Tag: WDW tickets

Little Cards Of Joy

by mkingdon, posted in Walt Disney World

We have defeated the 80’s and we are at 79 days folks. FastPass day approaches more quickly than my ulcer and with that in mind a welcome and significant delivery came this week.

These little bits of plastic were a very welcome distraction from a week at work I will long remember and yet wish to forget. It was a busy one.

That photo also demonstrates how dirty my laptop is. That’s a result of spending its three year life with me eating my lunch whilst working. There’s probably a whole sandwich somewhere in that keyboard.

Along with the tickets and their inherent ability to get our FastPasses sorted in a bit came news, well more rumours, of a tiered system at DHS. The theory is that all rides will be Tier 1 and all shows Tier 2 and you will only be able to book one Tier 1 and two Tier 2s. Now, I have my doubts that this is actually going to happen, as rumoured, when Galaxy’s Edge opens, mainly as Disney have already said that there will be no FastPasses for Star Wars stuff, at least initially.

It doesn’t sound great though, especially for those long time visitors who have seen all the shows a lot and prefer to do the rides, but I think this may be a symptom of the fears Disney have over the crowds they are expecting and how to control them.

For us, certainly whilst Freddie is so young (and short) it won’t affect us too much. He (and Tom) are still relative newbies, so doing the shows is fine and many of the rides Freddie can’t do yet. Disney will do what Disney will do, and some of the meltdowns I’ve seen on those very sensible and level headed WDW Facebook groups over this is just another reason why I very rarely contribute to any of them.

This year is very much a bonus, we shouldn’t be going year, so I am going to try and be as sanguine as possible when the time comes to get our FastPasses. I will of course fail and be sat at my keyboard, with war paint on and wild eyes, hammering sandwich riddled keys whilst screaming about how shit the My Disney Experience web site is as it crashes for the seventh time that morning and it’s only ten past seven……

Sorry, I just had a flashback to last year…..

If we can get on some stuff, and maybe benefit from the DHS crowds by bagging Pandora related rides, which we couldn’t last year, then all will be well. What will be will be……well, I almost believed that myself.

So 49 days till FastPass fun and games. I’m at the stage where I’m looking for ways to make the holiday seem closer than it is. For example, there are only two more pay days until we leave. See, it’s sooooo close.

In less frivolous news, Louise endured a trip to A&E during last week. The pain levels she was experiencing led to suspicion of a stone of some variety. X-rays, prodding and tests of all her liquids over many hours seemed to rule that out and a follow up visit to out patients a couple of days later confirmed that. As welcome as that news was it didn’t really explain the root cause, but she’s slowly getting better, and should be back at work tomorrow.

She is of course now on trial, having to prove her fitness to travel to Florida without the need to visit our friends at Centracare. As much as our Platinum reward card comes in handy, its to be avoided if we can.

Till the next time……

Breakfast Epiphanies

by mkingdon, posted in mkingdon, Walt Disney World

I didn’t have room/time to tell you last week, as I was too busy moaning about how I was absolutely in the right to be obsessed about a holiday. So, I’ll tell you now.

It would appear that I made a planning mistake!

I know, I know. I didn’t believe it either. A man of my experience, knowledge and girth does not make planning mistakes. The plan knows better than to include one. However, out of the blue Rebecca messaged our group chat thing (see how down with the kids and fly I am?) asking if the plan included a character breakfast.

By now, I know the plan. I don’t know it in absolute detail yet. I haven’t allowed my memory to retain all its glory yet as there is still the possibility of change until FastPasses are secured, but I know the general gist. So I referred to the plan, without referring to it….

I checked it twice.

It would appear that the plan did not contain said character breakfast, and for all the reasons already stated, this must be correct and as I had planned it.

Rebecca then pointed out that at some point in the past she had asked if we could do one, for Freddie’s sake. This rang a bell now, including the thin veneer of an excuse that this was to be for Freddie’s benefit.

Drat.

No matter. I rolled up my sleeves, fired up the laptop and got to work. It was a welcome distraction from Love Island to be honest which has now been on TV longer than Coronation Street.

As I was logging on to the laptop and stuff, Emily chipped in that if we were going to do one then she’d like it to be O’hana. Bloody demanding these daughters.

It only took a few minutes until I was satisfied. Wahey, that’s like the good old days when I wrote mildly amusing trip reports. Have it!

