Family Fun Times

If you know us at all, you’ll know that B-Rod and I are not very good at making plans. Partly due to it not being either of our strong suits, and partly due to the nature of B’s job and the lifestyle we’ve built around this. So, this latest adventure is not only out of our norm, but it’s one we both knew would take us out of our comfort zones.

Ever since his kids were very young, my brother has said he would eventually take his family to Disneyland. “We’ll go with you,” we said flippantly not giving it another thought. A few years later, my parents said they would also go along. While B-Rod and I continued to not give it a second thought, behind the scenes some planning was occurring. I may not be particularly good at long term planning, but my brother and mom are! So, over the years this limited vision B-Rod and I had once of randomly showing up to Disneyland one day to hop on a few rides eventually turned into a Bee family Disney extravaganza vacation involving 5 days at a Disney resort in Florida followed by a 4 day Disney cruise to the Caribbean booked at least 6 months in advance. Needless to say, B-Rod and I were scared!!

Despite being kept in the loop through group emails and chats, we were still fairly clueless about the whole Disney experience. Other people in the family seemed pretty excited to plan and execute these plans so follow along and see how it goes became our course of action. We knew there’d be crowds, lines, lots of noise, songs stuck in our heads, screaming kids, etc., but our time at the parks turned out really well. Sure there were lines for everything – for food, for bathrooms, for rides, for numbers to get in other lines for rides, for the sake of simply having lines – but there were also something called FastPasses (which we still don’t quite understand but which somehow got us to the front of lines) and my bro was a pro at this. With his love for planning and research, he had the FastPass game down to a science, and it almost seemed like sport for him. How could he best use and trade and get more of these passes to make our wait times less and our ride times more. Not only was he super successful (in 4.5 days, the longest we ever waited in line was 1.5 hours once!), but he appeared to have almost as much fun playing this game as he did on the rides! It definitely made B-Rod and I appreciate all the work and research he put into it as left to our own devices, we’d probably STILL be in line!

For the most part, the crowds didn’t bother us as much as we thought they would and we actually had fun!!

We did things like go on rides, . . . .

. . . . watch shows, . . . . . 

. . . . . meet different characters. . . .

 . . . take part in various activities … 

… and check out the different parks and areas. 

Despite not being Star Wars people, the Star Wars area was a fav for both of us!

Despite the fun, after almost 5 days of pretty long days of constantly being on the go (the last one we were at it for 15 hours!), I think we were all ready to slow it down and head onto a boat.