Today it is officially six weeks until I leave for Disney. I'm hoping to blog the whole trip, and I thought I'd spend the next six weeks giving some background and outlining my plans for the trip.
My first trip to Walt Disney World was when I was eleven as the centrepiece of a trip around the world with my parents and older brother and sister. I was instantly hooked on Disney parks.
Four years later, my brother was living in America, so my parents and I went to visit him, with a stopover at Disneyland Resort in Anaheim (so far my only visit there). Being a teenager, I was a little bit "too cool" for Disney [I put that in quotes because I was not in anyway actually cool as a teenager], but I still had a great time.
Once I got past my teenage years, I got over caring whether Disney was cool or not, and as my 21st birthday approached I was sure that what I wanted to do for my 21st birthday was go back to Disney World. We ended up spending a month in the US including 11 nights at Disney World - my brother was able to join us for a few days as a surprise. This was the first trip that I planned obsessively for. I bought 3 different guidebooks from Amazon and signed up at touringplans.com. I downloaded menus and entertainment schedules to my iPod (this was before the days of iPhones). I made spreadsheets and worked out step by step touring plans.
If my trip at age 11 got me hooked on trips to Disney parks, my trip at age 21 got me hooked on planning trips to Disney parks.
When I was studying to get my Speech Pathology degree and simultaneously dealing with living away from home for the first time and dealing with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, sometimes the only thing that kept me going was planning the trip to Disney World we would go on when I graduated in 2010. My Mum and I visited my brother in Boston for a week and then the three of us went down to Orlando for a week. A highlight of the trip was a day visit to Universal Studios for the soft opening of the Wizarding World of Harry Potter.
It was a great trip, but it wasn't long before I wanted to go back to Disney again. My parents and I decided to do a trip to Japan in 2013 with visits to Universal Studios in Osaka and Tokyo Disney Resort. Planning for that trip had the added layer of complexity that most of the information I could find on important planning topics like crowd levels and wait times was in Japanese. But I muddled my way through and figured out a detailed plan which we affectionately nicknamed 'the bible'. Tokyo Disney Resort was awesome, although it lacked a little bit of the magic which makes Disney World special.
By that point it had been announced that the Wizarding World of Harry Potter was going to be expanded in Orlando, so within a year of my trip to Japan I was already planning a return trip to Orlando with my Mum, on the tail end of a trip to Canada (a first for both of us). Unfortunately, that trip had to be cancelled when Mum was diagnosed with cancer.
I didn't want to go to Canada alone, but the thought of a solo Disney trip sounded fun, and I could still visit my brother and his wife in Boston. When I realised it was going to be Disneyland's 60th anniversary I decided it would be fun to go there too, especially since it's been so long since my last visit. My plans gradually started to fall into place. My brother and his wife decided to join me for part of my Orlando trip but parts of the trip still remain solo.
And now it's only six weeks until I leave...!
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