I had to identify a day in the plan with a morning that looked relatively free. I scanned the rest days we had planned and spotted a likely candidate. The morning when we would be doing MNSHHP in the evening had been designated a non-park day, with a lunch at Miller’s Ale House. As much as that is a nice place to eat, with O’hana now in play it was dumped quicker than Adam’s partners in Love Island. What? I am forced to watch the bloody thing every night. I can’t help absorbing some of the detail.

So we have secured a 9.20am breakfast on the 9th of September. I estimate this means that we will need to be up some time around 4am to make it on time.

In other news, with fifty odd days to go, Louise took it upon herself to let me know that I’m a fat bastard and drastic action was needed. She has got us both membership at the local gym for the next six weeks. Now, I have been eating more healthily for a week or two already so my body fat index is now close to 50% anyway, but the odd work out won’t do any harm I suppose. I have been every day this week, and felt close to death on each occasion, so I think I’m doing it right.

I mainly do cardio, as I don’t want to take my now naturally muscle-bound body and turn it into some sort of intimidating freak show by doing lots of weight work. I just want to lose a pound or fourteen. The fact that I can see no actual difference yet is not at all upsetting or demoralising. If I were to eat excessively for the same time period I would surely see the rewards of that by now. There is no justice.

So bear this in mind when you are shaking your head in disbelief at the amount of food I’m getting through on holiday. I will have earned every artery clogging mouthful. Don’t judge me!

I talk a lot about milestones, and another enjoyable and familiar one happened this week. Our theme park tickets dropped through the front door. For those interested, I used Floridatix. They have a deposit option which helped me order the 14 day ultimates at £350 each when they had a sale on a few weeks ago.

Here is the mandatory photo of our precious arrival…

It was pleasing to see that most of them sported a character that the girls could fight over (them being almost 23 and 21 changes nothing) and now we need to dig out all our magic bands from previous trips and go through the exercise of linking tickets to bands. Getting man on the moon was simpler and I implore Disney, in the name of Gary Sinise’s hair on Mission Space, to make this stuff easier.

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We also got our MNSHHP tickets, which were surprisingly not flimsy paper based things, but rather sturdy plastic affairs that one could easily mistake for a theme park ticket. Not that a man of my experience might……anyway moving on.

We’re getting closer folks.

During last week I was inundated with a message from a blog reader asking if I was going to do a trip report for this holiday. With a surge of demand like that, who am I to say no? As it has been the case for the last few, I’ll be posting it here, probably one day per week, so it will last roughly half the time of the current series of Love Island and will contain me sporting my “Love Island” physique, after my gym exploits.

So spread the word, tell your friends, tell your family, tell all those folks who used to go on The Dibb! This is where it’s at. If you think “it” is a middle-aged bloke recounting another Florida trip with the odd knob gag shoe horned in. Build it and they will come….

Till the next time…..Save on Orlando's Best Theme Parks!

Disney Does Detail

by mkingdon, posted in Walt Disney World

For us lucky Florida fans, the existence of both Universal and Walt Disney World in close proximity means that we get a whole lot of fun experiences without needing to travel very far. I’ve blogged before about the competition between them being very good for us as it keeps them adding new stuff and trying to outdo each other for your hard-earned dollars.

This week we had the excitement of our theme park tickets arriving in the post. This simple transaction highlighted to me the difference between the two. You probably know that if given a choice between visiting just Disney parks or just Universal ones then the former would win quite easily. There are more of them for a start but they just hold more of a place in my affections for reasons that I can’t easily articulate. Maybe this very small example might help to demonstrate how Disney do the little things very well, adding up to an excellent overall experience.

The WDW tickets arrived first. Each one of the five had a different character picture on it, so for those with smaller kids, the fun starts immediately as two of your children rip each other to pieces as they both want to be Mickey. The cards are substantial, by which I mean plastic and look like they would survive a trip or two down Splash Mountain.

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That is if they needed to because of course once you get your tickets you can start to feel ever closer to the magic by linking them up to your My Disney Experience App along with your on site accommodation if that’s what you are doing. Then if you’re staying on site, you can customise your Magic Band, which is basically choosing a colour, but it’s YOUR Magic Band and YOUR colour. This is important!

