I've been planning this trip since JANUARY. Yes, I said January :) The reason for that is because 1.) we don't have a whole lot of money to spare so it took a long while to research and figure out where the good deals are 2.) Decide where we wanted to save and where we wanted to splurge 3.) How to do a 6 hour car ride and Disneyland with 2 little nippers.
I know Disneyland very well, but this was my first experience creating a trip that basically revolved around a 2 year old.
So this post will be long and boring to most :) But, for those planning a trip with small kids might find it helpful and I'll enjoy reading it later on in life.
Time to Go
This is all personal preference, but in my opinion nothing is more magical than Christmas time at Disneyland, especially when it's nighttime. The weather is perfect, the crowds are minimal and I love the Christmas decorations and lights. However, the farther it gets into December the more crowded Disneyland becomes. We decided to leave the Monday after Thanksgiving, hoping that the Thanksgiving crowds would be gone and everyone else would be recovering from the Holiday. The crowds were very moderate, however Fantasyland seemed to be the most
crowded. The bigger rides were a 10-15 min wait while the popular rides in Fantasyland were around 25-30min. Peter Pan and Dumbo were the longest wait like always in Fantasyland.
Hotel
Finding a hotel was kinda hard. We needed a hotel that offered free parking, a free breakfast, a fridge and microwave all for a cheap price. When we booked out hotel it was necessary to have a 2 room suite because Audrey was incapable of falling asleep in the same room as us. Audrey fell asleep every night before we even reached the hotel so we discovered that this wasn't necessary. However, it was convenient to have the extra space so the $15 extra a night was well spent. We stayed at The Best Western Meridian. It was about a 5-10 min drive to Disneyland. It cost $79 a night and was about $370 for 4 nights with tax and everything included. We had bought this like a year ago and were able to pay it off before the trip. For some reason I forgot to get a picture of the other room and breakfast.
There are cheaper hotels... however, there are some pretty yucky, old and run-down places so I spent a lot of time reading reviews and comparing prices and this was the best fit for us at this time in our life.
There was good and bad with this hotel. We really liked our room it was nice and spacious, the breakfast was more than your ordinary continental breakfast. They offered sausage, eggs, waffles, juice, cereal, muffins, toast.... The sausage was very yummy while the eggs were not real eggs. Pete loved them, but I knew they weren't real so it kinda made it hard for me to eat them. I don't know if they were egg beaters or what. It was very quiet, we never heard anyone and didn't really see any other guests till later on in the week. The bed was very nice and comfortable.
I don't really have any complaints about the hotel itself we really enjoyed our stay here especially considering the price.I'm accustomed to staying directly across the street from Disneyland and while those hotels are kinda crummy you can't beat the convenience of being so close. Some could easily argue that the convenience is worth the extra $30 or more a night. If we had the money we would probably say the same thing. The hotel is where we decided to save a good portion of money so we dealt with the drive, the tram and the stroller situation, which I'll get into in a min.
Tickets
I got a thing in the mail a while back telling me if I signed up for a Chase Disney Card I would receive 200 free points which = $200, that can basically be used on anything Disney. I had a card years ago but cancled it because it takes forever to gain a point. You get 1 point for every $100 you spend, so getting 200 was huge.We bought our tickets through AAA which gives an extra magic morning day (this is normally only given to those staying in a Disney hotel, or booked a vacation package through Disney) AND the real awesome thing was it provides FREE parking at Disneyland! That's a $15 savings a day. We don't have a AAA membership, but we used my mom's and it didn't matter. Buying tickets through AAA is the same price as buying them through the Disney website but you get those 2 extra perks which I think are awesome.
So with the $200 off we were able to get our whole family into Disneyland for about $40 a day, with free parking. Audrey was still free so we lucked out there. Pretty good deal!
Stroller
(Pete wanting to kill the stroller)
We could not figure out for the life of us if we wanted to get a side by side, tandem stroller, sit and stand or a jogging stroller. We spent hours on Craigslist and then finding reviews and trying to figure out what we wanted. I wanted a side by side but Pete had to have the tandem style so that's what we went with. It was okay... It was Gracco brand, and actually we didn't really like it. It did what we needed it to do, but it was a pain to fold up and get undone and we didn't like that both the seats didn't fold down when the kids went to sleep. It was annoying that the shade and tables came off every time we folded it up and it was big and bulky.... If we had stayed across the street and didn't have to worry about folding it up every day that probably would have made a big difference.
Since there were like 10 strollers identical to ours I wish we had put a big bow or something so it would have been easy to spot and would have avoided the biggest fiasco and waste of a day. Somebody took our stroller and we thought it had been stolen. So Pete spent that day filing a police report, a report at Disneyland. Our car key was in the stroller so that caused us to call someone to come make a key and since our car requires a special chip in the key it was the biggest mess and they never got it to work. Eventually our stroller was found kinda tucked away somewhere. It was not fun, but we learned a lesson. I guess sometimes peoples strollers will get taken and will be found later in the day abandoned somewhere completely stripped. We were terrified this had happened because our camera was in there. Now we know to personalize our stroller somehow and keep everything of value in a purse that we can hang on the stroller but easily take off when we leave it somewhere.
Due to the fiasco we used a Disney stroller which costs $15 a day. It bugged me that these strollers didn't have a cup holder, they didn't fold back, or have a tray,but they moved nice. We also discovered the convenience of having 2 strollers. We think next time we will bring one umbrella, easy to work with stroller and our other single stroller. It was nice being able to separate if we needed too and we were able to organize our stuff better because it wasn't all stuffed in one.
Car Ride
This is the part I was dreading the most. We decided to have everything completely packed so on Monday we could wake up and go. I even had dry cereal in baggies for breakfast sitting in the car so literally all we had to do was get dressed and leave. We ended up getting off around 5:30, it was perfect. We dodged all traffic in AZ and CA. Brandon had his moments of fussiness but for the most part was really good. For Audrey I had a little prize every hour which was an activity she could do that would keep her busy. This worked great! I got everything for her in the dollar section at Target, ya know located right by the door.
We drove back on Friday after being at the park all day. We left about 6 and the kids slept pretty much the entire way home. Brandon woke up towards the end but went back to sleep. This drive was very nice until about 11:00, Pete and I were really struggling to stay awake.
I think that's about all that went into the planning. We did make reservations at Ariel's Grotto, which was a splurge for us but one of my favorite memories from the trip!
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