Hello from south central PA!

Thanks for the great welcome, everyone! For those who were curious, our trips for the year are:

Nov. 30-Dec. 11 @ Saratoga Springs (home DVC) - seeing Osborne Family Spectacle of Lights and doing MVMCP for the first time!

April 5-9 @ Boardwalk Villas with my husband and my parents for my birthday - first time my parents have been to WDW in 25 years, can't wait to take mom to flower & garden and take dad on the magic of the steam trains tour

May 15-19 @ Old Key West with my husband and the in-laws - my husband and brother-in-law are going to Star Wars weekend and I'm taking the mother-in-law to flower & garden

September 25-October 5 @ TBD (hoping to get Grand Floridian or Bay Lake Tower) - our first food & wine festival, hopefully running our first runDisney event. I'm trying hard to be prepared for the Tower of Terror 10-miler and hoping that it will fall on the same weekend next year!

Hopefully I didn't mislead anyone with my honeymoon story. As soon as we got to MK that morning, it suddenly hit us why this was a bad idea. We've been back twice together and I've been two additional times with friends since 2010. Most of the real reason it took us so long to go back is that we moved 4 times in the first 6 years we were married do to pursuing an out of state job opportunity, buying a house there, ultimately hating being away from home and moving back, and then buying a house in my hometown where we now reside. So, a lot of the problem was finding the time and money to go on ANY vacation. The only way I'm moving out of state again is to move to Florida

Hi Jackie,
I'm new, too--just signed up today. Welcome to you, as well!
Not sure if you do DVC or not, but I'll share with you our strategy for stretching our points and lowering our cost per day. Our trips are very strategically placed to maximize our dvc points and annual pass. I am the ultimate time share skeptic, but after a lot of math and a ton of what-if scenarios, I really do think that DVC is the best game in town if you buy a resale contract and you're willing to take the time to explore all of the options that are available. Last December, we purchased 200 Saratoga points with a March use year. Buying in at that time allowed us to take advantage of an AP sale to purchase a premium annual pass for $399 each (I believe current 10-day tickets are $325/adult). We've been sitting on the unactivated PAP and patiently not using any of our points (limited time magic announcements have been killing me!) until this trip. By waiting until almost the end of our current use year to activate our annual passes and borrowing all of our 2015 points, we have access to 600 points for 4 trips. We booked 10 nights in a Saratoga studio for December 2013 (131 points), 4 nights in a 1-BR at Boardwalk Villas for April 2014 (125 points), nights in a 2-BR at Old Key West for May 2014 (158 points), and we still have 186 points remaining to book 10 nights in September/October, which is enough to book at studio at Grand Floridian or Bay Lake Tower. I'll spare you all of the calculations, but we will be in WDW for a total of 32 days in the next 12 months for roughly $3500 less than if we had booked value or moderate accommodations for 4 separate stays through the WDW website.

Wow!!! That's awesome! What town are you in? We should totally have lunch!!

That IS a bummer. WDW is totally educational. I don't know why the schools have to be so stuffy about it. There's so much to learn in the parks! History, World Cultures, Engineering, Math (how much time until we can get our next FP!), Horticulture, Art, Music, Theater, Marine Biology, Zoology...the list goes on and on. I think the teachers and administrators are just jealous that they can't go to Disney in the middle of the school year!! LOL

Thanks, Allie! I just saw your thread about your new mouseketeer! Congratulations!!

Thanks again for meeting up with me, Jan. I had a great time!! We will definitely have to do it again soon! Is anyone else out there local-ish to south central PA? How much fun would it be for a whole group of us to be able to get together! I also have a few friends who I know "from real life" who happen to also be big Disney fans.

For today's Disney activity, I attended the Halloween party at my grandmother's nursing home--Alice in Wonderland theme! I wore my Cheshire Cat costume and I made a Queen of Hearts costume for Grandma. It was such a cool party! All of the treats were tea party themed, the activities staff all had very good and creative costumes, and we even watched Alice in Wonderland while we enjoyed the "Tea Party".

It used to be that way in our town, too. I remember when my great-grandmother was in the nursing home when I was a kid. It was so sad and depressing there, but Pennsylvania's lack of state tax for retirement income means that we're a hot spot for retirees, which has really created a boom in the nursing home business in our town!

The place that my grandmother lives is amazing. The building is limited to 40 residents - 20 that live mostly independently in personal care and 20 like my grandma that need specific or constant medical supervision that live in skilled care. We just happened to get lucky that there was a space available when she needed to move there because they usually have a waiting list. I've tried to attach pictures from the party. If it works, the activities coordinator is the Mad Hatter. His assistant is the Queen of Hearts. Alice is the daughter of one of the nurses and I'm the Cheshire Cat. Grandma was also the Queen of Hearts.

There is a brother and sister team that does a sing-a-long once a month and over the summer, one of the songs we sang was zip-a-dee-doo-dah, so when they opened up the floor for requests, I asked for It's a Small World. The keyboardist didn't know the music off the top of her head, so I got put on the spot for an a cappella performance. I've never been so grateful for the fact that these dear, sweet people don't hear very well!!

Preview	Attachment	Size
	img_0646.jpg	125.7 KB
	img_0634.jpg	125.07 KB