Cinderella's Royal Pain in the--hey there, kids!

At the end of October, I embarked on a magical quest. This quest had one thing as its goal: to secure dining reservations at many amazing restaurants around Disney World for our wedding. This quest was, for the most part, successful, though a quick glance back at the post I made on the first day of November reveals that I did fail to get one of my top-tier reservations, Cinderella's Royal Table during the Wishes fireworks show.

I typically prefer this particular kind of magical quest.

Over the course of the following four weeks, every morning during my post-run coffee-and-almonds breakfast, instead of playing some video games or watching a show on my tablet, as I would normally do, I headed upstairs to the office to hit the Disney Dining Reservations portion of the MyDisneyExperience website. My first stop on the information superhighway each morning was a search for reservation times for Cinderella's Royal Table, and each day I met with the same result as before: no reservation times appeared in the system for a late dinner the first week in May. This became my routine through most of the month, as the cast member I spoke to had assured me that I should have no problem securing a reservation once they were in the system; apparently, reservations for 2 are fairly rare at Cinderella's Royal Table, and they should have little difficulty accommodating us.

Finally, on November 27th, my search turned up something other than frustration and the creeping fear that, somehow, I had actually missed my shot at a reservation a while back. My first search turned up a reservation time at 9:15 for the day I wanted, some 45 minutes before the fireworks show is scheduled to begin.

Got me a reservation now, haters!

Let this post be a word of advice to anyone planning out a Disney trip and seeking to get a reservation that doesn't appear available at first: persevere! In this case, it's clear that reservation times for Cinderella's Royal Table had not yet been entered into the system, and didn't appear until nearly a month after my initial attempts. Throughout my explorations of message boards devoted to Disney Dining, I've also found a lot of folks saying that they snagged a hard-to-get reservation when someone else canceled, so even if you don't succeed at first, just keep checking back. Of course, it seems like taking advantage of the 180 days (+10 for resort guests) advanced dining reservation window is the best way to go, but if at first things seem full up, keep trying back.