I always wanted to wait til my youngest was at least 5 or so before taking the Disney Trip. But this past spring we decided to go for it and took the kids to Disney! My daughter 5 and my son not even 2. So how did we come to this decision?
Well, my husband and I are Hilton Honors members, which has its perks by the way! (Maybe I’ll write about that in another post) But anyway, one day in January my husband got a phone call from the promotional department of Hilton Grand Vacations Club offering us a stay at their Seaworld hotel in Orlando, Florida. All we had to do was agree to a presentation on what they had to offer. We stayed 3 nights and were given an amazing promotional offer so we spent $561.38 for our stay compared to $768.00+taxes.
So now that we knew we were going and had our hotel we had to figure out how to get there. We decided to go during April School Vacation Week. Now we live in Massachusetts and April Vacation Week is a popular week for families to fly out and head south to escape from winter! We looked up flights so it could be the first time for the kids to get on an airplane, plus I couldn’t imagine driving to Florida with our two kids. But with it being January and our trip being the week of April Vacation the flights were through the roof! I’m talking $700/$800 per person, far more than what we wanted to spend. So, without breaking the bank to get to Disney we decided to drive!
Now if you’re new to my blog, I have a post about how we drove from Massachusetts to North Carolina, you should check it out! Those of you who are regulars to my blog know that long distance road trips aren’t new to my family and I. After driving to North Carolina just a couple months before we figured this would be easy!
So we rented a car and decided we would drive overnight straight to Charlotte, North Carolina. We had always wanted to visit so we stayed there for a few days and did some sightseeing with the kids. We stayed at Home 2 Suites by Hilton and the kids loved our room and had a great time!
From Charlotte we drove straight to Orlando. Since we drove to Florida, once we were approaching Orlando, we passed many signs on the way on where you could get Disney tickets. We pulled into the ticket place we saw signs for and the way you get the tickets is by committing to a presentation on a vacation timeshare type program. We committed to the presentation and received a discount on our 3 passes to Disney. We only needed 3 passes since my son is 2 and under 3 at Disney is free. The grand total for our Disney passes $235.00 compared to spending over $400.00!
So if you’re keeping track now we have 2 presentations to get through with our kids!
Being that our kids are on the younger side we decided to only do one Disney Park with them. We looked up all the rides at each park and decided we would do Magic Kingdom! Our kids probably wouldn’t have cared either way, but we wanted to make sure that there would be enough for them to do and see. My daughter was so happy to be in Disney and my son was too young to understand, but that doesn’t mean that he had any lesser of a time than we did. He enjoyed it just as much as my daughter, maybe even a little more. My daughter did not like the fireworks at the end of the night, while my son was pleasantly surprised by them and in awe of the colors.
The passes we got had the fast lane feature that we could use for 2 rides or events, we just had to reserve our spot using the Disney app, which was super easy to use! We spent an entire day at Magic Kingdom and it was more than enough for the kids. I think anything more would have been too overwhelming and exhausting for them. By the end of the night my daughter was tired of walking. Her and her brother took turns in the stroller. So if you’re going to Disney and have young kids consider a double stroller.
We survived both presentations with our kids, I think mostly due to the snacks the hotels provided. 😂😂 It was a great time, we escaped the cold New England weather for a week, ran into several people from New England and enjoyed the hotel pooI.
Don’t think that you have to do the grand Disney vacation for your first time to the park or that kids ages 5 and under won’t have a great time! They’re kids! They don’t need all the bells and whistles to have fun! They’re easily entertained. We will eventually do Disney again and maybe even stay at one of the resorts! But this trip reminded me that you don’t always have to do things the way everyone else does it or the way it’s expected to be done to have a great time! Go to Disney or wherever, however you can and just have a great time!
Check out our pictures below and the link for the Etsy shop where we got our t-shirts from
https://www.etsy.com/shop/HawkinsStudio?ref=l2-shopheader-name