We had several options to consider.
When to take the trip? When knew we had to get a bargain so we would have to go during off peak (slow) season (which is usually during the school season when most people can't go) when the rates are cheaper.
Where to stay? Jared and I went to Disney for a belated honeymoon and stayed for 10 days at a beautiful Wyndham Resort (off Disney property) through Priceline and paid just under $50/ night ($500 for the whole trip). With cheap eating and minimal purchases, the budget for our first trip (with gas) was just $1500. But we knew we would double that this trip (since we had tripled our numbers since then:). So we had to decide if we wanted to stay on Disney property or off. It's cheaper off property, but there are some conveniences with little people that are worthwhile. I spent a LOOOOOT of time on the internet and on http://disneyworld.disney.go.com/ and on a few awesome blogs( http://land.allears.net/blogs/dnews/ and http://www.themouseforless.com/ ) that had great info and tips. I must have priced and repriced different scenarios of that vacation at least 1000 times (seriously). Tweeking this and that. Since we were traveling with 6 people that put us in a different boat than the customary 4 people per room. We were going to need 2 rooms or a suite (hotel mandates not ours). There are a whole lot of off property resorts that offer multi-room suites for really reasonable prices. And we almost booked with one of those. But when I found an excellent after-Christmas rate at Disney's Fort Wilderness Cabins that was 40% off, plus FREE Disney Dining (AMAZING!!) we were only saving about $400 (after you purchase park tickets and add the food back on) by staying off property. We decided it was worth it to spend the extra money and stay on property. WE. WERE. RIGHT.
I could just kick myself now that I didn't take any pictures of our cute cabin. Here are the stock photos Disney offers.
But this place was so perfect for us. We scored a cabin near the bus route but off the main road- so it was very quiet. Everyone out there was looking for the same kind of experience and we had no problems with loud neighbors. We were able to park our van right outside the cabin and didn't move it until we left. Our Dining Plan included a quick lunch (which is really a nice lunch at a quick restaurant), snacks, and a sit down dinner (which I made advance reservations for every night at the best places we were really wanting to go to and that determined the park we went to each day). We ate breakfast in our cabin (it was super great to have a kitchen- plus they did the dishes every day!!). The kids wouldn't have wanted to go out to eat each morning anyway. They wanted to go have fun. So we got up whenever (usually around 8, but we were totally relaxed) ate and were on our way quickly. One reason we had wanted to stay on property was for Ethan so that if he was completely tuckered out one of us could run back easily with him and let him get a nap while one of us stayed at the park with the kids. But who wants to leave all the fun??? Not me. Not Jared. Not the kids. And Ethan was such a trooper. He'd just lay down on Jared's shoulder and zonk out for a little bit then be ready to go again. Our stroller was like our traveling home. Every morning we'd load it up with a whole day worth of changes of clothes and jackets and snacks and head out. Definitely glad I had the double stroller. I considered taking something smaller to move around like an umbrella stroller, but there were always at least 2 tired kids who wanted a ride and they'd rotate in and out. They all took a turn at some point. Plus it carried all our gear.
I carried the camera everywhere and, even though the Photopass folks took pictures, I did too. Boy was I glad I did. I didn't realize until I got home that they were $15/ picture!! Yikes! But fortunately, I had also taken the pictures from similar angles as the Photopass ones so my pictures were almost identical. I only ended up buying 2 pictures that I couldn't live without.
