Our Epic Disney Vacation
To Travel is to Live – Hans Christian Andersen, And live we have.
I have always had a real wanderlust, a desire to travel, as Children though we never did, so I would dream of faraway places, adventures, travelling the world.
When we got married we decided to travel so in between work and renovations on our house, the years before our kids where born were spent travelling the high country of Victoria, relaxing in the Whitsundays and driving around the USA including a child-free trip to Disneyland.
I was hooked Disneyland was all that I had imagined as a young child living in a busy house in Melbourne.
Since then we have been back a couple more times, the first time when our older two were 4 and 6, then again when our four kids where 1,3,8 and 10. Our kids are caught up in the Magic of Disney too.
The minute we get back they start planning the next trip and after the trip in 2016, our oldest decided she had a goal.
Her goal was to go to every Disney Park / resort in the world.
She managed to tick the next item of her list when we went to the Disney Aulani resort in 2017, but her travel goal was still much bigger than that.
At home we have a Dream board that the kids have made, they cut out all the places they want to visit in the world and attached it to a board that sits near our dining room table. Every day as we sit for dinner we are reminded of where we have been and where we want to go. As you can see Disney is a huge part of this.
One of the best thing about being a parent is watching your children dream big dreams. Whether that is academic goals, sporting goals, theatre goals or even travel goals. What is even better than seeing them dream big goals is being in the position to help them achieve that. Whether that is being the taxi each week as they run from after-school commitments, whether it is helping motivate them to study for that next trip, or to plan the epic Disney trip so your kids can visit not only Disneyland on New Years Eve, but then also go a Disney Cruise before finishing off the trip with two weeks in Florida and Disneyworld.
Our Epic Disney trip didn’t start off that way though. It started much smaller.
We had wanted to visit the East Coast of U.S.A again we had visited back in 2011 and had some work commitments that meant we were heading over. We decided that as we had to go there for work we may as well bring the kids and visit Disneyworld. Then we decided well if we were heading all the way over there spending almost 24 hours in an aeroplane with four kids we may as well do a Disney cruise as well. As who knows when we would get back over there.
We remembered how exhausted we were after our last trip with the flight to LA and sitting in a crowded airport before our flight to New York and decided with kids it would be better to break it up and spend a couple of days in LA before our flight to Orlando. Allowing us to fly directly into LA and spend a few days there.
Now anyone flying with a big family knows it is often hard to get accommodation to fit all of you. Hotels can never guarantee interconnecting rooms, so you are often forced to look into apartments or hotels with family suites.
As we were going over New Year’s Eve meant our search got even harder and the only available accommodation we could find was in Anaheim. Now tell me if you are staying in Anaheim how could you not visit Disneyland?
So our epic Disney trip was born.
Itinerary
Disneyland hotel – 3 nights
Hyatt Regency Orlando Airport Hotel – 1 night (this Hotel was amazing, I will follow this up later in another post on why you should stay here before your Disney cruise)
Disney Dream – 3-night Bahamian cruise including a stopover in Nassau and Castaway Cay
Old Key West resort – 12 nights including a 10 day Disneyworld pass, 1-day pass to Universal Studios.
Magic Castle Hotel – Hollywood – 3 nights
The whole trip was amazing and whilst I have started posting about it previously over the next month I will be posting even more content about our Epic Disney Vacation.