Keeping Up With The Joneses: V is for VACATION: Part 1

So for our vacation this year we decided to go to...where else...DISNEY!! People ask us all the time if we get sick of going to Disney every year and the very clear answer is no.

It's THAT much fun and there is THAT much to do. The next several blog posts will be full of photos from our trip so if you aren't interested in the Joneses taking over Disney then these next blog posts are not for you. :)

This was our 6th trip and there are still things at Disney we have yet to do. This trip we were able to do some things we have never done before, tried some new places to eat and tired out a resort we have never stayed at. It was a week full of fun right up until the very end, which I will get to in another post. We also tried out the Memory Maker, which is a service that lets you download and keep all the photos you have taken by Disney cast members including photos from some of the rides. There are Disney photographers all over the parks so every time we saw one we stopped and had our photo taken. We came home with 451 pictures and videos from Memory Maker along with the over 600 I took! Memory Maker is definitely worth the money if you utilize it...we got some great photos out of it. To all my family and friends out there that have questions about taking a trip to Disney World I am happy to help. Planning a trip to WDW can be overwhelming if you haven't done it before because there is quite a bit of information you want to know and PLAN before you go. So...while there are blogs out there dedicated to all things Disney (and there are some excellent ones) I too have a little information I can share so feel free to ask. For my fellow CF parents I can share some helpful tips for traveling with your CFer too.

On to the good stuff.

We started our vacation on Sunday at Animal Kingdom. It was a beautiful, but hot day. We got to ride everything we wanted and even did some of our favorites more than once. We also caught the Flights of Wonder show, which we had never seen before. It was really good and included some cheesy humor. We cruised right through the park and were finished with AK around 2:30. I had planned a dinner at the Sci-Fi Drive In at Hollywood Studios for later than evening so we went ahead and headed over a little early to get a few rides in before dinner. This is where I learned something new about park tickets at Disney. We did not do the Park Hopper option (where you can jump from park to park in the same day) because typically we get to the park in the morning and stay all day. We decided to go to the Mickey's Not So Scary Halloween Party (MNSSHP), which is considered a "hard ticket" event meaning you have to buy a ticket to get into the event (offered certain nights in Sept and Oct only). Since we bought tickets to MNSSHP I ended up having an extra days worth of tickets hence why I made dinner at another park so we could use up the extra day of tickets. Well turns out you can't do that. You can't use 2 single park day tickets in one day. Whoops. Thankfully the kind folks at Disney took pity on us and gave us admission cards to get into Hollywood Studios that night. I really had no idea you couldn't use two tickets in one days, but I do now so lesson learned! I still have 1 days worth of tickets in my account that expire at the end of this month. I would be lying if I said I haven't thought about driving back for a day to use those tickets! I don't think Bryan is on board though. :)

So - first day was at Animal Kingdom and an evening at Hollywood Studios. Here are some of the 160 photos taken on the first day...it was really hard to narrow down my favorites to share!