Month: July 2014

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2014 Disney World

FastPass+ time

We finally hit the 60 day mark for our trip. Time to make our FastPass+ selections. FastPass’s don’t really matter too much to us on this trip as most of the attractions we’d normally use a FastPass on we can’t do with little Harry anyway. So this time we decided to use most of our selections on parades and fireworks.

Categories
2014 Disney World

Splurged for a park hopper

Since we will be bringing Little Mr. Unpredictable with us this year, we decided that we should allow for maximum flexibility in our Disney trip plans, so we added the Park Hopper option. It’s pretty expensive but probably worth it for us just in case Harry has a meltdown and causes us to alter our plans. I’m also kinda hoping that he will really enjoy a ride or two and insist that we revisit that ride several times. (I’m also hoping it’s the Haunted Mansion.)

The park hopper option is going to cost us an extra $125 or about $15 per park day or according to our schedule, $21.00 per hop. Of course the likelihood our almost 2-year-old will allow us to follow my carefully planned schedule is slim at best. Our price per hop might be significantly lower if he needs to ride Peter Pan first thing every morning.

We’re also planning to spend a lot of extra time at Epcot due to the Food and Wine Festival so park hopping does have some added benefits for us adults as well.

Categories
2014 Disney World

My Magic Band Experience

We were fortunate to be part of one of the first roll outs of Magic Bands last September during our stay at Disney’s Pop Century resort. Overall I am very pleased with them. We never used cash or our credit cards once. We did have to use our key to the world card at one table service restaurant, I’m not sure why though.

Things I love about Magic Bands:

  • Don’t really need to carry a wallet.
  • The server using our Magic Bands to locate us in Be Our Guest restaurant was so cool.
  • They control everything.
  • They’re always accessible. (This will be much more important on our next trip as trying to juggle money, Harry and a stroller at the same time will be challenging.)

I have two minor annoyances with the Magic Band system.

  1. Typing in a PIN each time is a pain. I see why it’s necessary for security but why can’t it be like some MasterCard/Visa payments that do not require a PIN for low cost items? Maybe it is because Disney doesn’t have any low cost items? 🙂
  2. Sometimes “getting the Mickeys to touch” is difficult. A few instances I had trouble getting the Mickey to turn green. Worse case it took me 2-3 attempts (a couple extra seconds) but maybe increasing the range of the RFID scanner a bit would help? Not really a big deal. The more I used the Magic Band the easier it was to get it to work on the first try.

Other than that, I have no other complaints about the new Magic Bands. I can’t wait to get our new ones during our fall Disney World excursion. Little Harry gets one too. We even let him pick his own colour.

Categories
2014 Disney World

Day 1 Schedule

Tentative schedule for travel day.

7:30 AM – Leave Waterloo
10:00 AM – Arrive at Buffalo Airport
11:30 AM – Lunch
12:20 PM – Flight
2:50 PM – Land in Orlando
3:10 PM – Magical Express to Pop Century
4:10 PM – Check In, Pop Century
4:30 PM – Find groceries, find room
5:00 PM – Dinner at Everything Pop
6:00 PM – Harry goes swimming
8:00 PM – Movies Under the Stars
9:00 PM – Harry’s bedtime,
10:00 PM – Work
11:00 PM – Sleep