This makes the whole thing feel real, personal and yes exciting. Seeing all your names, plans and tickets staring back at you from your app makes the holiday come to life. You are immediately anticipating that day when you can start to book FastPasses too. The holiday has already started to some extent. Sure linking up the tickets can be a bit fiddly, especially if you try to do it early in the day in the UK when Disney seem to like to take their servers down during their night-time hours but you don’t mind the faffing and time it takes. This is your holiday!

I’ve often spoken about how a trip to WDW lasts forever. All the planning, ADR booking, FastPass reserving and general planning can take months. Then when you get back, if you are sad, like me, you write it all up too, which takes a while too. It’s all good.

Now of course much of that is true for Universal too, but I do think they are missing a trick here. In contrast to the experience above, a few days later our Universal tickets arrived. Again, they were real tickets, but they are flimsy paper things which wouldn’t last one trip around Bluto’s Bilgerats no matter how sturdy your fanny pack is!

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You have to write your name on, manually, in pen and sign it. That’s it. No real excitement, no personal connection, no customisation for your unique trip and tastes. Once you get there of course it doesn’t matter so much as the Universal park experience is excellent, but this is, in my view, where Disney win your hearts and minds and Universal is something you do if you have the time and money to fit it into your plans.

We’ll be staying on site with them too, but I can’t set anything up in their app and the whole thing feels much less personal and engaging. I know there are folks who prefer Universal for all sorts of reasons and that is of course down to everyone’s own taste, but I think Universal could do better here. I did read with interest that they appear to be trialing facial recognition for Front Of Line Access for on site guests. If it works, great! Last time we were pointed at a small self-serve photo booth in the foyer and left to figure out how to create our own (flimsy paper) Front Of Line passes to show. Again, it’s not a big deal, but you pay a heavy premium to stay on site and I think they should give you something to reflect that and your “VIP” status. Flashing some sort of card, band or golden (laminated) ticket would be better and hopefully they are moving in that direction.

I love both sets of park of course and we LOVE the on site experience at Universal. As always seems to have been the case though, they could learn a trick or two in the details from Disney.

Till the next time…..

Look At My Ageing Baubles…

by mkingdon, posted in mkingdon

Thank you to you all for your kind wishes and lovely comments on last week’s post. If I could I would invite you all to the wedding but I’m tight so I won’t. That looks like it will be in 2020 by the way, which is a pleasingly long time off giving us some time to eBay our every possession to fund a wedding that a Russian Oligarch may find opulent (probably).

Louise has been working this weekend tending to the weeping sores and boils of the Bolton community which has meant that the enormous responsibility of putting the xmas decorations fell onto the shoulders of Emily and I. Louise normally does it as that is simpler than us doing it and then her re-doing it all shortly afterwards. She is quite particular about such things and to be fair it pays off as out tree always looks lovely.

So I did the wise thing and just did the heavy lifting of locating the tree, assembling it and moving around all the furniture to accommodate it in the nominated space. I then bowed out gracefully and left Emily to execute this year’s colour scheme.

She did well and the final result passed the ultimate test and not one bauble was moved. As we found the suitable baubles to match the instructed colours we did of course come across some blasts from the past.

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The fact that a delicate bauble has survived pretty much intact in our house for fifteen years is a Christmas miracle. Some though have not fared quite so well and the ravages of time, so familiar to my aging body have not been kind.

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Safe to say he did not make the tree this year. The theme was not shabby woolen tat.

Once complete Emily captured the dogs posing in front of it.

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Don’t worry, they got the doggy treat Emily was dangling above them to get them to pose like that.

My four-day working weeks continue and it is lovely to think that I now only have eight more days at work until my long festive break. I may spend the entire fortnight in my dressing gown and a food coma.

As we move closer to Christmas then our holiday moves into sharper focus too. We’ll need to be getting our Disney park tickets early in the new year so that we are in position to do our FastPass + bookings in February. I think we’re going to go with one of those Magic Your Way things as we only have four days in Disney. Did I mention that we have a lot to cram in? Those 4 day hoppers are currently around £312 whereas a 14 day ultimate is about £100 more each. Normally I like to have the flexibility to be able to pop into to Disney at any time but with time so tight and the price difference it just isn’t worth it.

We can pick up the Universal tickets just before we leave with no such incentive to have them 60 days before we get there. I wonder how long it will be before they cotton on to that.

