Christmas 2012 Disney World Trip Report


Our Christmas 2012 Walt Disney World Trip Report covers the holidays in the Magic Kingdom, Epcot, and Disney’s Hollywood Studios, including Mickey’s Very Merry Christmas Party, the Illuminations: Peace on Earth tag, and the Osborne Family Spectacle of Dancing Lights. Additionally, it shares photos of New Fantasyland and our thoughts about this recent addition to the Magic Kingdom.

Expect lots of tangents along the way, scant details about what we did on the trip itself, and plenty of photos from our three-day weekend during the Christmas season at Walt Disney World! (more…)

Disney World May 2012 Trip Report

Sarah & Tom Bricker - Disney's Beach Club Resort

Our May 2012 Walt Disney World trip was highly anticipated for us (isn’t every Disney trip?!) and it did not disappoint! Between Flower & Garden Festival at Epcot and Star Wars Weekends at Disney’s Hollywood Studios, plus the Deluxe Disney Dining Plan and hotel stays at Disney’s Port Orleans – Riverside and Disney’s Beach Club Villas, it was one action-packed long weekend! Did we eat our weight in food on the Deluxe Dining Plan? Was Tom killed in an epic light saber duel with Darth Vader? Do we now own a Hyacinth Hippo topiary? How many dozens of alligators did we see at Port Orleans Resort? Discover the answer to these exciting questions and more by reading our trip report! ;)

Note: Due to some overwhelmingly positive feedback regarding our trip reports on our Facebook page (it was very flattering, thank you all!), expect to see numerous trip report updates for this trip and our subsequent Disney California Adventure Grand Re-Opening trip posted this month. These trip reports are incredibly time-consuming to create. Given the work that goes into them, we would greatly appreciate it if you’d share any trip report posts that you like on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc., via the social media buttons on each installment to help spread the word about them. We also love when readers leave comments, which let us know that people are actually reading the trip reports!

Bookmark this page as it will be where we organize the updates in one convenient location. Links will become active as the Parts are posted.

Part I – Late Night Fun
Part II – Morning Extra “The Force” Hours
Part III – First Visit to Storybook Circus…DUMBO 2.0!!!
Part IV – Flower & Garden Festival Afternoon at Epcot
Part V – Late Night Magic Kingdom Fun!

If you just can’t get enough trip report fun, “Like” the DisneyTouristBlog Facebook Fan Page to see preview images from the trip report!

Disney World Proposal & Engagement!

This is our Walt Disney World engagement story from November 2007. We got engaged on the beach of the Polynesian Resort during the Holiday Wishes! fireworks. If you’re planning a surprise proposal at Walt Disney World, hopefully this story can serve as some inspiration for you!

I began planning how I would propose to Sarah prior to our August 2007 trip. I knew I wanted to do it at Walt Disney World, and I knew around Christmas-time would be perfect (as that would mark being together for two years). I hardly had to push with a suggestion for a Christmas Walt Disney World trip on our return from Walt Disney World in August. That really got the ball rolling. After the trip was set, I wrestled with some ideas in my head, but had nothing fully solidified.

So upon returning, and giving it some more consideration, I decided to post in the WDWMagic forums. Since Sarah commonly lurked the forums, I decided to create an alias and post this thread.

You can read the history of my planning in that thread yourself, I will get down to brass tacks here. The process started the night before we left for Walt Disney World, when I voyaged into the one place no man should ever go: a woman’s closet. There, I sought to find a dress for Sarah to wear to dinner the following evening. I located what I needed, but left it there, knowing she would head into the closet again before we left and would suspect foul play if any of her clothing was misplaced.

The following morning right before we left, I went back upstairs to grab my backpack which I had “accidentally” left behind. While grabbing my bag, I slipped into her bedroom and quickly grabbed the dress and threw it in my bag. We were living in Valparaiso, Indiana at the time, so we had to take a series of our car, and trains and buses to get from Valparaiso to Chicago’s Midway airport. From there, we were off to Walt Disney World! (more…)

One More Disney Day Disneyland Trip Report

Sarah & Tom Bricker in Disneyland - "One More Disney Day"

We headed to Disneyland for the Leap Day 2012 “One More Disney Day” promotion. The highlight of the trip would be spending 24-consecutive hours in Disneyland, but a trip to The Walt Disney Studios in Burbank, California was another highlight, as was seeing the ABC television series Modern Family film an episode inside Disneyland. The definite “lowlight” was Disneyland being closed one morning due to a bomb scare (it was actually just a geocache). As always, we ate plenty of food along the way and took thousands of photos.

Although the installments are loaded with photos, you can see many more photos from “One More Disney Day” in Tom’s Disneyland: Sunrise to Sunrise eBook by TouringPlans.com.

Join us for this rollercoaster of excitement as we present our February and March 2012 Disneyland Trip Report! Links will become active as installments are posted.

Installments:

“One More Disney Day” Part I – Disneyland Fans Are W$*%^ CRAZY!
“One More Disney Day” Part II – Beautiful Day In Disneyland
“One More Disney Day” Part III – When The Sun Goes Down, The Crowds Come OUT!!!!!!!!!!
“One More Disney Day” Part IV – The Wild & Crazy Overnight Hours
“One More Disney Day Part V – This is the End… 

Disneyland Spring Trip Report Part I – Three Hours of Sleep, Then on to Disney California Adventure… Yep, We’re Crazy!
Disneyland Spring Trip Report Part II – More Modern Family & The Walt Disney Archives
Disneyland Spring Trip Report Part III – TERRORISM at Disneyland?!
Disneyland Spring Trip Report Part IV – See Ya Real Soon!

Disney World February 2012 Trip Report

We visited Walt Disney World in February 2012 in honor of…uhh…Valentine’s Day? (it’s getting more and more difficult to try to justify these trips!) and we had a blast. We laughed, we cried (when we thought we were going to get stuck watching the Norway film), and we ate. A lot. We stayed at Disney’s BoardWalk Inn, dined at Bistro de Paris, the Hollywood Brown Derby, and we ate approximately 73 cupcakes as we “snacked around the world.” Here is our directory of trip report installments for these trip. Each installment features our photos and thoughts from this late-winter 2012 trip.

Bookmark this page as it will be where we organize the updates in one convenient location. Links will become active as the Parts are posted.

Part I – Late night, early morning (cupcakes 1 & 2)
Part II – Sarah cheats at Toy Story Mania (cupcake 3)
Part III – Disney’s Animal Kingdom…Over 3 Hours?!…Clerical Error?
Part IV – Extra Freezing Hours in the Magic Kingdom
Part V – Snacking Around the World at Epcot!
Part VI – A Journey Into Imagination and Dinner at Epcot’s Best Restaurant
Part VII – Test Track x22394
Part VIII – An Epcot Afternoon
Part IX – My memory is good-enough to write these reports, but not to order an appetizer…
Part X – See Ya Real Soon!

If you just can’t get enough trip report fun, “Like” the DisneyTouristBlog Facebook Fan Page to see preview images from the trip report!