I am looking forward to my upcoming trip because I get to spend four days in the most magical place on earth with my mom!  One of the great things about Walt Disney World is that there is so much to experience you cannot possibly ever experience it all so every trip holds the potential for a new unique experience.  Even if you do not try something new or do something different, if you are with someone different it can be a whole new experience.  Even though I was just there a month ago and I will do many of the same things this trip, I look forward to creating new memories doing those things with my mom next to me!

We both will be flying and arriving around the same time so we will ride the Magical Express to WDW together to our resort, All Star Music.  We probably won’t arrive at our resort until 11:30 or 12:00 at night so I am not sure we will head out to Downtown Disney this night.  We may just opt to hit the hay early and rest up for a busy four days.

Our “magic journeys” (reference to WDW history) will begin in Hollywood Studios.  I am going to skip the American Idol Experience this time because it eats up so much of my time.  Hollywood Studios has morning extra magic hours so I hope to take advantage of that and do the Toy Story Manic sprint to get fastpasses and ride as many times as we can before the wait gets too long.  I am thinking ABC Commissary and Backlot Express for our meals.  We scored free dining for this trip so we have one snack credit and two counter service credits for each night we stay in the World!  This weekend will be the first weekend of The Osborne Family Spectacle of Dancing Lights which I have never seen and is one of the things I am looking forward to most!  There are two showings of Fantasmic! so we are going to hit the second one because apparently more people go to the first show.

The Studios close at 8pm and Magic Kingdom has evening extra magic hours until 3am and of course we have park hoppers so we are going to take advantage of that.  The crowd level at Magic Kingdom is 9.5 and last trip we hopped to MK on a night like that and it was chaos the first couple of hours so we might go check out the Boardwalk, Downtown Disney, or ride the monorail around and explore some of the resorts for a couple of hours and let the riff raff clear out before heading to Magic Kingdom.

Day two we head to the Epcot, home of the Food and Wine Festival!  That’s right, it will still be going on!  You can bet some of my snack credits will be used at those kiosks and I might even have to break out my wallet as well because I probably will run out of snack credits!  Our first destination will of course be Soarin and then we will head over to the Chase Lounge in the old Wonders of Life pavilion to pick up wristbands for preferred viewing of IllumiNations.  I just found out about this a couple weeks ago.  Of course it was after our last trip.  I would like to eat at the Tangerine Cafe for sure but I think we might just wing it for our other meal.  There are so many great options in Epcot you can’t go wrong.  Epcot closes at 9pm and Magic Kingdom has extra magic hours until 1am so we have the option to go back there or we can sail over to the Boardwalk or take a bus to Downtown Disney.

Day three Mickey’s Very Merry Christmas Party will begin at 7pm in Magic Kingdom!  The crowd level is predicted to be a 1.1 which is hard to beat!  If it is indeed a 1.1 we should be able to do quite a bit and I am hoping between this day and the previous nights during extra magic hours that we can accomplish enough to not feel rush.  I would love to be able to take it slow, explore, take it all in and maybe do some serious drooling in the gift shops.

This night we will be attending Mickey’s Very Merry Christmas Party.  I am really looking forward to seeing the Magic Kingdom decked out in all its Christmas splendor and watching Mickey’s Once Upon A Christmastime Parade.  Cinderella’s Castle was covered with hundreds of thousands lights when we were there in October which you could only see when you were close to the castle but this trip we will get to see them at work! 

Magic Kingdom closes at midnight the night of the party and there won’t be any other parks still open so if we are still really energized from the free hot cocoa and cookies and the party we may head to Downtown Disney.

Our last day we will head to Animal Kingdom with a predicted crowd level of 1.9 we should be able to accomplish quite a bit before it closes at 5pm.  I am thinking Flame Tree Barbeque for lunch this time and wait until we get to Epcot to eat dinner.  We could then hop over to Epcot which closes at 9pm.  My mom’s flight leaves early afternoon so we could sleep in and still do some exploring the next day before we begin our sad journey on Disney’s Magical Express.

Despite it being a fairly short trip I think there is potential to experience quite a bit between the decent crowd levels and there just being two of us.  I think the weather (temperature at least) should be perfect and I look forward to stuffing my face full of wonderful food thanks to the free dining!