We’re headed to Disney World again! This time, I used my 30th as an excuse to plan a trip to WDW in March. The excitement, scraping & saving, and researching has done a great job of distracting me and getting me through our loss of our 8 year old dog, Truffle. I’m finally starting to feel more normal and looking forward to the rest of 2013.
The planning of this trip is definitely different from our last one. First off, we LOVE Bridget at Pixie Vacations and she helped a lot at the beginning of the planning. But we had our heart set on Animal Kingdom and kept looking at ways we could afford it. Only a stroke of good luck allowed us that option. We searched Mouseowners.com for DVC (Disney Vacation Club) owners who were renting out their points and actually found someone with points expiring March 30th. With the expiration so close, they were willing to negotiate with us and we got an incredible deal of $8/point. I would write a whole DVC post but so many people have already done that, so I’ll just link you to one to learn more.
We won’t be flying this time because Cole is now 3 and the cost is more than we can afford. We purchased a new (to us!) car this past summer with 3 rows and a DVD player and thought it would be a great time to try a road trip with our two boys. So we’ll be driving down this time around and stopping part of the way down and back to sleep.
I ended up using TripIt again and still love it for keeping our reservations in order. And I’ve made all of our ADR (advanced dinner reservations) already. All that’s left is our tickets!
One thing I wasn’t aware of on our last trip until we were there was the PhotoPass service. There are photographers all over the parks and you hand your card to them to scan so that any pictures they take of you are uploaded to your account. They can be at locations with characters or randomly throughout the parks. What’s makes this so great is that moms that are normally not in the pictures (like me!), can now be in all of them. And you don’t have to carry a camera around if you don’t want to. AND the pictures are professional quality. AND they’re all included! If you order before you go, you get a pretty nice discount off a CD or the plus package.
Content and/or other value provided by our partner, HTC.
Techmomogy needs to have gadgets though. I cannot wait to use my HTC One X+ in the parks to check in on Facebook and show off pictures of what my family is doing as we’re experiencing everything. An added bonus for this trip is Disney has the “My Disney Experience” app on Android which includes maps, wait times for rides, park hours, character meet times, and more! I am really looking forward to trying this out and reporting back. I’m also planning on bringing our Kodak Playsport again for even more pictures and video. It’s waterproof and rugged, so I don’t have to worry about breaking it throughout our adventures.
To add even MORE to all of this is the possible addition of the new FastPass+ system. We aren’t sure if it will be there when we visit, but this tech family is ready and willing to test it all out.
I would love to bring back information for anyone with questions, so comment below and I will take note for a Q&A post when we get back! 🙂
HTC provided me with a free HTC One X+ in order to participate in Troop One X+ and facilitate all reviews. All opinions are 100% my own.
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