When I sat down to write this travelogue, I quickly discovered that trying to tell the whole story in one post was ridiculous. Things didn’t happen all at once, they unfolded. So, my approach here will be to write about each stage of the journey as its own post.

Prologue

We are used to traveling to the Walt Disney World (WDW) resort each year (sometimes more than once) because we could. We bought into Disney Vacation Club (DVC) back in 2010. This ownership provided us with a number of resorts that we could stay at on the WDW property that were paid for, and generally having the feeling of being “free.” (I should do a post about the DVC and the value (yes, value) we have gotten from it.) Since, at time of writing, WDW was/is still determined not to sell annual passes, we are able to stay in the hotels, but we can’t afford to go into the parks. This makes a vacation there far less appealing.

When it became apparent that Walt Disney World was not going to return its annual pass program, we made several decisions at once. The decision that affected this trip was the decision to purchase annual passes at neighboring Universal Orlando Resort (UOR). We had been to the Universal Orlando parks about 20 years prior, but we had never stayed on property. So, we made the decision to book this trip.

How long should we stay? At WDW there is so much to do that even if you stayed a fortnight you still could not fit it all in. When we thought about Universal, we couldn’t see staying more than 2-4 days. There are only two parks after all (and a waterpark we didn’t care about) how much time would we need? (We ended up staying 6 nights.)

Factors that went into the decision of when to stay, and how long to stay:
1.. We would be traveling in February 2023. This gave us a definite time frame.
2.. We were booking this in June, which meant that we had plenty of time to make payments, and were not faced with the bill all at once.
3.. We had already purchased annual passes to UOR, so park admission was assured along with some significant discounts on food and merchandise.

We went to the Universal Orlando Resort website and looked at their hotels. Although nothing in comparison to their neighbor, UOR had more hotels than I thought. We scrolled through the website thinking about the kind of experience we wanted to have, and what we could afford. In all honesty, we were looking at this as both a “once in a lifetime” and a “one and done” kind of trip. We were willing to splurge if we were only doing this once. Knowing that we would be traveling in February from fridged New England, we landed on the tropical Royal Pacific Resort. Yes, it was more than we would normally consider paying for a hotel, but we thought that we might as well try to have the best experience we could. On that note, we decided to book a club level room, which was not that much more (at the time of booking.)

If you are thinking about following the same process we did, and book your vacation in advance in order to give yourself time to pay it down without ruining your budget, there is something you should know. After you go to the website and book your room, you will only be charged for the first night. There is no way to pay on the room on the website after that initial deposit. Don’t despair. All it takes is an easy phone call to the resort to sort it all out.

OK! We had our Annual Passes (APs), dates, and a room booked! Now we could just coast freely without thinking about it until February! (We didn’t, of course.)  I can have a little bit of an obsessive streak when it comes to vacations. It gives me something for which to look forward when my depression hits. Daydreaming about vacations gives me a momentary oasis in the Desert of Real-World Drudgery.

Click on this link to read the next instalment : Planning and Preparing for our Universal Orlando Resort Vacation