I’d say there are “degrees of bubbleness”.
And those degrees play out differently depending on the style of your trip. Many of you mentioned feeling being in the Bubble when you get to the DME, some at the airport in general, or on the plane, etc. But I’ll never experience that. (Well, I did once, but I’ll get back to that.)
We drive. We stay off site. So in order for us to be “in the bubble”, it can’t be the “true” bubble that comes when you are insulated from the rest of the world, and only the world of Disney exists. As I mentioned, I did experience that once. For our honeymoon, my wife and I flew down, took the (at the time) Mear’s Shuttle (before there was ever such as a thing as the DME) to Disney and checked into Dixie Landings (aka POR). From that point forward, we were in the bubble. Nothing else existed but Walt Disney World. It was really quite amazing. Which is why my wife and I are planning our 25th Anniversary trip to be on property (although we’re driving down).
But in the meantime, that doesn’t mean we don’t feel “in the bubble” on our trips. Just not to the same degree. Being in our condo or rental home isn’t enough. We do that for other vacations. But every time we drive under that Walt Disney World sign, there is something about it that makes it feel we’ve arrived home. Going to Universal, for us, doesn’t do it. Maybe it is because we don’t have as many memories, or maybe because there is nothing really so iconic when you arrive on Universal property. But, as I said, even just taking a trip to Disney Springs (which we did our last Universal trip) made us feel like we had temporarily stepped into the bubble.
Is the bubble the same as the bubble we experience for our honeymoon? Nope. But it s a lot more than what we feel when we just head to Universal instead. In fact, our last trip, ever time we drove to Universal, we passed by WDW property. We kind of felt ourselves looking that direction longingly, wishing we were there instead. Kind of skirting the bubble, but not really entering it.
And I think there is the third level of the bubble that people feel where it is just that bubble of vacation, not necessarily being at Disney itself. The trip begins and the bubble begins. For me, though, the trip doesn’t fully feel like it begins until we arrive. Perhaps this is because we drive and don’t fly.
