Travel Tips Tuesday - Trip planning!

After the Disney Mom's Panel application, I looked into the 2nd and 3rd round questions.

One of them struck me as odd - show the program or a file that you use while planning a trip.

Hmm.  A program or file?  Really?

As a long-time day tripper, my plan looked like this:
              Wake up early (6am), drive North on the Florida Turnpike, Osceola Pkwy exit, drive to the Transportation and Ticket Center.

Seeing that I followed that routine (sometimes with a stop to pick up a college friend) for the better part of the past 10 years, I never thought about making something fancier.

For this past trip, I used Disney's online planner.  It seemed like fun and gave me something to do, but when I printed it out, it was missing all of the details I typed online.  Geesh.

So, yesterday I sat down and typed everything up.

I made a simple word file that shows every day of the week, has all of our flight and rental car information, the villa information, dinner reservations (and Noah's first haircut reservation!), and what parks we're planning to visit for each day.

What I realized in my plans - I'd rather stop by the Magic Kingdom 3 different times than ever go to Disney's Hollywood Studios.  And, I'm not sure if we'll visit the Animal Kingdom.  I'm planning on 3 days at WDW with a 4th park day to visit Universal's Islands of Adventure.  If we're not loving IoA (read: Wizarding World of Harry Potter), we'll have a 4th day on our card to drive across town and hit another park in the afternoon.  We just all really want some butter beer!

Our plan looks like this (I've omitted all reservation info as well as villa for posting purposes):

 Walt Disney World Half Marathon

January 6-13, 2011

Thursday, January 6th:

7:30 Leave for IAD

Jet Blue Flight IAD-MCO

11:45 a.m. Enterprise Car Rental

12:15 p.m. Head to ESPN Wide World of Sports – Marathon Weekend Expo

                Pick up race packets 

2-3 p.m. Grocery Shop

4 p.m. Villa Check in

Parents arrive
               

Friday, January 7^th:

11 a.m. – Mickey’s Marathon Kid Fest – ESPN Wide World of Sports

 Noah’s Diaper Dash                                                                                      Explore Celebration/Downtown Disney

Saturday, January 8^th:

5:40 – Half Marathon begins!

After Race: Sea World/Celebration/Downtown Disney

p.m. Kouzzina by Cat Cora

               

Sunday, January 9^th:

9:00 a.m. – Magic Kingdom (EMH – 8, no rope drop)

a.m. – Harmony Barbershop – Noah’s 1^st haircut

p.m. Le Cellier Steakhouse

               

Monday, January 10^th:

9:00 a.m. – Islands of Adventure

                Wizarding World of Harry Potter!!!!

Tuesday, January 11^th

9:00 a.m. – Magic Kingdom (rope drop!)

Wednesday, January 12^th:

9:00 a.m. – EPCOT (rope drop)
p.m. Il Mulino NY Trattoria

Thursday, January 13^th:

10:00 a.m. – Check out time

Return Rental Car           

Jet Blue Flight MCO - IAD

               

 I promise it looks nicer in my own file - I removed spaces and other info to save room, but this is the general idea.  How does our trip compare to yours?  Do you have a better way of planning out your trips that you'd like to share with a recovering Day Tripper?

Thanks for stopping by!

~Jenn