Well, last night didn’t quite go as planned.
See, in regards to the thread [Convincing the teen - #38 by ryan1], we had a conversation last night with my son about options for his trip. We offered him the choice of:
- doing everything exactly as planned;
- doing a WDW trip in May 2019, with an abbreviated 2-day Cedar Point trip the following May 2020 (but not the full King’s Island/Cedar Point 5-day trip) and including The Void
- doing a WDW trip in May 2020, leaving the current 2019 trip to Branson (and also doing The Void).
He thought about it for a while and decided to keep things as they are (although he was tempted by The Void!).
Okay. No problem. He left and returned to his homework. Our daughter comes in and we reviewed with her what we had offered my son. Now keep in mind that her senior trip is planned for 2021. She wanted to do a “tour of Michigan” trip where we actually go up to see Macinaw, Traverse City, the Soo locks, MIchigan’s Adventure, etc. But when she heard that DS16 had turned down the offer she said, “I wish I could swap my trip for a trip to Disney!”
Well, that got us excited. And, since we would be down to two kids for that trip, we also thought we could manage throwing in a couple days at Universal…plus it should be when Tron and Guardians are open (perhaps). Being this would be so close our our Anniversary trip in 2020, we could buy annual passes for my wife and I to make it more affordable.
Yay! A second trip to Disney!
But then…in walks my son, after about 20 minutes of thinking. He then said he changed his mind. He WOULD rather do the Disney trip, as long as we have the abbreviated Cedar Point trip. Um. Okay. But you could see our daughter now kind of sink at the thought of losing out on HER trip to Disney. (Not that she’d really lose out…after all, she’d be going on our son’s Disney trip!) Still, that would be THREE separate Disney trips in a year and a half. That becomes a little undoable.
What to do.
So, after much discussion, we came up with a compromise solution where we drop the Branson trip in 2019 and instead do an abbreviated Cedar Point trip in 2019 in order to save money. Then, we do a COMBINED Senior trip in 2020 for both my son and daughter (they are a year apart in school, so this would be at the end of my son’s senior year, and just before my daughter’s senior year). This would be a full Disney trip PLUS Universal trip PLUS The Void thrown in. And, being it is in 2020, we can still do the annual pass thing for my wife and I to save a little more money since we’ll be going AGAIN in December.
I have to now crunch the numbers. A little nervous about the idea of going to Disney in May 2020 due to Star Wars.
And to FURTHER throw a monkey wrench into all of this…my mother in law was JUST diagnosed with esophageal cancer. This means that everything is kind of up in the air for all of it because we just don’t know how things might play out there. At the moment, her prognosis looks good, but with cancer you never know.