Signing Up for My Disney Experience

Full Disclosure: This is a backdated post. I wrote it after the blog was created, but have written it in the style of an in-progress blog so that anyone reading from the beginning will get a more sensible narrative than time-jumping like David Freeman through our wedding planning.

I joked earlier in this blog about going through Disney World Withdrawal, and it's not a joke. All of the honeymoon planning that I've been doing has really been making it worse, though. It's gotten to the point where, during a slow moment, I pull out my iPhone and fire up the Disney Parks app, then look at the wait times at various rides of showtimes of various shows, kind of like scrying on the parks through a crystal ball from a distance. I know that sounds sad, and it is, but it's the closest I can get to Disney World for the next 10 months.

As I was doing some more honeymoon planning research, I came  across the My Disney Experience website. This looks like a planning website for anyone (not just Disney wedding people) to help plan out your vacation. It is compatible with an app (named the same thing) for iOS that is like the Disney Parks App on steroids. Plus, this is the app that the MagicBand technology is going to be tied into, which will allow you to book Fastpasses and restaurant reservations. I actually really like the idea, but it seems to touch on something very, very important that I did not realize before: online ADR booking.

Enjoy this image of Future Me after booking ADRs.

See, up until this point, I'd planned on getting up at 6 AM Pacific/9 AM Eastern 6 months to the day before our trip begins to call Disney's dining reservations line and book all of our Advanced Dining Reservations. Thanks to reading up on My Disney Experience, I have discovered that you can make your ADRs at midnight that night instead of waiting until morning. This is a big deal, especially since I'm trying to get a reservation at Victoria & Albert's Chef's Table for some time during our stay, so now I'm going to try and book it all online. The one takeaway I did get from other folks' experience is that, even when making your ADRs online, you should still call the next day and ask them to put a note that you are there celebrating your wedding/honeymoon at Disney World, just so the staff at the various restaurants knows that you're celebrating a special occasion.

Booking Our Hotel Reservations

Full Disclosure: This is a backdated post. I wrote it after the blog was created, but have written it in the style of an in-progress blog so that anyone reading from the beginning will get a more sensible narrative than time-jumping like Inspector Spacetime Dr. Who through our wedding planning.

Today, I booked our hotel for the wedding and honeymoon. We're going to be staying at the always-beautiful and exciting Boardwalk Resort on the Disney World property.

I get excited just looking at this photo.

In my younger days, during trips with my family, we stayed at a lot of different resorts. I have fond memories from the Polynesian, the Contemporary, the Caribbean Beach, the Dixie Landings Port Orleans Riverside, the Beach Club, and, of course, the Boardwalk. Over the years, the Boardwalk emerged as my favorite, largely for the variety of food and entertainment right there at your doorstep. In fact, in the last few years of my frequent trips, my family stopped staying anywhere else, as it had the best combination of food, entertainment, comfort, and location for us on the Disney property. For years, the Hollywood Studios park has been our favorite park, so being within a boat ride (or a really long walk, on some days) from that park was a big perk. Plus, being able to walk in the back door of Epcot for a beer at the Rose & Crown was a huge plus once my brother and I were both 21.

Still, just because it's my favorite doesn't mean that it's the best resort for our wedding and honeymoon, so I did some research. I wanted us to stay at one of the nicer hotels, because I want this to be a really special trip. I considered the Grand Floridian and the Contemporary because both are really nice, but the Contemporary felt a little dated the last time I was there, and we've been put in one of the outlying buildings (instead of the main resort building) before. The Polynesian didn't really seem like Girl Scout Fiancée's style, though I do expect us to visit it during the stay. The Yacht Club and the Beach Club are nice, but they always feel like sub-hotels of the Boardwalk (though the pool is very, very tempting). In the end, it came down to the Grand Floridian vs. the Boardwalk, and I think we settled on the Boardwalk for three main reasons: We want to get married at Sea Breeze Point, since it offers a great overlook of the lake; it is centrally located between two parks, giving us easy access to both; there are lots of dining and entertainment options right there at the hotel so we don't have to travel very far.

I did briefly consider that we could stay in multiple different hotels, but I was dissuaded by doing some research on others who did the same thing. In almost every case, they lamented trying to change hotels, as they ended up losing a half-day to each change. Given how much I want us to do, and how little I want to deal with perfunctory bureaucratic busywork like checking in and out of hotels, I proposed to Girl Scout Fiancée that we stay in only one hotel, but make it a goal to go visit all of the other ones. This also meshes nicely with my plan to go eat at various restaurants across the resort!

