Always Going to See the Mouse

Now that I've gotten started, I'm going to post about one of my best trips ever:

On October 1, 2008 I got an email telling me I won a trip for 4 to Walt Disney World.  As soon as I established that this was not spam, I wanted to know if we would be able to use this for our upcoming trip in the end of October.  They needed a minimum of 45 days notice, so we proceeded with that trip as planned and   I just proceeded to do all my paperwork and wait to be contacted again.

It was the Year of a Million Dreams and I had won 1 of 5 Grand Prizes from Disneyshopping.com.  It consisted of airfare for 4, 4nights/5days in a hotel at Walt Disney World or 3 days/4 nights in Disneyland and (4) 5-day park hopper passes.  I spent some time emailing back and forth with the lady from Disney Destinations regarding the prize until all the arrangements were made for us to go in July of 2009.

Since we won the trip and were paying for neither airfare nor park tickets, we decided to splurge a little on some other stuff.  We planned an appointment for my daughter at the Bippidi Boppity Boutique.  My husband and my son did a tour.  We couldn't get the dining plan, so we made a lot of reservations for character meals and sit down restaurants.  We even planned to rent a car for a few days to go to Universal.  Then we decided it was too much to do in 5 days, so I asked if we could add on a few nights at the hotel.  Then we decided to just go ahead and purchase 10-day hopper tickets and add the no expiration option to them.  In the end, we got a great price on the room and they let us stay in the room we had for the prize.  The tickets we used only 2 days on, so we had enough left for an 8-day trip at another time.

I learned a lot that trip.  I became way more active on some message boards that I frequent and on Facebook.  I made my daughter custom-made Disney outfits for every day that we were there.  I totally admire the ladies and men who do this on a regular basis, because that was a tremendous amount of work and took me the better part of six months to do for one child!

Hope everyone has a nice holiday!