If you would have asked me 24 hours ago when the next time I would go back to Disney, I probably would have said at least 6 years from now. Now, I’m going back the week before Thanksgiving week in 2023. What changed?
Let’s back up. Some of you may remember that I took my family on 2 trips. The first was in 2016 when my daughters were in kindergarten. We took them out of the school the week before Thanksgiving week to go. On the way out of the parks, I looked at my wife and said “We have to come back.” So fast forward to 2019 and they are in 3rd grade. We went during Thanksgiving week. On the way out, I looked at my wife and said “We aren’t coming back for quite a while.” I just had no energy to fight the crazy crowds and we weren’t going to take them out of school to go on a trip after elementary school. We also aren’t going to go in the crazy summer heat. So that leaves when my daughters graduate high school and we can go without taking them out of school.
So my daughters are in 6th grade this year. One of my daughters came home at the beginning of this school year and said she had been accepted into Beta club. Beta club was going on a 2 day trip to Tennessee at the end of September and we had to pay. for her to go if she was going to go. We gave her permission and paid it all off. It was a total of $250, so it was not too bad. Then yesterday, I get a message from the teacher saying that a slot opened for the Disney World/Universal studios trip in November 2023. It is going to be the week before Thanksgiving week, so no crazy crowds, so I was open to it. I knew I would have to talk with my wife to find out what she wanted to do.
SO last night, we talked about it. Since it was a school function, she would be excused and teachers would give her time to make up the missed work. We haven’t been to Universal. So I said I had a few questions for the teacher. I asked her to call me and she did later last night. I asked about if families could go, because we weren’t going to send my daughter with the school by herself. The teacher said families could go and what we didn’t use (bus ride, hotel, etc) we didn’t have to pay for. So the trip includes 4 day park tickets plus a Mickey’s Very Merry Christmas party ticket. Since we aren’t staying at the hotel they are, we have to get our own Universal tickets (we are staying in a timeshare offsite). All in, with providing our own transportation, we will owe $2,400 for all 4 of us.
We decided to get 1 day Universal tickets and 1 day Sea World tickets. instead of 2 days at Universal.
So after talking to my wife, she said yes we could go.
On another note, I just want to say that when I picked my daughter up yesterday, I told her I got an interesting text. She asked what it was about and I was coy with her. I realized she hadn’t heard yet. Finally I told her and she asked if we would all go. I said I had to talk to my wife and we would discuss it. She said she didn’t want to go without us. She said the trip to Tennessee was a small trip but Disney is big and it wasn’t going to be fair for her to go and not us.
That made me really proud that she was going to be considerate of us like that.
So I know Disney has changed a LOT since we’ve been. I now have my homework cut out for me because I’M GOING BACK TO THE WORLD!!!
