Disney: Making up our Touring Schedule

What I Learned Wednesday is taking a little break this week.  It has been preempted by more DISNEY POSTS!!!  Yay!!


OK, so maybe I'm the only one excited about that, but it's my blog so I can do what I want on it :).

As I said in my previous Disney post, I am all about the Unofficial Guide to Disney and their corresponding website, touringplans.com.  (Touringplans.com is a subscription service; however, if you buy the book, you get a free 1 year subscription.)

In the book, they have some nice, pretty graphs that show crowd levels over the whole year.  You'll see that crowds are highest over Spring Break, followed closely by mid-June through mid-August.  Holidays also draw big crowds.  But the first week in May - not crowded at all.  That is the main reason we decided to travel when we did and to take our kids out of school - to miss the crowds. 

After you determine the dates you're going, flip over to the touringplans.com and look up each individual day to see the predicted crowds by park.  For example, our first touring day would be May 2.  On May 2, it shows that the overall crowd level for all of Disney World will be 6 out of 10.  If a 10 is the most crowded it's ever been, May 2 will be 60% as full as that day.  Broken up by park, Magic Kingdom (MK) is predicted to be a 7.7 out of 10; Epcot (E), a 2.8 out of 10; Hollywood Studios (HS) a 2.3 out of 10 and the Animal Kingdom (AK) a 4.6 out of 10.  (Both the book and the website go into a lot of detail about how they get these numbers.  I won't bore you with that here.)  Obviously, if you were picking parks based solely on crowd levels, you would pick either Epcot or HS for May 2.

Armed with all that information, we made up our schedule: Epcot on Monday (2.8), MK on Tuesday (2.7), swimming and shopping on Wednesday, HS on Thursday (2.6) and MK again on Friday (5.4).  Please note, if you choose to go the lowest crowd option like we did, you will probably have to give up some things.  For instance: Fantasmic, the nighttime show at HS was only shown on Tuesday.  We went there on Thursday based on crowd predictions.  Because of that we had to give up seeing that show.  But that was something we were OK with.  You'll just have to make that decision for yourselves.

Now that you know where you are going on which days, you get to pick your touring plan.  This is the best thing about touringplans.com.  For each park, they have done extensive research to find out the optimal order to ride/see every attraction to minimize wait time.  There are many touring plans to choose from.  You can choose plans for parents with young children, with tweens, with teens; plans just for adults, or senior citizens.  You can also choose plans that are based on what type of attractions you want to see, i.e. princess plans, pirate plans, character plans.  You can also customize your own plan by entering in the attractions you don't want to miss.  The website will then tell you what order to visit those to minimize your wait time.

For example, for the Magic Kingdom we chose the 2-day touring plan for Junior Pirates and Young Adventurers.  It was written with 4-8 year old boys in mind; however, it had every ride that my daughter really wanted to ride as well.  The plan has a map at the top labeled with each step so you know where you go next.  This is how that touring plan starts:

Magic Kingdom Entrance - Arrive at the entrance to the Magic Kingdom 25 minutes prior to opening.
Peter Pan's Flight (FP) - Ride Peter Pan's Flight in Fantasyland.
Mickey's PhilharMagic (FP)- See Mickey's PhilharMagic.
The Haunted Mansion (FP) - See The Haunted Mansion in Liberty Square.
Splash Mountain (FP)(40") - Ride Splash Mountain in Frontierland. Obtain FASTPASSes if wait exceeds 30 minutes here or at Big Thunder (whichever is longest).

It continues on with 15 steps for Day 1 and 9 for Day 2.  "FP" tells you that a ride has Fastpasses available. "40" " tells you the height requirement for that ride.  Armed with your optimal touring plan, your visit is really easy.  You just do everything in the order they tell you, cutting out the things you don't want to do, and you'll hardly have to wait in any lines all day.  This worked out beautifully for us.  We only had to wait in one attraction line that was longer than 10 minutes and that was for Soarin' at Epcot (with a Fastpass no less).  Several attractions we rode multiple times but by using our plan, we didn't have to wait in line for any of them.  It made our visit so much nicer.