Part of vacation for Jared and me is the eating out. We love good food. Who doesn't?? And we had some amazing food at Disney. Several of the blogs I had read talked about ways to eat cheap and bring your own meals. I wasn't really interested in being stressed about how much money we spent at each meal and how much we couldn't spend on the next one. And how we couldn't afford the nice places we wanted to go to. So it really REALLY was so nice for me and worked out great that we bought the package that had the free dining plan. I wouldn't have probably sought it out myself because I didn't know much about it. But, boy, am I glad we got that one. When we made our Disney Reservation I started making dinner reservations. I knew the nice places go quickly and didn't want to be out of luck. I was able to get all the places we wanted. We had a nice (super nice!) dinner every night at each park. Then that determined which park we went to each day. It's so easy to do. You just go to any restaurant or vendor and ask if they're part of the Disney Dining Plan (usually it's posted actually), then buy whatever you want for the most part (there are a few places that you can only pick from a selected part of their menu). Then you give them your Disney Key to the World and they just scan it and it prints out a tally of how many meals and snacks you've used and how many you have left. Just for fun (purely for our own info) we kept the receipts at every quick service meal, sit down meal, and snack we ate the entire time. The DDP would've been like $850 or so to add on to our package (we got it FREE!). Our total food receipts came to just over $1250. Wow!!! First of all, I had no idea we could spend that much just on food in a week. And second- awesome! What a good deal. And we ate at restaurants that we never would've otherwise. Monday we ate at 1900 Park Fare and had a delicious gourmet buffet dinner with Cinderella, Prince Charming, and the evil stepsisters. That meal receipt was $150 for all of us!! We never would've gone and spent that money right out of our pockets. Every day was like that. The kids would ask for those ridiculously priced Mickey Mouse Ice Cream Cones and we'd say "sure, take your card". It was soooooo nice and sooooo much less stressful. We will definitely do the DDP again. Definitely.
When to go? We got our awesome amazing deal for 2 weeks after Christmas- just when everyone else would've been going back to school. If you looked on the Disney site, the rates were high high high for Christmas and the week after, but the week after that (the first of January) they plummeted. Score. So we just pre-approved the vacation time with Coleson's teacher (she said they'd be having an easy first-week-after-break week anyway) and we were good to go. I was a bit concerned about what the weather would be like in January. Who wants to go out for a beautiful beach and parks vacation when it's 30/40 degrees? Not me. I really didn't want it to ruin our dream trip. But the price was so good. I scoured tons of websites and almanacs about Florida weather and it seemed like the weather could go either way. We were so so so so so relieved when the 10-day forecast started showing 70 degree weather for the week of our trip. SO relieved. In fact, the day we arrived at the beach the weather spiked up to 80 degrees for that day and the next (which were our 2 full days at the beach). It was 65/70ish all week at Disney. Which we decided was absolutely perfect weather. Cool in the morning and evening (perfect with jackets) and the perfect t-shirt and walking weather all day long. We did get caught off guard one day when we stayed later than we thought we would and it got really chilly and then we had the boat ride back to our resort and that was cold. But other than that, the weather was perfect. Which turned out to be more of a blessing than we could've imagined because on our drive home Saturday and Sunday, an ice storm hit Georgia (and reports said down into Florida) with the coldest weather and more snow than they'd seen in 20 years!! Ha! What a blessing it didn't ruin our trip.
Every night of our 2 week trip (except being at Disney) we Pricelined our hotels. We bought only 1 room for all of us- the kids are small and we really don't mind. Poor Ethan spent every night of the trip in some sort of closet. I thought about taking some funny pictures of the tight spaces we got his little porta-crib to fit into (so he couldn't stand from inside his bed and see me laying in my bed and then scream "Mama!" until he could get me to come get him-which doesn't take long in a hotel room, because you don't want all the kids up and crying for mama in the middle of the night), but Jared didn't want him to know about it when he gets older (thought he might feel less loved or something for being tucked into closets. Weird.) Several hotels let us upgrade to a suite either for free or a really small fee (bonus to traveling off peak travel season). And every hotel had a continental breakfast for us to take advantage of before we took off for the day. We were extremely strict with our budget for the trip. We allotted ourselves a certain amount of money each day (I think it was $115) for hotel, food, and any extras in a specific envelope labeled for that day. If our hotel took $50 we had extra for a nicer dinner. If our hotel took $75, we had less. We were amazed with how far our money stretched each day. Almost every day we closed up our envelope with extra money in it.
So, on to the actual trip.
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