Fire and Ice

Time has flown by since the last time!  I am now about two weeks away from WDW and I can’t even tell you how much I’m looking forward to it all. I’ve been busily completing the last-minute admin but also keeping up with all the latest news, closures, menus and other fun things.  One thing that I have found incredibly useful at this point of the planning is the Touring Plans app which, full disclosure, was a gift from Len Testa. However, they haven’t asked me to promote it at all and all opinions are my own. Having used both the app and the website for a few weeks now I will say that so far it is worth the money! I haven’t used it in the parks, which I guess is the true test, but so far it has been an invaluable planning tool. Touring plans in general have never really been my thing, as I’ve mentioned before . I just can’t face all the planning and lack of spontaneity that these things entail so I’ve never really been down this road before. This time though I feel so pressured...

It’s been about a month since I booked my trip and I’ve sorted flights and hotel , made park reservations and reacquainted myself with the mobile app . I’ve even started to have some thoughts as to what I need to pack and especially, what shoes to wear! Additionally, the RetroMagic website has started adding details of the special guests that will attend and I am really excited! During my daily walks, I’ve also spent some time thinking about what to do about Genie+ . I’ve been doing a LOT of research, because this is the part that I’m most apprehensive about. This is an entirely new thing that I have never experienced in WDW and that has the potential to make a big difference to how I plan my days and navigate the parks, but also apparently, on how much sleep I get and how many battery packs I need to bring. Coming into this, all I knew about Genie+ was academic: I heard about it when it launched and have been following this with interest in the months (years?) since. I have read co...

Last time I started the serious planning and allocated parks to days so that I could make reservations. It was all pretty smooth at this time, to be honest, but I hadn’t yet looked at the mobile app so this was my next step. As I alluded to before, I have had the WDW park app on my phone since at least 2016 even though I’ve not been to the parks since. I kind of felt that deleting the app would be admitting defeat, so it’s lived on my phone, unused, for seven years. I even migrated it from phone to phone as I upgraded my device over all that time. I believe it’s changed name too - at the moment I think it’s officially called My Disney Experience but I can’t see that either on the app icon or the app home page. Anyway, I clicked on the app and (after a slight update) it was ready to go. It was also pretty easy to log in and confirm my park reservations. At this point, I was still having second thoughts about which parks I’d allocated to some days so thought I’d make some changes. For v...

Once I’d decided I was going to Disneyworld and had organized my flights plus accommodation , the next step was to procure some of those park tickets I’d heard so much about. I was getting pretty excited about this trip, so now that the more familiar admin was taken care of, I could focus on the exciting, Disney-specific elements. This was something I was looking forward to, of course, but also strangely apprehensive. A bit of context may help: as mentioned previously, I was a pretty confident WDW vacation planner and I also love the vacation planning part of any trip. At the very least I use Google Travel to record all the various elements but when things get a little more complex, I also use my own documents like spreadsheets and such. It really does depend on the trip but one of my more complicated trips was a two-week Caribbean cruise plus a stay in Texas before and after the cruise, during the latter part of the C19 pandemic. There were a lot of elements to keep track of, includ...

Pretty much all of my trip planning starts by looking at flights - and this was no exception. To be honest, I look at flights so much that Google Flights must hate me. I like to dream about travel and sometimes I’ll look at flights just because I’m bored! Other times I do have some sort of a plan but I may abandon the search because of cost, logistics or other reasons. This time the trigger was an email to let me know that RetroMagic was happening, in early October. So I did what I would automatically do and started searching for flights to Orlando and quickly realised that they were expensive. I tried various strategies for keeping costs down (stopovers, weird airlines, arriving in other airports rather than MCO, etc) and the math really wasn’t working. I looked at flying on unusual days, of staying only a few days… I even tried the incredibly unrealistic booking where I’m not allowed any sensible luggage, but even then it was coming up pricey. Especially when added to the hotel - an...

The last time I went to Disney World was in August 2016. It was a world where the most annoying thing that we had to do before entering the theme parks was to go through security. It certainly was a different world. t was a time of FastPass, of unlimited park hopping and when there were absolutely zero construction walls in Epcot. Nobody had heard about park reservations and most sightlines in Epcot were pretty clean. The most complex technical thing that we had to achieve before our visit (and even then, it was entirely optional) was to link our Magic Bands to our park tickets so that we could use them. Needless to say, things have changed quite a bit since then. It’s amazing to think just how much things have changed in under a decade and just how much I’ve fallen behind. As you may know, I’ve been a Disney fan for a long time now: going back way, way back, to perhaps the early 80s if not earlier. I remember going to Disney World when I was very little and having a wonderful time but...

There are lots of weird things that appeal to me, but one of them is the idea of planned communities. I think the concept of producing a place to live in a space where none yet exists is quite idealistic. There’s something very satisfying about getting to decide what it looks like, where things are located, how it will flow, what are the underlying design principles, etc. Of course one of my favourite planned spaces is Walt Disney World which famously was built in the middle of nowhere much and everything had to be built. For decades I have researched almost every aspect of its construction and every detail is fascinating. The fact that it is still standing, still functioning and still successful is one of the reasons I admire this place so much. Closer to home, MUCH closer, is another planned community that I love learning about. It is of course Milton Keynes where I live. Here is another planned community that had its genesis in the late 60s with the first spaces built in the 70s an...