I will tell you one caveat though, and that is the character lines.  We always had to wait in line for characters.  They pretty much run the lines so that you are guaranteed at least a 15 minutes wait to see a character, so just be prepared for that.

If you want to check out touringplans.com and see which plans we used, we went with the tweens plan for Epcot, but amended some of the more rigorous rides.  We also did the tweens plan for Hollywood Studios minus the Rock 'n Roller coaster and the Tower of Terror.

I am a HUGE planner, if you hadn't already guessed.  Some of you more spontaneous folks may think this is going overboard, but I can't stress how much I think theses plans helped our trip.  Waiting in lines with bored kids is the worst and it was my biggest fear on this trip.  How much will they fight?  How will we keep the whining down?  After our plan worked so well on the first day, I was completely hooked!  I HIGHLY recommend going into Disney with a plan.  If you don't choose touringplans.com, find another book or site to help you.  It makes your trip so much more peaceful.

No, touringplans.com didn't reward me in any way for this post.  I wish they had.  But I will recommend their product wholeheartedly whether I'm being paid to do it or not.

Disney: Budgeting for your trip

Hello all. We're back!!

We had a wonderful Disney World trip.
The weather was great.  The crowds weren't too bad and we absolutely LOVED our resort.

I hope you guys like Disney too, because you're going to hear a lot about it in the next week or so. :)
Besides needing to get it all recorded for posterity sake; hopefully, some of the things we learned could help you out on your next Disney trip.

OK, to start, we're going to talk about the B word that everyone hates.  No, not that one - budget!

When we first decided to plan a Disney World trip, our first question was "How in the world do we know how much to save?"  One of our personal convictions is to never put a vacation on a credit card.  We ALWAYS save up for it first and only go on the vacation when we have enough money for it.  Remember a budget is only what you think you will spend.  If you actually spend different amounts, that's OK, as long as you don't overspend on the overall vacation.  In other words, if you spend more than expected on one part, you'll have to spend less than expected on something else.

To start off, we thought about the categories that we would need to pay for.  (And trust me, there are SOOOO many different choices where Disney, or any vacation, is concerned so don't think this is the only way to do it.  It just worked for us.)

Transportation
You'll have to decide if you are driving or flying.  If you live far away, that decision is probably made for you.  For us, driving in a day was doable, so it was still on the table.  To compare costs, check the prices of airline tickets for the time of year you are going.  Then find out how many miles it is to drive and figure out how many tanks of gas that is.  For us, it was 2 tanks down and 2 tanks up.  You'll have to estimate your gas cost using current gas prices.  You just may have to adjust that up or down the closer you get to your vacation.  Then you can compare the costs of driving versus flying.

We decided to drive so our next step was to budget how much we would spend in gas.  We started out budgeting $50 a tank for gas, but later changed it to $60 a tank, since the price of gas had gone up dramatically.  We assumed we would need 5 tankfuls of gas total - 2 down, 2 back and 1 while we were there.  So our total gas budget was $300.  In reality we didn't need that tank of gas in Orlando, so we only spent $227 on gas.

Lodging
If you'll remember, we had a hard time deciding where to stay during our vacation - on Disney property or off.  When making up a lodging budget, look up current prices online.  It was very easy to see prices for condos outside of Disney online.  To see prices for Disney resorts was a little more tricky.  I actually had to go through the process of booking a place online (just didn't put in credit card info) and then I could see approximately how much the different resorts would cost.  After comparing prices and weighing all the pros and cons (Disney transportation, etc), we chose to stay on-site at a Moderate priced hotel.

Disney requires a 20% deposit to reserve your hotel, so make sure you have saved up that much before you make your reservation.  I called the Disney Reservation Center to reserve our room and they told me exactly how much I still owed and when it was due.  Moderate priced resorts for a week are about $1700.  I got a deal for 40% off, bringing our total down to about $1000.  So we added $1000 to our budget.

