Due to financial planning that could have gone better (I won't elaborate since I promised no introspective whining,) we could not book our flights until we got our tax refund.  The best flights for our budget were either in the wee hours of the morning or after 7pm at night.  And the only return flight I could find in this range had a plane change in New Orleans.  Not ideal, but we booked them.  I then shopped for car rental deals.  I found a great deal on a mid-range SUV for under $20 a day using retailmenot.com.  Things were falling into place.  Based on disboard recommendations, I used Undercover Tourist to buy all my park tickets.  The only park ticket I didn't buy in advance was one adult and one child to Legoland.  I had a coupon for a free child's ticket (and although Jacqueline was an adult at Disney, she was still a child at Legoland!) but it required full price purchase of an adult ticket.  I did the math and figured it was cheaper than buying all 4 of our Legoland tickets from UT.

Having decided not to make this trip a surprise as I did our 2015 trip,  I made up a Powerpoint presentation detailing my plan for the trip.  I had pictured gathering the entire family around the TV (with my laptop plugged into it) and announcing this great "Do It ALL" vacation.  The big meeting never happened, though.  The wife was having to spend a lot of time on the phone and online with her job, due to some problems.  It was hard to get everybody together, so I ended up showing the Powerpoint to the kids and just emailing an all-text rundown of the vacation plan to Julie so that she could review it at her leisure.

One thing I hadn't planned down to the rivets was a possible date night.  I had two ideas:

1) We have dinner at a nice offsite restaurant (Landry's Seafood was one possibility) and then go shopping at Premium Outlets (including, of course, the Disney Character Warehouse for souvenirs.)

2) We do date night on the evening of our Epcot day (we did not spring for parkhoppers) and just return to Epcot and enjoy World Showcase without the kids (we had already had experience with Jacqueline's lack of enchantment with the beauty of this part of the park.)  We would pick a nice restaurant in one of the countries for dinner.

Julie picked #2.  So I now had to decide on where to eat.  Since I would be forcing her to endure an Italian buffet and Marvel superheroes on our first Universal day, I wanted to be fair this time and choose a place she would like.  She has an occasional taste for exotic cuisine, so I checked out the menu for Restaurant Marrakesh in Morocco.  I actually found a couple of things I would eat, so I brought that to Julie, and she approved.  She had actually had a meal in Morocco at World Showcase before (her FBLA group in high school came to Epcot back before she met me.)  She couldn't remember if it was the same place, but it just might have been.  I made the reservations and then called Kids Nite Out to reserve our sitter.  They had to check and make sure they provided service to Windsor Hills - they did.  They said I would need to sign a waiver saying the sitter would not be responsible for the 15-year-old.  No problem.  Date night was set.    

At 30 days out, it was finally time to start making FastPass selections.  I had been warned extensively that all the good ones would be taken if I didn't stay onsite and be eligible to make FastPasses at 60 days.  So I knew I wouldn't get everything I wanted.  But I actually did okay, all things considered. 

For Hollywood Studios, I got Tower of Terror (my favorite at HS,) Rock & Rollercoaster, and Star Tours, which I probably wouldn't need a FP for, but there really wasn't anything else.  There were none available for Toy Story Midway Mania.  

For our first Magic Kingdom day, I got Space Mountain, Buzz Lightyear's Space Ranger Spin, and the Cinderella-Elena meet.  (No Seven Dwarfs Mine Train FPs.  Bummer.)

For Epcot (our biggest FP bust) we got Mission Space, Spaceship Earth, and (Yay!) Frozen Ever After.  The MS one was right after opening, but I had every intention of giving it up if I could rope drop Soarin' (no FPs available of course.)

For Animal Kingdom, I got Kiliminjaro Safaris, Expedition Everest, and Dinosaur.  I never at any time fooled myself into thinking I would get any FPs for anything Avatar.  We had dinner at RFC that evening, and I had heard the lines thin out close to closing time, so I had considered checking out Flights of Passage and Na'Vi River Journey after dinner.  But at this point, I didn't know closing time was 10:30.

For MK day #2, I got Haunted Mansion, Splash Mountain (which had been closed last trip) and the other Princess Fairy Tale Hall meet, Rapunzel/Tiana.  STILL no 7DMT.

Also, since we weren't staying onsite, we would not be getting new magic bands.  I wondered if our old ones would still work.  The consensus on the disboards was that they would work for everything except capturing ride videos, since the battery that powered this feature had only about a three year life expectancy.  Not a big deal.  So my next mission was to try to find everyone's old magic bands.  It took some digging, but I managed to find them all.

So now there was nothing left to do but wait the next 30 days.

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