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.
Checking out the Dinosaurs at the zoo!
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.
Hope you enjoy
Our Disney Vacation Club adventure!
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?
Let’s see where this DVC adventure leads us!
Captured some Fin Fun Mermaids in our backyard pool!
Fin Fun Mermaid Tail unboxing and first swim!
How to cool your backyard!
Moving to ZnuggaZahug.com!
Hi there – we are in the process of moving over to start using ZnuggaZahug.com instead of inspiredbydisney.com.
With the InspiredbyDisney site and related Twitter and Instagram accounts we focused mostly on Disney World vacations and we wanted to expand to a broader area and do more family stuff around home.
So ZnuggaZahug.com was born and we have created Twitter and Instagram accounts (@znuggazahug for both) as well as a YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkYuz89qJcWr3AejTDNJ8_g).
The site and social media account haven’t been active yet but we have added a few Disney and mermaid videos to watch on YouTube.
Please have a look and join us for this change. Hope you have some fun!
January 2017 – family trip – report 10
February 1st:
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.
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.
It was a good trip!
January 2017 – family trip – report 9
January 31st:
Last full day! We got the Magical Express envelope under our door through the night – pickup 4:30 pm the next day. That’s pretty good as we get time to do stuff before we have to leave.
We decided to walk over to Beach Club this morning – grab breakfast from the Marketplace and then eat in the Solarium. We enjoy having a snack in the Solarium – love the atmosphere – we are glad that the little tea event Disney was doing in the Solarium is not occurring anymore as we missed the place.
Then a bus from Beach Club over to Animal Kingdom.
Straight to Kilimanjaro Safaris – we hadn’t had a day ride yet this trip on it so it was nice to do that. Heather was hoping to see the new baby elephant – we kind of did back over our shoulders but it wasn’t a great picture opportunity.
After an ice cream we headed out and caught a bus back to Boardwalk.
Then a bit of a rest in the room and then headed on down to the pool and hot tub. The kids did a lot of slide runs and K did some stuff with the entertainment crew.
We had lunch by the pool before heading back up to the room and eventually heading over to Epcot for our last night.
We snacked our way around the park and caught Illuminations (we did Spaceship Earth and once we got off I did our pre-check in for our flights the next day).
There was a section of World Showcase where the lights were out (near Morocco) and we saw lights flicker hard just after we got in the park crossing the bridge to France. There were also several rides down – Frozen Ever After for quite a while, Test Track and Imagination for the whole time. Soarin’ and Spaceship Earth for a shorter time. Apparently Epcot was having some power issues that night!
There were Extra Magic Hours but after doing Nemo I was just done. T wanted to go back to the room as well and relax.
So T and I went back to the hotel and Heather and K stayed in Epcot. They did meet and greets with the Mickey crew, Anna and Elsa and managed to get on Frozen Ever After when they finally opened it again (apparently it was deserted).
Packing and then bed!
January 2017 – family trip – report 8
January 30th:
We got the kids up and moving and I headed into Hollywood Studios with the kids after a quick breakfast of left over pizza.
Heather stayed at the hotel to get laundry done and have a bit of a relax but the kids and I were on a mission to make sure we hit Star Tours since we hadn’t gotten it done earlier in the week.
We walked over and even though it was cool it was still a sunny morning – so it was a nice walk. It is nice when I can spend some time with the kids when we don’t all have our noses buried in electronics!
After we got through security we went immediately to Star Tours – it indicated a 20 minute wait but it took less than that to get through the line.
We decided to ride again even though it said there was now a 25 minute wait. It took less than that again.
Next was Muppets 3D before grabbing some lunch and heading out of the park.
Once we made it back to the hotel we stopped at the laundry room and helped Heather bring the clothes up to the room.
After a bit of a rest we got ready and took the bus to Magic Kingdom.
We wanted to see if we could find our daughter’s glasses so we took the monorail to TTC (whoohoo – whole car to ourselves!) and walked to the lost and found area. The guy working there seemed a bit out of it and couldn’t find the glasses.
We hopped the monorail back to Magic Kingdom and asked at the Town Hall guest services and they didn’t have anything so they suggested checking at the ride, just in case.
After that we still had some time so we decided to check out the Sorcerers of Magic Kingdom game for the first time. We got the run through from the cast member and our first set of cards. We got part way through the game before we decided we had to stop to get to our fast pass.
We went and used our Space Ranger spin fast pass and then walked up to the People Mover. It looked like they had just had to stop the ride and after waiting for a while we decided we couldn’t wait anymore.
We were just heading out of Tomorrowland when they got People Mover working again but we continued on to Cinderella’s Castle for our dining reservation at Cinderella’s Royal Table.
After getting checked in we went in we had a short wait and managed to quickly grab a pic of 3 little princesses dressed as Cinderella all waiting for supper.
We got our pictures taken with Cinderella and had a short wait until we were called up to the restaurant.
We had a great meal, good food, great service, had the 4 princesses visit the table and got pictures. Had some champagne too.
After the fun supper, we wandered out to check at Barnstormer to see if they had K’s glasses. The Cast Members described their nightly and daily routine and it sure made it sound that they would not have missed the glasses in the pouch. We resolved to go back to TTC lost and found and hope a different cast member was there.
We let the kids ride the ride and they were supper excited to get front row.
Then we went and watched Wishes from the bridge area between Be Our Guest and Gaston’s.
We then went and rode the Ariel ride twice back to back.
After that we did Philharmagic and ended with Peter Pan.
Then a walk out to the buses and the ride back to the hotel. Bus to Magic Kingdom had been direct for Boardwalk but at the end of the night they were running the 5 Boardwalk area resorts together. Still was fairly quick to get back to the hotel.
We checked out the main store before heading back to the room to relax and unwind.