Food
Like gas, this was a tricky thing to plan.  We had to decide ahead of time whether to get the Disney dining plan or not.  I had two choices.  I could get 40% off our room and no dining plan.  Or I could pay full price for the room and get free dining.  We felt like we could eat for a lot less than the $700 difference, we opted out of the dining plan.

Our plan was to bring breakfast food to eat in the room, eat lunch in the parks and eat dinner out in Orlando somewhere.  For the most part we stuck with that plan.  A few days we switched up lunch and dinner (i.e. Orlando for lunch, back to one of the parks for dinner).  We had to estimate the cost of meals in the park and the cost of meals in Orlando.  Then we had to add in the cost of fast food meals on our travel days.  The numbers we used in estimating were: $40 for park meals, $60 for Orlando meals and $20 for fast food meals.  Our total food budget was $820.  In reality, the meals in the park we cheaper - more like $30.  And we ended up eating PB&J sandwiches in our room one day because we were just too tired to go out.  So we really only spent $525 on meals for the week, which was cheaper than the $700 the dining plan would have cost us.  (See below for a note about character meals and the Disney dining plan.)

Tickets
Disney likes to make things complicated.  If you've been there recently, you know there aren't just "park tickets."  You start with regular tickets then you can add the park hopper option, the water parks and more option and/or the no expiration option.  To confound the process even more, the more days your ticket is good for, the cheaper it is per day. 

Some people just add it all and pay for it all.  We didn't want to do that.  Our kids aren't into water parks, so we crossed that off the list.  Choosing whether to add the hopper option or not was a toss-up.  But we went with the thought that we would just be too tired at the end of the day to hop to another park.  I think that was a fair assessment for us. 

But we didn't just get regular tickets either.

We knew that the price of tickets increases every year and we knew that it's cheaper per day to get longer tickets.  So we opted to get 8 day tickets and add the no expiration option (regular tickets expire 2 weeks after you start using them).  Our thinking is that we would use 4 days now and we can use 4 days a few years from now when we go back.  It makes our future trip cheaper if the tickets are already paid for.  You can see ticket prices at Disney's website; however, that is not the only place to buy them.  We shopped around online and got our tickets through Undercover Tourist instead.  (Keep in mind, you'll save a little bit, but anyplace that advertises extremely discounted rates on Disney tickets is a scam.) 

Also a warning - Disney tickets are outrageously expensive, even with a discount.  Our total for 8 day no expiration tickets for 2 adults and 2 kids were $1500.  If we were to divide it out, it would be $750 for this trip and $750 for our future trip.

Souvenirs
The all-time budget killer - souvenirs.  When you are taking 2 small children to Disney World who have a tendency to want everything they see, budgeting for souvenirs can be tricky.  However, we found a method that worked wonderfully for us. 

We started planning our trip back in October.  When we did, we told our children that they needed to start saving up for their spending money at Disney.  We opened special saving accounts for them at the bank and made a deal with them.  We would match whatever they saved up to $100 each.  I'm so proud of our kids.  They saved diligently over the 7 month time-frame and Julie saved up $140.  With our $100 matching and a gift from their Mamaw, she had a whopping $290 to spend!!  David saved a little less but still managed to save $100.  We added out $100 and Mamaw's gift and he had $250 to spend.  Each child was allowed to spend our $100 before they touched their cash.

When we arrived in Disney for the week, we divided their money out over 5 days (4 days in the parks, one in Downtown Disney).  They had the right to spend their money anyway they wanted - all in one day or a little at a time - but we wanted to give them a little guidance.  Julie's budget was $58 a day and David's was $50 a day.  They both did pretty well spending within their budgets.  David spent every penny.  Julie came home with about $40.

So how did we decide what they paid for and what we paid for?  Our rules were we would pay for meals and for one snack a day (ice cream, funnel cake, etc).  Anything else they wanted, they had to use their money for.  That system worked beautifully for us.

Tim and I together had $300 budgeted to spend on our souvenirs.  We spent $237.

