Disney World 2022!

Disney World 2022!  Our 'next trip to Disney' is always in the back of our minds, and we've known for a while now that our next trip would happen when everyone was old enough to enjoy Harry Potter World as well.  We've spent the last eight months planning and preparing and saving money and watching YouTube videos and making reservations and touring plans and when we started planning this trip last June, we were all sure that, thanks to all of our efforts in mask wearing and vaccinations and boosters and social distancing, Covid would be a not-so-happy but fairly distant memory that would have no effect on our travel plans.  

Well.  The weeks leading up to the trip were stressful enough with half of us getting sick with what was probably Covid, cancelled flights all over the country, rising case rates in Florida, a big snowstorm 48 hours before we were set to leave and yet... it all worked out just fine and we were on our way to Disney right on schedule!

Almost anyway.  We ended up having to sit on the plane for an hour while they de-iced the wings and tried and tried and tried again to get one of the engines started, and the man directly behind me and the boys was shouting to get off the plane and was almost escorted off the plane for his outbursts, but eventually we were in the air and headed south!  That was definitely the worse of the two flights we took on this trip, but all in all it wasn't horrible.  But when is flying ever really enjoyable?  You just deal with it to get where you want to be!

All travel with Noah still requires a sweet bit of hand holding.  On the planes, in the cars and buses, and definitely on the roller coasters.  Noah and I were absolutely hand-holding buddies on this trip!

And where we wanted to be was in Disney World! 

We stayed in the Art of Animation resort, which was just as cute and inspiring as I remember it being when I stayed there with my family, maybe as a teen?  

We saved an extra $20 a night by not requesting a particular theme for our family suite, and in the weeks leading up to the trip we looked for all kinds of signs and had all kinds of bets about whether it would be a Little Mermaid, Cars, Finding Nemo or Lion King room.  The kids even had a deal that whoever picked the right room would get the first bag of Goofy Gummies!

And it ended up being Emma who guessed that we would be in the Finding Nemo suite!

It was such a cute room with three queen-sized beds and two bathrooms and a kitchenette that we filled with groceries that were delivered to our resort- no Walmart dash this time and I loved it! We had plenty of treats and snacks and cereal and fruit and popcorn- popcorn was definitely the star snack of this trip- to eat whenever we were in our room.  

And it worked out that we were as close as could be to the main building and the bus stop as well.  All in all our resort was perfect and our journey to get there was relatively painless so we all quickly jumped into bed so that we could hit the ground running to Magic Kingdom first thing in the morning!