The Johnsons Head to Disney!

We had planned to go to Disney World back in the fall of 2008, but we were blessed with the birth of Eli instead. Needless to say, we put our trip of for a couple of years. We decided back in January, that this would be the year that the Johnsons would visit Mickey at his house. We invited my parents and Mark's mom to go with us, so all ten of us geared up for a very memorable trip!

When we started, I had no idea how much time and thought goes into planning a Disney trip. I booked our trip in March through themagicforless.com, which I highly recommend. Disney offered free dining if you stayed at one of their resorts and bought tickets for the parks. Our free dining package included a snack, a counter service meal and a sit down meal for each day. I was very thankful not to have to "brown bag" our trip!

We chose to stay at a Value (cheap) resort -- The Pop Century. My frugal side would not allow me to go any higher than that! It more than met our needs. We had three rooms to house the ten of us.

I made reservations for our sit down meals 190 days before our trip. It was a bit of a stretch to think about our meals six months in advance -- it is a big enough challenge to plan our meals at home a week in advance! We wanted to have lunch at Cinderella's Castle, which books up months in advance. We also chose the Coral Reef at Epcot, the Crystal Palace character meal with Pooh and friends, and a meal at the O'hana restaurant at the Polynesian Resort.

We left when Mark got off work on September 10th and drove to Birmingham. That allowed us to get six hours of our fifteenish hour trip out of the way. We had been counting down the days for the past six months, and we were all excited that the day had finally arrived. We got up early the next day and made our way to Orlando. We hit construction, bad weather and Florida Gator traffic -- the trip seemed to take forever! We were so glad to finally pass under the magical Disney World sign!

To be continued...