Entertainment
Disney has LOTS of special dinners and tours that you can reserve.  They can cost anywhere from $35 a person on up.  You just have to find out what your family feels is important - meeting characters, seeing a show, etc - and pick your entertainment choices based on that.  We went to Mickey's Backyard BBQ and on the Family Magic Tour.  Both turned out to be excellent choices for our family.  We also knew how much those would cost so we budgeted for them.  Our entertainment budget was $300.

Miscellaneous
Extra expenses always come up.  There are strollers to rent, Disney Photopass CD's to buy, and the list goes on.  Plan for miscellaneous expenses.  Consider them your wiggle room in your budget.

Overall we saved $5100 for our trip and ended up spending $4500.  I think we did pretty good.

Have you been to Disney World?  What are your budgeting tips?

How many hours did it take?

Since I know you have been dying to know, it's time for the answer!!

How long did it take the kids to tell us they were bored?

(Drum roll, please.)

3 hours and 5 minutes.

Yup - a whole 3 hours, 5 minutes of watching movies and playing with toys until there was "absolutely nothing to do."

Our winner is...
Crystal who said "3 hours and 25 minutes. Have fun!"

So, fellow readers, what did she win???

Pin trading is a BIG thing at Disney.  Guests and employees (cast members) alike wear lanyards with all kinds of pins all over them.  Then they trade them.  So in light of that, I decided Crystal needed an official Disney pin to start (or add to) her collection.  Since I know that Crystal is very crafty, I picked up this pin for her.

Congratulations, Crystal!!  I'll be mailing out your prize this week!

Book Review: The Amish Midwife

The Amish Midwife by Mindy Starns Clark and Leslie Gould

Nurse-midwife Alexandria Jaeger (Lexie) has just returned home to bury her adoptive father, the only father she's ever known.  All of her life, she has wanted "her story."  Where did she come from?  Why was she given up?  Now it seemed that story was within her grasp.  A deathbed conversation and gift from her father give her clues to her beginnings. 

After the funeral, Lexie travels from Oregon to Pennsylvania Amish country to search out answers.  While assisting a fellow midwife with Amish deliveries, Lexie learns pieces of the truth.  But no one seems willing to tell her everything.  Will she finally learn her story?  Can she handle the truth that she finds?

My Thoughts:

I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE Mindy Starns Clark.  I think I have read every single fiction book that she has written.  When I pick up one of her books, I know there will be great characters, a great mystery and a final solution that you never imagined. 

This is the first time I have read something of hers that she collaborated with another author on.  But it did not disappoint.  It was wonderful!!

The almost comical contrasts in the Amish that the book showed were delightful.  No electricity, but propane generated refrigerators.  No home phones, but texting Amish teens who all carried cells.  The characters were well-rounded and conflicted, like all good characters should be.  You learn how Lexie thinks and what frustrates her.  You see her trying to choose the right man to love.  And you feel for all the Amish families involved.

The story that Lexie learns of her past is fascinating.  I'm always amazed at how authors can come up with these great mystery plots.  Reading the book, I felt Lexie's frustration at every closed-lipped person and I felt her shock and peace as her story is finally revealed.  Believe me, this is one mystery you WON'T figure out ahead of time.

Mindy - you're still on the top of my list. 

5 out of 5 stars

What I Learned Wednesday: Great Blog Post Titles

What is the hardest part of writing a blog post?

The title, of course!

I really hate having to title each post.  I guess I don't really have to title them.  But it would come across as "Untitled post" to everyone and I don't want that either.

So how do you get something witty and clever but also something that shows up on search engines across the world?

Fortunately I'm not the only one with this problem.  These fine folks have come up with some ideas.  Check 'em out.

How to Write Killer Blog Titles & Why Mine Suck

How to Choose a Headline Using 3 Little Known Secrets

Blog Title – It’s More Than A Few Words

 

What I Learned at Cooking Class

I'm happy to give you this guest post (including recipe!) today by Amy:

Hi.  I’m Amy.  I’m happy to be a guest blogger for Cathy today.  My blog is Motherhood and Miscellany, where I write about the things I love: my two girls (ages 2 and 8 months), being a stay-at-home-mom, reading, cooking, photography, and anything else that strikes my fancy. 

