Category: 2014 Disney World

2014 Disney World

Disney World 2014

We’re going again! This time we’ll let little Harry tag along. I figure he’s old enough now to meet Money Mouse. We will be going in the fall and staying at Pop Century again, this time for 9 nights. It will be a VERY different type of trip with the boy as he is too short to go on any “thrill” rides. We will also have to slow down our touring style a bit. Instead of dodging the families with strollers this time we’ll be one of them. It’s not all bad though, with Harry along we can get away with doing more kids centric activities like character dining and meet and greets. I’m sure we’ll feel a little less conspicuous during “Turtle Talk with Crush” not having to pretend one the children at the front is our kid. I’m also happy to use Harry as an excuse to play in the “Honey, I Shrunk The Kids” playground. Oh yah and he’s free. And that’s not a word you hear too often at Disney World.

Tags disney-world

2014 Disney World

Free Dining

Post author By John
Post date June 14, 2014
No Comments on Free Dining

Staying 9 nights at Disney World during free dining equals a lot of food. Unlike last time our plans will be a little more modest. We will not ever again eat 2 table service meals in 1 day, nor will we be scheduling any extra dinner shows out-of-pocket like last time. This year. We will be trying two signature restaurants which will use more dining credits so we won’t have to stuff our selves silly every night. This will even give us a night off to snack around the world in Epcot since we will be going during the food and wine festival.

We made the reservations 180 days in advance, getting up each day at 6am. We got everything we wanted except Be Our Guest. We keep trying several times each day but still no luck.

Here’s our table service dining lineup.

Tags disney-dining, disney-world

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

Tags disney-world-schedule, plan

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.

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? 🙂
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.

Tags disney-world, MagicBand

2014 Disney World

Splurged for a park hopper

Post author By John
Post date July 4, 2014
No Comments on 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.

Tags park-hopper

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.

Tags fastpass

2014 Disney World

Luggage tags

We received our Disney World booklet and luggage tags in the mail today. Leanne and I were a lot more excited than Harry though. I wish they would mail Magic Bands to Canadians 🙁

Tags disney-mail, luggage-tags

2014 Disney World

Frozen Fireworks Spectacular

Post author By John
Post date August 18, 2014
No Comments on Frozen Fireworks Spectacular

Disney has decided to extend their popular Frozen Fireworks Spectacular until the end of September which means we will get to see it!

It also means yet another late night for little Harry. Oh well, he can sleep the rest of the other 51 weeks of the year that we won’t be at Disney World.

Tags frozen, frozen-fireworks, hollywood-studios

2014 Disney World

More Disney Mail

We received another letter from Disney today. Harry was slightly more excited than yesterday.

Inside was a customized Disney brochure with our name and information as well as a neat Dumbo magnet to put on our fridge.

Tags disney-mail, magnet

2014 Disney World

My Disney Experience Video

Post author By John
Post date August 19, 2014
No Comments on My Disney Experience Video

A link to this video was also included in our Disney mail today.

Tags disney-mail, my-disney-experience

2014 Disney World

Letting a 21-month-old choose his own MagicBand colour

Post author By John
Post date August 21, 2014
No Comments on Letting a 21-month-old choose his own MagicBand colour

We let Harry pick his own MagicBand colour…3 times.

The first time was using my iPhone and I was just going to pick the first one he touched on my phone. But then he picked the pink one, twice. Then the default, very un-fun colour of grey. Finally he picked yellow, whew.

Since his little mind is learning more and more every day I decided to let him try picking again. This time he picked green. (Or at least that’s where he first touched on the iPad)

Finally with only 2 days left to choose I let him try one more time and well he just didn’t care, he just wanted to touch everything on the iPad. I need to disable 4 finger app switching as his fingers, plus my fingers, on the iPad at the same time, cause a lot of frustrating app switching.

His MagicBand is now orange because that is the latest colour he has been able to say. He picked up a large orange duck in the bathtub and said “Ownge”. We also did a quick Google image search for orange MagicBands and saw one around some chubby little kid’s arm, which made Leanne go “aw” which meant that was the colour Harry had to have.

