Heather’s most recent crochet project has been to make a pocket wrap with a hood for a friend – but as she was testing it on our son, he claimed it. So it has now become the “crocheted gaming cloak with integrated storage”.
As we have all been hunkered down at home and as it is getting colder outside, having a nice, snug wrap while sitting at the computer has become a nice little pick me up. We are spending a lot of time on the computer lately with school, video games, etc and being comfortable is pretty huge right now.
We are a family of 4 who have a love of Disney, mermaids, mini Aussie shepherds and having fun in our backyard pool.
We previously used to blog and do Disney World trip reports at inspiredbydisney.com (Twitter and Instagram: @disneyinspiredx) and then moved to using znuggazahug.com (Twitter and Instagram: @znuggazahug) to expand our horizons a bit and started doing more YouTube videos.
We had some success there for a while but as our kids have gotten older, we want to start focusing on other things.
As part of that, we are re-branding as BigGoofyFamily – on this blog and on the YouTube channel as BigGoofyRunner and Family, expect more videos of stuff that just looks cool, Disney discussions and tours, and our dogs! Basically we are going back to to more of what we used to do with Inspired By Disney but expanded to include YouTube and just cool looking videos.
Content on this site is a combination of our posts from those previous sites and all new stuff from Sept 23, 2019 on.
One of our mini aussie shepherds likes to ride on pool floats. Here is some video we captured over a couple days this summer of Sven having a couple nice rides. Some cameos from Kaia the mermaid and our unicorn and flamingo pool floats.
Updated version of the Dinosaurs Alive video from the last post. I took that video and cut it down to just the animatronic dinosaurs. Makes for a pretty cool video.
We hit up Dinosaurs Alive! at the Assinboine Park Zoo over the weekend.
Some cool animatronic dinos that moved and made noises as you wandered around.
Very neat to see, plus had lots of tidbits of info about the dinos.
We did a bunch of other stuff at the zoo as well, like checking out the polar bears, the tropical house and the butterfly garden. Lots of fun! But that will be in a different video.
Since my first trip in January 2008, we have stayed in Orlando and at Disney World proper many different ways.
We have stayed on property in value, moderate and deluxe resorts (even once getting a wicked upgrade to a 2 bedroom club level room at the Beach Club Resort – now that was fun!) and we have stayed off property in a townhouse for a 3 week stay when the kids were much younger.
There were pros and cons to each but this past summer we finally decided that Disney Vacation Club was the way to go.
Basically the major driving factor for that is that when we are at Disney World, one of our favorite things to do skip the Disney buses and walk to the parks.
That basically means a deluxe resort…a few very specific ones.
And the cheapest way to stay deluxe at Disney World appears to be Disney Vacation Club (DVC). You can rent DVC points to do that which is much cheaper than renting the room from Disney directly. But if you plan to go year after year then it can be cheaper to buy DVC points.
If you decide to buy then you have a couple choices – buy direct from Disney at a premium price or buy from the resale market. Buying direct from Disney does get you some extra perks over resale but there are some negatives as well beyond the extra price. Disney usually has limited availability of some of the older resorts which is unfortunate if you are looking for a specific resort to allow you to book at the 11 month window for that resort. Sometimes you can get on a wait list but that doesn’t necessarily work for us Canadians as there are some laws in place that make it difficult for DVC cast members to contact us for purposes of a timeshare sale. Which mostly means that, for Canadians, you have to buy when you are down at Disney World and if what you want isn’t available when you are there then you either end up not buying or buying a 2nd or 3rd choice.
So for us resale made sense.
But what resort?
Ideally we wanted to be able to walk to parks from our home resort. That meant the Contemporary Bay Lake Tower walking to Magic Kingdom or the Beach Club or Boardwalk Villas to be able to walk to Epcot and Hollywood Studios.
We were leaning toward either the Beach Club or Boardwalk as Epcot is our favorite resort and they are so close. Plus they are a quick walk to Hollywood Studios and with the two new areas getting built in that park we figured it would be good to be close.
We love the Beach Club Resort but the Villa rooms looked a bit dated (this was before they did a fantastic update to the rooms in 2016). We did a tour on our last trip of the Boardwalk rooms that were fantastic. The Boardwalk rooms also have more bed type options in the Deluxe Studio rooms with a bed, a couch/hide a bed and a Murphy type single bed meaning we could get each of the kids in their own bed. (Yay sleep!) (Note that they did this same style of set up for the updates at Beach Club Villas.)
Then we looked at price and landed on Boardwalk as well as the cheapest cost per point.
Then we looked at the number of points required to stay…which landed us at Boardwalk too.