One thing I’ve been writing about quite a bit lately is cooking.  I might even say I have a little bit of a cooking obsession lately.  I love to cook and have recently started trying to make up my own recipes.  My husband and I love the show “Chopped” on the Food Network and decided to try our own little version of the show at home.  You can check out how we started here.  Basically, each week he is giving me a “mystery ingredient” that I have to use in a recipe that I create myself.  So far he’s given me Ritz crackers and grits.  The recipes I’ve created have been good, though not yet great.  It has been tremendously fun to challenge myself this way in trying to take my cooking abilities to the next level.

Another way I have recently tried to improve my cooking is by taking a cooking class.  There is a wonderful chef staff at our local country club, and my husband and I love to eat there.  A few weeks ago they offered a class on braising with one of the chefs, and I jumped at the chance to attend.  It was a fantastic experience!  I thought I would share a few of the things I learned. 

Of course, braising is basically a way to slowly cook meat, first using a dry heat to brown the meat, and then cooking the meat in liquid until it is tender.  This is a great way to take tough but less expensive cuts of meat, like chuck or shank, and make them tender and delicious.  I always want to throw something in the crock pot without having to brown the meat first (I’ve done it many times), but the chefs say “No!”  Browning adds much to the flavor they say, so I will try to make myself take this extra step from now on.  I learned that the basic steps to making a complete braised dish are pretty much the same every time: 

1. Season your meat, either by marinating it or rubbing some seasoning on it, or just putting salt and pepper on.
2. Brown your meat. First get your pan hot, then add your oil or butter or whatever fat you’re using.  Let that get hot and then put your meat in and brown it on all sides.  A new thing I learned at the class is that you should flour the meat if it is in small pieces to help it get browned but prevent the meat from cooking all the way through while you brown it (in the browning step you just want to caramelize the outside of the meat, not cook it all the way through).
3. Once the meat is browned on all sides, remove it to a separate plate, add a bit more fat to the pan, and brown your mire poix (chopped onion, celery, and carrots).
4. Then deglaze the pan with some sort of acid, like wine or vinegar.  Pour it in and scrape up the browned bits from the bottom of the pan.  This starts to prepare the sauce for the meat already by getting all that great flavor into the liquid.  Reduce the deglazing sauce a bit.
5. Add your meat back in with other seasonings and liquid for cooking, usually a stock or broth.  You want to put in enough liquid to cover the meat about half- to two-thirds of the way, not to cover it completely (another new thing I learned). 
6. Cover the meat and put it in the oven to cook.  You could also use a crockpot, or even cook it on the stove.  But doing it on the stove requires more attention to make sure the temperature stays right.  During the cooking you may want to turn the meat halfway through and/or baste it a few times.
7. Once the meat is done, take it out of the liquid and keep it warm.  Skim off any impurities from the top of the liquid.  Then you can use the cooking liquid to make a sauce.  You can strain out the mire poix vegetables and other seasonings and then thicken the liquid with a cornstarch slurry or roux*.  Or you can puree the whole thing and use the vegetables to help thicken the sauce.  Or you could put the pan back on the stove and reduce the liquid.  Or you could do any combination of these things.  Or maybe the liquid will be just right when you take it out and you won’t need to do much of anything to it!  You can experiment and taste it and see what works. 
8. Slice the meat, top with sauce, serve! 

*I learned two great tips in the class for making and using a roux (combination of butter and flour used as a thickening agent).  First, the rule of thumb for making a roux is that you use equal parts by weight of the flour and butter.  Second, you can make a large amount of roux and then put it in an airtight container and just scoop out whatever amount you need each time you make a sauce, instead of having to take the time to make the roux each time you cook a sauce.