On a side note I’m not exactly sure why he even gets a MagicBand as I don’t feel comfortable giving room charging privileges to an almost 2-year-old, and I highly doubt he will need his own key to our room (although I wouldn’t mind him taking the bus back to our room by himself to have a nap in the middle of the day; heck, if he did that I’d gladly give him charging privileges…)

Tags MagicBand, toddler

2014 Disney World

Harry wants to meet Woody

Post author By Leanne
Post date August 30, 2014
No Comments on Harry wants to meet Woody

Can’t wait to see Harry’s reaction when he meets Woody in person! Definitely adding that to our list of must-do character meet-and-greets.

Tags character-meet-and-greet, woody

2014 Disney World

Stroller napping practice

Post author By Leanne
Post date August 31, 2014
No Comments on Stroller napping practice

Stroller napping practice was a success. Hopefully this works as smoothly in the parks. Waking up is always difficult though!

Tags napping, practice, sleep, stroller

2014 Disney World

Harry Sleep

After 19 days of collecting data on Harry’s sleep patterns we have learned that he averages 13.5 hours of sleep each day. He usually sleeps about 11.25 hours at night and has 1 or 2 naps with a combined total of 2.25h.

The schedule we are going to try to put him on is:

8:15 AM – Wake up
9:00 AM – Arrive at park
11:45 AM – Lunch
1:00 PM – Nap in park for 3h or nap in room for 2h
5:00 PM – Dinner
7:30 PM – After dinner nap
8:00 PM – Night time entertainment
10:00 PM – Absolute latest we would be back to our room. Some nights it could be before 9 PM

Note: times and durations are approximates.

Harry has demonstrated that he can adapt to these hours already although I’m not sure

Harry should get 10h of uninterrupted sleep at night and then 4h likely spread out over at least 2 naps during the day.

2014 Disney World

Memory Maker card came today but I’m not sure why

Post author By John
Post date September 4, 2014
1 Comment on Memory Maker card came today but I’m not sure why

Since this is Little Harry’s first (postnatal) trip to Disney World, we thought we would try out Disney’s Memory Maker. It’s expensive (big surprise) but it would be really nice to have photos of the 3 of us together.

I didn’t realize there would be a physical card involved. It looks like the card was automatically linked to our MagicBands already so we probably don’t have to use it. Apparently Disney thought it was important enough to FedEx it to us overnight, internationally. I got excited when I saw the tracking email. I thought Disney had actually started shipping MagicBands to Canadians. My optimism diminished quickly when I noticed the 0.4-lb. weight of the package.

Tags memory maker, photo-pass

2014 Disney World

Cleaning out the fridge

Cleaning out the fridge before we leave… chicken cacciatore on macaroni and cheese.

Tags chicken-cacciatore, clean-out-the-fridge, macaroni and cheese

2014 Disney World

TSA with a toddler

We made it to the gate! Whew! Security wasn’t too bad and we got to do TSA-pre again which meant not removing shoes, liquids or laptops. They even let Harry keep “Tom” after the security lady checked it out carefully first. Leanne also forgot all about the half full milk bottle in her bag and they didn’t even notice.

We stopped at Tim Hortons just before the border and Harry’s cuteness scored him two Timbits.

Harry fell asleep about 20 minutes from the airport. So he is due for a nap.

Right now Leanne is taking him on a tour of the airport.

Tags buffalo-airport, tim-hortons, timbits, toddler, tsa

2014 Disney World

BUF to MCO

Harry was pretty good on the flight until he wanted milk and got a bottle full of water. Then he screamed. Otherwise he was good. He looked like he was going to fall asleep but never did. Right now he is drinking milk on the Disney Magical Express and is saying “Mick”.

Our southwest flight attendant was pretty funny as they often are. We actually sang to someone because it was their birthday. They got us all to press the call button which lit up the entire plane. Then they made him a peanuts pack hat which was pretty cool. Everyone loves Harry.