Disney Family Reunion Planning

It was magical! It was fun! It was a great family time!
I think I will have to blog about this trip in a few posts...otherwise it will be very long.
We have been planning this trip as a family for over a year. We have been saving, budgeting and making reservations.

We created a Facebook group to help with planning, since we don't all live in the area. We put up ideas and suggestions and links for everyone to look at on this page.

We decided to fly out on a Saturday morning and stay in California until the following Saturday. At first, we thought we would only go to Disney for four days, but then we decided to buy the five day park hopper pass. The price difference was $15 and then we felt we could see everything we wanted to and also not feel bad about going back to the hotel to nap or swim or relax for a few hours during the day. We stayed across the street from Disneyland for four nights. Wednesday night we drove down to San Diego and stayed at a beach house for three nights.

We flew into Orange County. It is a smaller airport than LAX and it is closer to Anaheim. All of our flights came in within a half hour of each other, so it was fun to reunite together in the airport. We took an airport shuttle to our hotel. We all got rooms close to each other and all the rooms were decorated with Disney decor. We loved this Fairfield by Marriott. It was close to Disney and they were so nice and very accommodating.

We rented vans for the last part of the week, but we didn't get them until Wednesday. Parking at the the hotel costs money and we didn't want to pay for rental vans during our Disney days, because we knew that we wouldn't be using them. A few of the boys took a shuttle back to the airport and picked up the vans on Wednesday and then we paid for parking that day and loaded our suitcases into them after check out. (Although the hotel does have a room where they will keep our suitcases secure until you leave.)

We each took a part in the planning which was very helpful. Liz and I did a lot of the pre-trip planning, i.e. reserving the hotel rooms, researching flights, finding and reserving the beach house, etc. My dad ordered our tickets through Ford...because he gets a discount. My sister Kathryn took on the food. We ordered food from a grocery store and had it delivered to the hotel. We ate breakfast in our hotel rooms and took lunch with us. The hotel was very accommodating in accepting our food order while we were gone...keeping things cold and then they delivered it to our room when we returned. It was awesome!

The beach house turned out to be a bit of a dive...but we had fun and loved being only a block from the beach and in close proximity to other things around Pacific Beach. If we do this again, I would not necessarily go all the way to San Diego for the beach house/beach experience. We didn't really do any San Diego tourist things because we were exhausted after five days at Disney.

More pictures and fun to come...