Dynamic Duo Tackle Disneyland - COMPLETED - With Final Thoughts About This Page:

[Joy J]

My wonderful son, Kirk, and I have taken a few trips to WDW in the not so distant past but now we have a brand new adventure to look forward to. About two weeks ago, Kirk surprised me with the announcement that he was taking me down to Disneyland in California for my birthday this July. To say I was stunned would be an understatement but I was also thrilled right down to the ends of my toenails.

My last visit to Disneyland was in 1968 and Kirk has never been there so the first thing I realized was that a lot of research and planning was going to be necessary. It was a tiny bit discouraging to discover that there was not nearly the number of quality sites dealing with DL info that there are for WDW. However, I still kept checking every piece of information out that I could get my greedy little fingers on. This section of the boards probably proved the most helpful to me in this respect. I sent Kirk the URLs for any of the websites that I thought might be helpful to him with his first big choice: which hotel we would be staying at. I already knew that he wanted it to be an onsite hotel so that narrowed the choices considerably. It didn't come as any shock to me at all when he decided on the Disneyland Hotel. He may be 31 years old chronologically speaking but he's really nothing more than an overgrown five-year-old when it comes to all things Disney so it was no surprise that he took one look at the Neverland Pool and fell instantly in love.

The next big decision was how many days to stay for. I'd been hoping for about a week so I was flabbergasted when Kirk declared that he wanted us to stay for two weeks. I did tell him that I didn't think it would take nearly that long for us to experience everything DL has to offer but he just smiled and said, "Well, I also want us to take some of the DL tours that they offer and then we can take day trips and explore the surrounding area." That sure sounded fantastic to me so the length of our trip was now determined. It wasn't a huge leap from there to picking the actual dates as I have a conference that I have to attend in early August so we simply worked around that and came up with the dates of July 20-August 3.

Since Kirk hates the planning stuff and he knows that I absolutely love doing it, he tossed that responsibility over to me at this point. My next step was to call the Disneyland Resort line to book our room. What a delightful experience that was! It was also refreshing to learn how knowledgable and helpful their CMs who handle the calls are. After listening to my criteria, the CM suggested we purchase annual passes which would net us a discount for the room plus a 10 per cent discount at most of the DL restaurants and shops. She booked the room for us incorporating the discount although we don't have to actually purchase the APs until our arrival. I was also thrilled to learn that they do not charge a deposit for the room reservation but simply take your credit card number as a guarantee in case you fail to show up or cancel. You have up to three days before arrival to cancel without any penalty whatsoever.

Already I could see definite advantages to the services offered by DL in the trip planning stages as opposed to WDW but this was just the beginning. The CM then offered to put the charges for both the APs and four character meals that we wanted to do onto our room ressie. And again we would not have to pay a cent until we checked in. This sounded good to me. So was this the end to the perks of booking through them? Not by a long shot.

Since the wonderful CM with whom I'd been talking was aware that Kirk and I wanted to do a few Disney tours and book a few other specialty events like the Fantasmic dessert buffet, she then transferred me to a department called Vacation Planners. Imagine my delight when I spoke to these folks and discovered that they offered free services to all Disney resort guests. What do these services consist of? Well, pretty much everything you can think of when it comes to trip planning. All I have to do is provide them with a list of all the tours I want to take, special events I want to participate in, restaurants I want to eat at, etc. and any particular days and times I might have in mind. Then they do the rest. When the appropriate time window opens up for each item, they will go ahead and book it for me. Then, when we check in at our resort, they will provide us with a detailed itinerary for our stay of all the ressies they've arranged for us. In order to give us a better idea of our choices, they have mailed out to us a complete list of all their services and what exactly they can book for us. This whole thing excited me to no end. It's like enjoying concierge style planning services without having to pay concierge style prices.

With this task out of the way, the next step was to book our flights. I lucked out and through Expedia I found some very reasonable flights and even got times that would allow us the maximum time at our destination.

So for now about all I can do is wait for the Disneyland planning DVD and the information packet from the Disneyland Resort Vacation Planners to arrive plus figure out which restaurants and tours we want to take. I also need to research other places not too far from Disneyland that we can explore during day trips. Oh, and I also somehow have to find a way not to explode from excitement before July gets here.

Joy