It all began one day when we were watching TV and a commercial for Walt Disney World came on. You know, (407) W-DISNEY and all that. Julie, my sweet and very attractive software engineer of a wife, suggested the idea that we need to take our kids there sometime before one or both of them get too old to enjoy it. I think Jacqueline, the younger of our two, was at least 15 months old at the time. This remained in the back of my mind for years; I too thought it was a great idea. But how to justify paying for such an extravagant vacation? My brother once said he did not want to hurry up and have kids just for the sake of doing it before he got too old to have kids. I felt I was in a similar dilemma. We had the desire and the available credit. But I still felt there needed to be a really good reason to go that deep into debt.
My parents have always lived close, but Julie’s folks are in Northeast Arkansas, where she originally grew up. The only fair way to handle Christmas is to alternate years. On even-numbered years, we go to Arkansas for Thanksgiving and have Christmas at home. But on odd numbered years, we have Thanksgiving at home and go to the inlaws’ house for Christmas. And on these odd-numbered years, there are always concerns with the logistics of transporting the presents, particularly the big “Santa Claus” presents, without the kids seeing them prematurely. I thought I had a solution for both this problem and the above-mentioned problem of the “really good reason.”
It was a weekend in January 2013 that I suggested this over lunch with Julie (the kids were at my mother’s): Instead of leaving big “Santa” toys in the floor on Christmas morning for the kids, why not leave nothing but a DVD labeled with “Play Me” on a post-it note. The DVD would be a custom made announcement that “Santa” would be giving them the gift of a Disney World vacation the following summer. We would use our income tax refund to pay for all or most of it. She was more receptive to the idea than I expected. But she mentioned that she had been there in 1989 with her high school FBLA group, and it was miserably hot and humid in summer. Her suggestion was to make the trip during Christmas vacation when the kids were out of school. But for it to be a Christmas morning surprise, we would have to wait until Christmas 2014, which would be spent at home. I decided that would at least give us more time to plan and save up money, so I agreed. The logistics problem eventually got solved with a set of roof rails and a rooftop cargo carrier bag. We ordered the free planning DVD. Watching this got us excited, not just about riding the rides in the parks, but staying at a Disney resort and letting our Princess Jacqueline get made over at the Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boutique.
The next time I brought it up, she told me that some friends of hers warned her about how outrageously busy the World gets between Christmas and New Year’s. Mid-January seemed to be the slowest time. But did we really want to take the kids out of school for a whole week? So we started working on a compromise. I looked at MLK weekend and saw that it tended to be quite busy too, and we couldn’t stay as long. So after playing with the dates, we decided on arriving on New Year’s Day and heading home on the 6th, meaning the kids would miss two days of school if we drove, one if we flew. Now for the next question: Should we drive the 21-hour drive, or go deeper into debt and fly?
I mapped out a driving route, which even included staying a night in Biloxi and visiting the Jefferson Davis museum. But Julie decided that was not so important. We did get a chance to visit Biloxi and the Beauvoir estate in June of 2016. It is beautiful.
I also started looking at resorts. At first, Caribbean Beach Club looked good. The kids might like a pirate-themed room. It was about this time that I discovered the disboards. I grew an immediate like for this community of Disney lovers. By perusing these posts, I learned a lot about how things work in the World, clearing up a few misconceptions that I had. I also learned things about the place that might never have entered my mind. After reading reviews and other comments about the resorts, I decided that Port Orleans Riverside would have more to offer us. Julie sort of preferred French Quarter, but she also liked a lot of things about POR, so we decided that would be the one.
After discussing payment options with Julie, I applied for the Chase Disney Platinum Visa card. The $100 bonus gift card we would get on approval would go toward any purchases made at the World. We were approved. The plan was to pay this card off with her Christmas bonus and, if it didn’t cover all of it, our next tax refund. Plus, we could apply rewards points to our airfare.
One of the disboard.com threads I spent a lot of time on was the one about decorating your resort window. I really wanted to do it. I ended up designing two signs which I intended to print out on cling transparencies.
In the end, I chickened out and decided not to do it. Good choice. Not one single door or window at Port Orleans Riverside was seen with any kind of decoration.