We looked at the number points we would want and ended up buying 100 points from the resale market at a price we liked that also had some banked points we could use.
By the time we had decided we had already rented points for our January 2017 family trip so we had some decisions to make on what to do with some of the points.
I was already booked to do the Goofy Challenge at the beginning of January but didn’t have a room yet so after playing with wait lists I managed to get one night at the Beach Club Villas and then the remaining nights will be at Saratoga Springs.
Since we had extra points my wife, Heather, decided that she would see if there were rooms available during the Princess Half Marathon in February. There were, so she signed up for the Glass Slipper Challenge, convinced her mom to come along, and booked flights and the room. (We strangely had a lot of extra air miles this year so this all wasn’t nearly as expensive as it sounds).
While we were at Disney World for our family vacation we got super lucky and Disney actually had some points available for the Boardwalk Villas that we could purchase directly from them. We added 25 points (at a premium!) to bring our total up to 125 points. The points were added to our existing contract with the same use month, etc making it easy to manage the two sets of points. The bonus with these direct points is that we now get all the benefits reserved for direct purchasers including the discounted annual passes and access to the unique and exclusive DVC member lounge located in Epcot.
We are about a year into the purchase now and have booked our next family trip using the points we have and are extremely happy with the value for the money we are getting from how we did our purchases. January 2018 we will be down in Orlando for the Disney World Marathon weekend (Dopey Challenge!) staying at the Boardwalk Villas and then spending 4 nights at Animal Kingdom Kidani Village and ending our 2 weeks at Disney’s Beach Club Villas. We are going to get lots of different experiences this trip! And isn’t that what it should be about?
I got up early to sign up for Dopey Challenge for January 2018 as I had it in my head that the pre-registration for Annual Passholders started today. I was mistaken though, whoops!
We had decided that our next family trip to Disney World was going to be over the Walt Disney World Marathon weekend the next year and it apparently can be tough to get DVC rooms at Boardwalk Villas for that period. We wanted to start our stay on January 1st, and with Boardwalk Villas being our home resort that meant that this morning had our 11 month window opened up. Apparently some people do lots of tricks like walking forward reservations to try to save a spot and other things so getting just what we wanted was going to take timing.
I tried to do a DVC booking at about 8 am for Jan 1 to Jan 8 but the online booking was down until the 9 am EST and the DVC offices don’t open until 9 either.
It was going to be a mad scramble to get what we wanted! The availability tools seemed to indicate that it was available but we just couldn’t book it with the online booking down for maintenance.
I started hitting refresh every 10-20 seconds just before 9am and managed to get in and actually booked exactly what we wanted! A minute or so later there was no availability. That was tight!
We then did the final pack up and got out the door of the room shortly after 11. Dropped the bags with bell services to be picked up when we get on the Magical Express this afternoon and started our final tour.
We walked to Epcot, wandered through and took the monorail to Magic Kingdom (TTC) – we did one more check for K’s glasses at the lost and found with no luck and then took the monorail to the park. Got warm today so we enjoyed the heat – was not enjoying my cold / allergies though.
Pic of me not enjoying the allergies while on the monorail to TTC
We made sure to do TTA people mover and It’s a Small World. We had lunch at Cosmic Rays and after some more wandering we headed out to the busses. We waited and waited and no Boardwalk bus came so we got on the second Yacht and Beach Club bus we saw come through. Hopped off at the Yacht to do a walk through there before heading out to the Boardwalk area to walk to the hotel.
We let K and T play a bit in the play area and we checked out the DVC Community Hall before getting our luggage and settling in to wait for the Magical Express bus.
It came a bit early – or they let us on a slightly earlier bus. Mixed blessing – don’t like waiting but don’t want to leave too early either.
Magical Express used to drop at both A and B side depending on what carrier you were with but it appears that this has changed. We were dropped off on the B side and we had to walk to the A side to drop our bags with our carrier.
After a bit of a wait to do that we headed straight through security which was a bit slow and then took the small monorail to our gate.
We had independent snacking along the way and got on the plane. I got in to the window seat to try to sleep because of the cold meds I was on but managed to break my Kindle in the process. Yay!
The flight was good though and after we landed it was a quick and easy run through Canadian customs but we ended up having to wait a bit at the back of the line since the kids needed to go to the bathroom just as we were getting in line.
Short wait for our luggage and headed out of the secured area to pop open our bags and find warm jackets. Then out into the deep cold to get to the truck.
Quick ride home and kids straight to bed around 1:30 am.
We managed to get them up and had them at school on time in the morning!
Next was breakfast and then we went to pick up the pups from the kennel and bring them home.