By the way, after I highlighted the cabana nonsense a couple of weeks ago, did anyone see the news about the “express” bus service being offered at WDW? $15 a day per person to get some sort of VIP experience. Now, we always hire a car, as that independence is really important to us, plus we like to venture out and about off site a lot and to be honest I like driving over there in what is usually a lovely motor. So the thought of paying extra for that sort of thing is not something we’d ever do, but it’s another extra earner that doesn’t really feel right to me. Is anyone thinking of using that?

From what I’ve read one thing that might be worth using the service for is that they intend to go through some backstage areas to speed up journeys. That might be interesting to see, but I doubt it will be taking a route through anywhere too interesting or sensitive. For a family of four, I’d venture that for $60 a day you could Uber your way around the parks, could you not? Anyway, I suppose if some people do use this new thing it will lessen the load on the normal service which may be helpful.

Anyway, time to go and walk several animals and then think about what is for tea. Louise has been taking it easy at work all weekend but she’ll expect to be fed when she gets in.

Till the next time……

A Ticket To The Magic

by mkingdon, posted in mkingdon, Walt Disney World

The post doesn’t often deliver things to brighten my life. Bills, junk and more bills are the daily routine for those still intent on killing trees to tell me stuff, but this week, a rare delivery of joy tumbled through our front door. Well, actually it tumbled out of our post lady’s hand into mine as I signed for it.

ticketsUpon opening said package, our upcoming holiday raced a little closer towards us as our theme park tickets tumbled out. It is always a significant milestone in any WDW countdown as I’m sure most of you can appreciate. Once the weekend came and I had a little time, I undertook the task of linking each Disney ticket to our Disney app thingy.

For five out of the six it worked like a dream, seamlessly linking each scanned ticket to the person for which it was intended. As a side note, I decided who got what ticket, as I wanted to avoid the ugly scenes of Nana and Grandad wrestling each other to the ground for the Mickey ticket last time! The final ticket decided it didn’t want to play ball and wouldn’t link. However, when I then tried to link it again, the app told me that ticket had already been linked. Evaluating the two options of cancelling the whole trip and going to Butlins instead or seeking technical assistance from Disney, I opted for the latter.

I called the number suggested to me by the app, disregarding the enormous expense of a call to the US, as I am just crazy like that. I was connected quickly after a few IVR choices and was soon embraced in the warm, welcoming Disney tones of some chap on the help line. The US accent alone evokes every positive memory of every previous trip and I could almost feel the Florida sunshine coming down the phone line. The service was of course outstanding, with courtesy, apologies for the inconvenience and a promise to have things resolved promptly. He apologised again for having to put me on hold for a moment to check things out, but he needn’t have, as when the first few bars of the hold music kicked in I filled up and had to compose myself quickly as he returned to line.

A quick refresh of the app confirmed that the issue was resolved and every traveler was now linked. Not content with sorting out my problem, he enquired, with seemingly genuine interest, when our trip was, where we were staying and how long we would be staying with them. If I could have hugged him I would. One step from me suggesting we get married, he thanked me for my call and instructed me to have a magical day. Upon ending the call I sat collecting myself for a few moments before carrying on with every day life. The latter, being at times consistently challenging, with this week being no exception, this is an insight into how the Disney magic really operates. Whenever you engage with the Disney brand, be it on the phone, in a store or actually in the parks, it is that temporary escape from what can be quite sucky reality and long may it continue.

You will notice from the picture above that our Universal tickets also arrived. As much as I love those parks and the on site experience, for me personally, they just haven’t yet delivered that immersive experience of that elusive magic that will always see us visit Disney, with Universal being a casual and occasional addition.

Aside from tales of grown men over reacting to a simple call to Disney, I again find myself exhausted on a Sunday after two gigs on successive nights this weekend. Whilst I have no interest or much respect for their musical output, I tip my hat to the Rolling Stones, who tour in their 70’s. Two gigs in a weekend and I am ready for the scrap heap. Mind you, they don’t have to work all week and then transport, carry, set up and then take down their own gear, so I suspect they wouldn’t  be in great shape either after carting our gear up and then down two flights of stairs last night.

Both nights were good and I am now becoming much more comfortable with the whole thing, feeling like I know all the songs well enough to relax a little. We have a weekend off next week, but then three weddings on the bounce over the next couple of weekends. After that, we have a fairly lengthy break as there are lots of holidays within the band, including of course mine.

I must go now to stare at my theme park tickets a little more.

Till the next time…..