OK, Knowing myself, I am going to try to make this report a bit more photo-heavy so I don’t devolve into a word frenzy. 
I know I’ve already started the trip report above with an EPCOT tip - but I’ll back up for a second.
As usual for my wife and I, it wasn’t our direct intention to visit Disney World this year - we always want to, mind you, but always know there’s other things to spend money on. As I’ve probably mentioned before: Like a new oven, which is apparent whenever we watch a Brady Bunch episode with the kids and my wife points and yells, “HEY! There’s our oven!”
But this year was my mother’s 90th birthday, and she lives down with my sister in Miami. We didn’t want to miss that special day, of course, so I started scheming. “How much money can I save?” I asked myself, rubbing my hands together conspiratorially, until noticed that looked kind of weird while standing in a Starbucks line.
Well, save I did, indeed. If you are a regular TP forum visitor, you may have already read my post entitled “Pre Trip Report or How I Embraced Credit Card Rewards and Learned to Love Them.” You can go visit there for more info on my plan and the steps involved in gaining rewards.
After crunching the numbers late into many evenings, and even though it was really a two-pronged trip cost-wise since we would go to Miami for several days as well, I was proud to say I thought we could get there without too much pain in the pocketbook.
Now that we’ve come back home I can say the rewards plan was an incredible success. Between Disney Visa Rewards, Barclaycard Arrival MasterCard travel reimbursements, Caribbean Beach room-only discounts, construction rebates, and an almost fanatical devotion to The Pope, I was able to put together about $2,641 in rewards to apply to the Disney portion of the trip.
For a 6 night stay with 5 park day Base tickets, I estimated the costs as shown in the table below. You can see our actual came in very much under projection even though I made a rookie mistake and forgot to include souvenirs in the totals. (Apparently us Tierneys don’t eat much in the heat when we don’t have a dining plan making us stop and smell the cupcakes.)
I am pretty proud that a trip that should have come in around $3,600 (including room and ticket discounts) actually cost us $937. (Plus about $40 in various tips.)
We had told our kids the trip to see Grandma was almost a done deal and that going to Disney was just a maybe. They asked every few days if we’d decided we were going, until my DS14 began to call me Señor Spreadsheet and we finally told them it was ON like UNCLE BEN on RICE. or something like that.
My daughter then decided to assign us each a character mascot for the trip, which was pretty cool.
During a fairly uneventful drive down, stops included time to stretch legs, for my DD10 to take a Florida selfie to send her friend in California, and my son to shop for eats.
We had a wonderful time in Miami just hanging around with family, taking my Mom out for a nice dinner and then was relieved found that the coffee cake I had baked for my Mom (allergy-friendly so my kids could eat it and my sister didn’t have to worry about it) actually made the trip unscathed and still fairly fresh.
At the end of that week we said our sad good-byes and headed up to Caribbean Beach Resort, wondering just how much the construction would affect the stay.
On the way there, my wife and I saw some billboards that briefly made us wonder if our “family experience” meter was broken.
Anywho, we reached CBR and noticed the construction fences on the way in. Check in went well, and at the end the CM handed us a gift card with $450 on it as our rebate. (I liked that part a lot.)
If interested, you can read more details on my perspective on CBR in this other forum thread, but quickly here: No major issues, loved it. Coffee could have been hotter.
Oh, before we left, in my frenzy of dollar and discount store strip shopping I found an Island Coconut room spray in the Macy’s Backstage store next to my office. I thought would it be cool to use in our room - turns out the spray smells exactly like the scent in the main check in building at CBR. You can buy a 4-pack here if you love that smell as we do. (My son started yelling at me for using it TOO MUCH in the room, because he wanted to have some left to use at home and keep the trip feeling alive.)
I’ll end this section here with a standard cliffhanger and pick up again soon with
THE ROAD TO PANDORA
~ or ~
Our first visit EVER to Animal Kingdom, using the play by play I posted when we showed up for RD to attempt an early Flight of Passage, NOW WITH ADDED PICTURES OF THE TREK.
OOH, EXCITING, KIDS!