With that decision made, we very quickly started running into the biggest challenge with the wedding and honeymoon plans: length of stay. I want us to have nine days for the honeymoon (one for each park, two to revisit parks, two relaxation days, and the departure day), then we have the day of the wedding itself. Girl Scout Fiancée wants to go to Universal Studios one day, and coming from the West Coast our travel in day is going to be basically a bust. We want a day for our families to mingle and spend time together, since they've never really interacted before. That means we need a total of thirteen nights (travel day, Universal Studios, mingle day, wedding day, then nine honeymoon days) in the hotel. Of course, since I settled on one of the Deluxe resorts, that got pricey in a hurry.

Because I saw the writing on the wall here, I decided to start pricing out the hotel stay once the rates went up for April 2014...and I'm glad I did. Turns out, April 8 is right in the middle of Spring Break for a lot of people, and then Easter is the following week, meaning we were accidentally booking in peak travel season! For a while, I was really worried that this would make it impossible for us to go to Disney World for our wedding/honeymoon; the price was much, much higher than I had anticipated, a result of being in peak season. A little research revealed that the end of the month was actually a slow season (kids back in school), and the first two weeks of May are too; the prices were much more reasonable for this time period. After some discussion with Girl Scout Fiancée I discovered that she didn't have her heart set on the 8th, so we agreed to try and push our target wedding date back to the 30th of the month, with our honeymoon in the first two weeks of May.

Of course, seeing the price differences, and knowing that pricing was up for everyone to see, made me nervous for another reason: other people can now book those dates, too. With that in mind, I decided to go ahead and book the hotel for our stay. I knew that Disney World's cancellation policies were very generous, and suspected (rightly) that I could rebook the same stay at a different time should a better discount come along (like the discount I suspect will be available for having Annual Passes or having our wedding in Disney World). I got on the phone and had what can only be described as one of the most pleasant and efficient experiences I've ever had when booking a hotel. The agent we spoke to was polite and enthusiastic, and asked lots of questions about our reason for travel. She was more than happy to book the hotel rooms we wanted for our stay, and even put us under the AAA discount rate (which was 20%) as a worst-case-scenario option. She noted on the reservation that we were coming for our wedding and honeymoon, which I really appreciated, and was so informative and accommodating that I went from being very stressed out before the call to totally relaxed after.

Our hotel is booked, and if need be we can rebook it later, but that's the first real step we've taken toward our Disney World wedding!

Grimstad Farms

Full Disclosure: This is a backdated post. I wrote it after the blog was created, but have written it in the style of an in-progress blog so that anyone reading from the beginning will get a more sensible narrative than time-jumping like Dr. Sam Beckett through our wedding planning.

A few days ago, Girl Scout Fiancée informed me that she wanted to check out a new venue for our Seattle wedding party, a place called Grimstad Farms located about 10 minutes from where we live. She arranged for us to go for a visit, and then we piled in the car and headed over to give it a look. One of our close friends who lives out in that direction had alerted her to its existence, and it wasn't really one of the sites on her radar up to that point.

When we got over there, we were pleasantly surprised at how much we liked the place. Yes, it's a farm, and there are a lot of buildings there, but it quickly emerged as a front-runner for us for a number of reasons. First, it's got a cool rustic aesthetic that GSF really liked, and a large lawn available for yard games. Second, the interior of the barn (where the main event would be) is fully furnished and decorated, and so there would be no need to spend any money on decor. There is plenty of room to roll in a food truck, and an entire upstairs area where we can set up tables with board games in case the weather doesn't cooperate. Plus, since the main seating area is indoors, rain will only cancel the yard games, not the entire feeling of the event.

There are a few drawbacks, namely that we can only have bottled beer and wine (no liquor, which puts a cramp in GSF's plans to serve alcoholic Arnold Palmers), and I'm concerned that some of the open barn areas (where a lot of the farm equipment is kept) might be a little distracting, but in the end we weighed our options and ended up booking the place as the venue for our party! We're having our party on May 25th, the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend, in 2014. That's locked in, the down payment is made...and now we just have to figure out all of the rest of the logistics.