked those rooms for my family and so now instead of just a Deluxe Family Oceanview Stateroom, we are now in a Deluxe Family Oceanview Stateroom with Verandah, category 4A. This is definitely exciting to us as we're going to be staying in a new room type we've never stayed in before and because we get to bring the child that is practically a member of our family! We're about 126 days away from our vacation!

 

[Riss]

Reserved our dining

Wow, time sure flies when you're trying to plan a Disney vacation. We are only 48 days out from the first day of our trip, which meant that we booked our dining about almost two weeks ago. Everything seems to be taking shape regarding the trip. We're in the midst of booking transportation for us to get from Universal to Disney and then also booking transportation for us to use to get from our house to the airport and then back when we return. One of the last big things that we had to do, though, was dining.

The question always was what we were going to do and what we wanted to aim for. My family absolutely loves the dining plan and are bummed that we'll be missing it by a month. But still, we're not trying to let that hold us back.

The child that we're taking, who will be 8 on this trip, experienced character dining when we had taken him when he was almost 3. My nephew, who is 4, has never done character dining. He rotates through a variety of liked characters with his more recent being Winnie the Pooh. We had done Crystal Palace in the past with the child and did enjoy it. After speaking with my youngest sister and the rest of everyone else that's going, we thought that Crystal Palace might be a good place since it would allow my nephew to see the Winnie the Pooh characters.

As for other dining locations, I know we wanted to get the Fantasmic dining package, however, I had read on here that it was being glitchy and sometimes not showing up. That proved to be true when our 60 day mark opened and we had looked to see about booking that. More on that later.

In the meantime, my youngest sister was also thinking about possibly doing something on our MVMCP day, like in the morning before the party. I'm not sure how she landed on it, but she suggested trying for Chef Mickey's. I knew that it was supposedly a hard ADR to get, which I had informed her of. But it wasn't like it was something that was a must do for us. It was more of a if we get it, we get it type of feeling since we knew that we still wanted to be on the look out for the Fantasmic dining package and was toying with the possibility of potentially dropping one, if we got them both and if Fantasmic released.

Well, on the 60 day mark, I got up a little bit earlier than 6am, I typically wake up then to get ready for work anyway, and went and joined my youngest sister so we could make them together. We knew we had a lot of people to account for. There were already 10 of us and then two sets of my brother's coworkers are going. One is coming with his mom and he other is coming with his wife and two children. We hadn't heard anything back from the family, but the other coworker that was coming with his mom wanted to be included on the Chef Mickey's. At the time our plan was to get Crystal Palace breakfast on 12/7 and since their flight was arriving at 12pm that day, they obviously wouldn't have been around.

I think Crystal Palace was the first one we looked at. Our first day in Disney is Wednesday, December 7 and so we wanted to start the day off with breakfast there, although when we went to look, there weren't any reservations available. During this time, we had split it so that I was going to be looking for a reservation of 6 and my sister would be looking for 6 on her account. But we had discussed the possibility beforehand about there possibly not being any reservations and since she really wanted to take my nephew there, we had to make a decision on which park reservation we wanted to switch.

We ended up agreeing on Saturday, December 9 that we'll switch our reservation from Animal Kingdom to Magic Kingdom. Looking on that day, we were able to get two reservations of 6, changing the number to 6 since my brother's coworker and his mom would be able to join. We had gotten our reservations at the same time, even, at 8:20am.

Next, we looked for Fantasmic and couldn't find it, it was showing as not available, so we jumped to do Chef Mickey's for Friday, December 8, the day that we're attending the party. Originally, I was able to get a reservation for 9:45am and my sister got one for around 10:15am, but shortly after, we were able to change hers to 9:50am, a much closer time.

On that day, those were the only two that we had made, but we both were going to keep a lookout for the Fantasmic dining package.Well, jump to yesterday. I saw on here that the dining packages had opened, although I only saw it in the afternoon and they had been opened a while. i immediately jumped on and was able to snag a reservation for 6 for Hollywood and Vine as part of the package for a late lunch at 3:45pm. Dinner would've been more preferable for our group, but they didn't have any reservations available. Immediately after I had gone into my sister's account to make the reservation for the other group, but couldn't find any. In a slight panic, I texted her to tell her that and she responded shortly after that she had gotten a reservation for 5 for 3:50pm. We were still missing one person and so al little while after that, we make a single reservation for one person, on my brother's account, for 3:50pm.

Now, after having all of these reservations, the question is whether we should keep them all or drop one. I think we should just keep them all. But only time will tell.