Walt Disney World Countdown… 30 Days to Go

We are finally into the last month before going on holiday to Walt Disney World in Florida! I’m driving everyone crackers with my daily countdowns but I am so excited! So is Little Miss. So from today onwards I’m doing every 10 days then an update on the night before (which will probably be incredibly brief but I still want to share my excitement with you all!)

In the last 30 days I have booked ANOTHER dining reservation and most excitingly of all of our fast passes! For seven days of our visit I’m staying at a Disney resort, which not only meant I could book all our dining experiences in one go, but I also get a 30 day jump on people staying off site when it comes to fast pass. This ended up being a bit of a game changer, as one of the weeks we’ll be there will be the last week of Spring Break and WDW’s second busiest week of the year (second only to the one between Christmas and New Year!) Fast Passes become available at 5am GMT (midnight at WDW) and yes you guessed it, I was up at 5am booking. The hardest to get FP reservation is to meet Anna & Elsa, which isn’t just something high on LM’s list, but something practically at the top of Lily & Megan’s. I made sure it was the first FP I booked and after I had booked for all the other days, I went back to check and in the 11 minutes that had passed since booking, there were no Anna & Elsa slots left for the days we would be at Magic Kingdom.. ELEVEN MINUTES! So seriously, if you want to see Anna & Elsa and you are going during a peak period, I can’t stress enough how important it is to get up at 5am to ensure no one is disappointed!

The other dining reservation I got was for a lunch at Be Our Guest. This again is incredibly high in demand and getting it was rather stressful! At the end of the month the trial period was over for BoG lunch reservations and from the 25th they would be available to everyone visiting in the next 180 days. As Bee is the HUGE Beauty & the Beast fan top of her list was a dinner and lunch at the coveted dining spot and as she’s done so much for me, I was going to try my damndest to make sure she got both. USUALLY dining reservations open at 11am GMT (6am EST) however, for some reason the Be Our Guest lunch spots went onto the system about 8am GMT (3am EST). A wonderful friend alerted me to this via Instagram and I logged straight on to secure our reservation. We were all booked in by 9am however I’ve heard rumours that all tables up until mid August were booked up before the usual 11am dining reservations release!

So aside from those two big things, I paid off the rest of my holiday, finished all my holiday shopping and I’ve been filling in my Disney Planner, which is practically full now. I’ve even completed doing my budgeting for meals, which made me so hungry as it required looking up menu prices and everything sounds SO GOOD! I used allears.net for my research into this. I mainly wanted to see what was available at counter service that LM would eat and I found this site so helpful! I now have a list of counters that serve the kids snack pack and places that serve things I know she’ll definitely eat. I also downloaded the Disneyland Explorer app, and although it’s for Disneyland in California it does have a lot of the same attractions (or similar) and obviously the same characters. She tells me random things she wants to do or see, like the fact she wants to try Dolewhip. It’s been great for getting her ready to go.

Yesterday Little Miss had a photoshoot as she’s the new face of The Princess and the Frock. We spent the day with Claire who owns the company and her daughter and she’s actually going to Florida exactly a month after we do. She hasn’t done much planning so I’m going to be helping her with that which I am so excited about. Now aside from saving our spending money I’m done with my planning but the fact I can now help her and impart everything i’ve learned from planning our trip is also an exciting experience!

So come back in 10 days and I’ll be sharing what I’m packing for Little Miss!