Okay, so now that I’ve given you all that info, here’s an actual recipe that we made in the class for Southwest Bar-B-Que Pork Ribs:

Ingredients

5 lbs Country style pork ribs

Southwest seasoning (enough to season the ribs)

Oil for cooking

1 large onion, diced

2 ribs of celery, diced

2 carrots, diced

¼ cup garlic, chopped

4 cups Bar-B-Que sauce

2 quarts pork or chicken stock (approximately)

2 Bay leaves

3 dried Ancho chiles

1 cinnamon stick

1/4 cup cilantro, chopped

Salt and Pepper to taste

1. Rehydrate the chiles by soaking them in warm water until soft.  Drain and remove the stems and seeds, then chop.
2. Add about a Tbsp of oil to your pan over medium heat.  Add vegetables and sauté until tender.  Remove from pan (in this recipe the chef chose to do the vegetables before the meat so they wouldn’t get browned)
3. Lightly season the meat with the southwest seasoning.  Add a bit more oil to the pan and brown the meat on all sides (this recipe calls for a lot of meat so be sure not to crowd the pan.  We had a huge pan in the commercial kitchen, but at home you’d probably have to brown the meat in batches).
4. Add the reserved mire poix vegetables, BBQ sauce, bay leaf, chilis, cinnamon, and enough stock to cover the meat 2/3 of the way.
5. Bring to a boil, reduce heat, and cover.  Cook the covered meat in a 250 degree oven for 2.5 to 3.5 hours, until fork tender.
6. Remove meat from pan and keep warm.  Strain the liquid through a mesh strainer.  Return to pan and reduce by 1/3, skimming often (there will be a bit of oil that comes to the top).
7. Thicken the sauce, if necessary, with roux or cornstarch & water (when we made this in the class the sauce was the perfect consistency after being strained).
8. Return the meat to the pan and heat through.
9. Add cilantro and adjust seasoning.  This will serve 6-8.

  This seems like a lot of work, but most of the time spent is just waiting for the meat to cook. It really wasn’t that involved, and the dish was so flavorful and the meat so tender, this is definitely something I will be trying at home.  I may cut the recipe in half though, since it was really a lot of meat at the end. 

It has been fun doing this guest post.  Thanks to Cathy for having me (and my cooking obsession) for the day!

How to Keeps Kids Entertained on Long Car Journeys

Guest Post today by Joe.  Enjoy!

With the Easter break just gone and the kids facing lengthy school holidays, you have likely been subject lengthy car journeys with the kids, ferrying them around to various attractions and amusements, desperately trying to keep the little rascals entertained. It’s one thing finding things for them to do, but quite another keeping them happy on long, hot commutes. As we all know kids have an attention span lasting mere seconds and boredom can set in almost immediately, so what exactly can you do during these trips to keep them from kicking the back of your chair and distracting your attention from the road?

Of course with the massive leaps in in-car-entertainment over the past few years, kids are spoiled for choice when it comes to passing the time on long-distance trips, of course we don’t all have a state of the art people-carriers equipped with surround sound systems, plasma TVs and a fridge to keep their candy cool. No matter how high tech your vehicle, there are plenty of ways to make a gruelling trip that bit more pleasurable, for both you and your kids!

Traditional Games
This is a fun and cost-free way to pass the time. Getting your kids involved with old favourites like I-Spy will not only keep their minds occupied, it will also hone their lateral thinking and engage their brains more than watching TV would. Other great games include ‘twenty questions’ and ‘stop the bus.’

Food and Drink
As we all know, one of the easiest routes to our kids hearts is through their stomachs and when they’re eating, they’re not shouting! Of course any intelligent parents knows not to feed their kids mountains of candy and sugary soda. Instead pack fruit juice, wholemeal bread and vegetable sticks to keep them satisfied and healthy!

Crosswords/Sudoku
Another effective way to keep your kids mentally stimulated is to get them to play word or number games. There are plenty of activity books out there packed with such puzzles available at very reasonable prices.

Sing-along Music
If your kids insist on making a din, why not at least try to get them sounding tuneful? Rather than simply putting on some Millie Cyrus or Justin Bieber, get a sing-along CD from a popular film or musical, this way your little ones can exercise their vocal chords and be educated about some cultural classics.

Joe is a stay-home-dad who drives a Volvo V70.