Gina Starr
DIS Veteran
- Joined
- Mar 29, 2015
Hey everyone and welcome to another trip report! I’m going to be lazy and copy our “about us” from my last trip report.
I’m Gina and my husband is Donnie. This trip report will tell the story of our 11th trip to Disney World together. We both went as kids in the 90s and our first trip as a couple was in May 2014. We tagged along with my sister and her family and my parents joined. It was not the greatest trip due to poor planning (we didn’t know you could get FP in advance!) and the fact that the majority of the family was sick at one point or another (I missed our Universal day and had to be pushed around in a wheelchair in Animal Kingdom!) Needless to say, after that trip Donnie and I decided we needed a do-over so we went back just the two of us a year later and the rest is history.
We are high school sweethearts and we have been together for more than half my life. We are childless millennials unless you count our dog, Pepper! He is 5 lbs of pure terror and is 100% our fur baby. We both work at the same place, work the same hours, and even share a desk. (And now work from home just a few rooms apart!) Yea, I can guess what you are thinking but we love it. We married each other for a reason and we love spending time together.
Some of my hobbies are eating delicious gluten free foods, bargain shopping, watching YouTube, and dying my hair at home then going to a professional to fix it. Donnie enjoys “just looking” at the store, collecting Disney merch, watching vlogs, and enabling my shopping habits.
This trip came about for lotsa reasons. So obviously we are still in a pandemic which we have been taking very seriously. Our awesome employer gave us two months off in April and May 2020 and we have been working from home since June 2020. When we were off work we were only leaving the house once every two weeks for groceries. Since we have been working from home, we get out usually once a week for groceries and have gone to the movies twice and Top Golf once for my birthday. So needless to say we were both itching to see something other than our house and someone other than each other.
Then, a few months ago Donnie had a health scare which put him in the hospital twice. He is good now but the second time he was in the hospital he said we were going to Disney one way or another.
And lastly it just seemed like a great opportunity to take advantage of lower crowds (haha!) and one of those things that would be something to remember for years to come. Everything we saw showed how safe it was at Disney and how serious they were taking everything so we felt safe.
We didn’t know when or even if we could get time off work so we didn’t have a ton of time to plan, not like there’s much to plan these days. We booked the trip September 16 and our check in day was September 27. We were only going to have three park days and since there was no park hopping at the time we had to carefully decide which park we wanted to go to and when. Obviously we were going to Magic Kingdom and Epcot was an easy decision too with Food and Wine. The third park was the hard decision. We haven’t been on Minnie and Mickeys Runaway Railway yet and we love exploring Galaxy’s Edge and Toy Story Land but we had been keeping an eye on crowds and Hollywood Studios had been packed with really long waits and boarding passes for Rise of the Resistance going within seconds so we decided on Animal Kingdom! Now what order do we do them in? We always start at MK and end at MK but that wasn’t an option. I thought it would be a good idea to start with MK so that if we didn’t get to any of our must do’s then we could ditch AK and change our reservation to another day at MK.
So now that we know the who when and why let’s get into it!
I’m Gina and my husband is Donnie. This trip report will tell the story of our 11th trip to Disney World together. We both went as kids in the 90s and our first trip as a couple was in May 2014. We tagged along with my sister and her family and my parents joined. It was not the greatest trip due to poor planning (we didn’t know you could get FP in advance!) and the fact that the majority of the family was sick at one point or another (I missed our Universal day and had to be pushed around in a wheelchair in Animal Kingdom!) Needless to say, after that trip Donnie and I decided we needed a do-over so we went back just the two of us a year later and the rest is history.
We are high school sweethearts and we have been together for more than half my life. We are childless millennials unless you count our dog, Pepper! He is 5 lbs of pure terror and is 100% our fur baby. We both work at the same place, work the same hours, and even share a desk. (And now work from home just a few rooms apart!) Yea, I can guess what you are thinking but we love it. We married each other for a reason and we love spending time together.
Some of my hobbies are eating delicious gluten free foods, bargain shopping, watching YouTube, and dying my hair at home then going to a professional to fix it. Donnie enjoys “just looking” at the store, collecting Disney merch, watching vlogs, and enabling my shopping habits.
This trip came about for lotsa reasons. So obviously we are still in a pandemic which we have been taking very seriously. Our awesome employer gave us two months off in April and May 2020 and we have been working from home since June 2020. When we were off work we were only leaving the house once every two weeks for groceries. Since we have been working from home, we get out usually once a week for groceries and have gone to the movies twice and Top Golf once for my birthday. So needless to say we were both itching to see something other than our house and someone other than each other.
Then, a few months ago Donnie had a health scare which put him in the hospital twice. He is good now but the second time he was in the hospital he said we were going to Disney one way or another.
And lastly it just seemed like a great opportunity to take advantage of lower crowds (haha!) and one of those things that would be something to remember for years to come. Everything we saw showed how safe it was at Disney and how serious they were taking everything so we felt safe.
We didn’t know when or even if we could get time off work so we didn’t have a ton of time to plan, not like there’s much to plan these days. We booked the trip September 16 and our check in day was September 27. We were only going to have three park days and since there was no park hopping at the time we had to carefully decide which park we wanted to go to and when. Obviously we were going to Magic Kingdom and Epcot was an easy decision too with Food and Wine. The third park was the hard decision. We haven’t been on Minnie and Mickeys Runaway Railway yet and we love exploring Galaxy’s Edge and Toy Story Land but we had been keeping an eye on crowds and Hollywood Studios had been packed with really long waits and boarding passes for Rise of the Resistance going within seconds so we decided on Animal Kingdom! Now what order do we do them in? We always start at MK and end at MK but that wasn’t an option. I thought it would be a good idea to start with MK so that if we didn’t get to any of our must do’s then we could ditch AK and change our reservation to another day at MK.
So now that we know the who when and why let’s get into it!