Vacation Archives - Lazy Man and Money

What it’s Like to go on Vacation During Coronavirus

July 2, 2020 by Lazy Man 3 Comments

kids smores — Our annual s’mores dessert.

Today’s article is brief… expect a couple of longer ones next week and in the future as the kids go to camp (if camps still happen as planned)

So like everything in 2020, this is going to be a weird article to write. It’s especially odd because coronavirus cases are spiking across the country… except for two states, Connecticut and Rhode Island which are declining. We’re lucky enough to live in Rhode Island. We never got a big spike in our area and now things are on the decline.

I still don’t see nearly enough people wearing masks, but what’s in place is working as well as… what’s working in many European countries when you see the charts.

It’s so strange here, that we did something that few Americans can think about – go on vacation. Last week, we went on our annual trip to Block Island – a small island ~15 miles off the coast of Rhode Island. It’s only accessible by ferry and has a tiny population of ~1000 people. It’s where (allegedly) Billy Joel and Christopher Walken sneak off to if they want to get away from the celebrity life for a bit.

Block Island hasn’t a coronavirus case yet. (Now that I think about it, their “hospital” isn’t really much and I can’t imagine they do testing.)

In a role reversal, the bed and breakfast that we stay called us up and asked if we wanted to come this year. Their usual clients from out of state, couldn’t come as a practical matter, because of the state’s 14-day self-quarantine mandate.

So we did what the 30-year old song said to do:

“Sail away on the Block Island Ferry, leave all your troubles behind… take a trip back to carefree times.”

For the most part, it lived up to its promise.

Our Own Block Island Gotchas

This section is likely to go over like a lead balloon. After all, we’re already in the win column by having any kind of vacation at all.

It seems we weren’t the only people looking to take this trip. While we were able to book the hotel easily enough, the ferry itself wasn’t taking reservations for awhile. When they finally started, car reservations were filled up for the first day except for the last one at 7 PM. That would be a loss of a whole day of vacation. That’s significant when you are only staying 3 nights/4 days.

We decided to park the car and go across ourselves in the morning. I took the ferry back at 2 PM to pick up the car and bring that across to the island. I was originally disappointed by this run-around, but it’s the first 6 hours I had without the wife and kids in about 4 months. I was only disappointed that when I got back, everyone (especially my wife) was ready for sleep. I can’t blame her with two kids and the dog.

Before our trip, we got the news that my wife’s friend’s father had died. The funeral was the morning of the last day of our trip. We had planned to stay the full day, but we were able to change our ferry time and leave in the morning. (Few people leave the Block Island first thing in the morning – the ferry was almost empty.)

A four-day vacation turned into about a two day one. That’s still 2 more days than most people have during these times, but it was disappointing nonetheless.

The Block Island Vacation Itself

There isn’t a lot to do on Block Island. That’s kind of the point. There are outdoor activities like hiking, kayaking, and beaching. There are some nice tiny boutique shops. Finally, there are the restaurants. The outdoor activities are exactly the same during coronavirus – except that you bring your mask with you just in case. There aren’t many people around, so there’s not a big need to use it.

We usually go hiking and hunting for glass orbs. There’s a deal with the tourism industry on the island and a local glassmaker to hide around 500 of these on the island every year. They are extremely hard to find, and we haven’t found one in 4 years now. This year they weren’t hiding them until late July. Instead of hiking, we brought an inflatable kayak and took that out for a little while.

We didn’t get to do any boutique shopping. I’m not a big fan, but sometimes there’s something in the 75% bin that’s a good deal. The biggest reason why we didn’t get to do any is that our 6 and 7-year-old kids wouldn’t allow it without ruining the whole vacation. There’s simply nothing fun for kids in boutiques. If we had a longer vacation, we could have split up, but it didn’t work out that way.

The restaurants are very different during coronavirus of course. They were just starting to open up distanced indoor dining when our trip started. It didn’t seem like any restaurant operated the same way. A few took temperatures. Some took our name and phone number. Some had menus. Some asked us to take a picture of a menu with our phone and use that to order from. However, once again, many people don’t have an option to eat at a restaurant.

At the end of the day, the best thing about Block Island is simply unplugging from day-to-day life. It’s nice to not have to worry about a to-do list that never gets done or laundry, dishes, cooking, etc.

If we wanted to be more frugal about the planning perhaps we would have come back the evening before and saved the last night at the hotel. That would have saved us a couple of hundred dollars. However, we would had spent a lot of the last evening cleaning and packing for our trip, which would have cut down on our vacation further.

Our Frugal New York City Vacation

February 25, 2019 by Lazy Man 4 Comments

The words frugal and New York City are seldom seen together. It’s probably one of the most expensive cities in the world.

Nonetheless, we wanted to take the kids to see the big apple. Driving from Rhode Island, it was a little more than 3 hours away.

(Note: I originally had “staycation” in the title. I’m not sure if driving 3 hours and staying overnight at a hotel qualifies though? Are their “staycation” guidelines?)

The drive was a bit of a long drive for the kids, but with tablets, it wasn’t too bad. Unfortunately, I didn’t do the best job of loading up the two tablets with movies. I might have to consider buying another Amazon Fire 10 to replace my old Nexus 7. It’s much easier to get movies on it.

As with most vacations, the biggest expenses are travel and hotel. That was no different for us. It’s very hard to limit these, but we did save a few dollars over some other options:

Travel – If it was just one of us traveling a train may have made sense. With the four of us, train tickets get expensive. We opted to drive and park at the hotel. It was $60 for the night, which comes to about $20 per person when you add in gas. Back in college people would take the Fung Wah bus from Boston to New York for around $10, but I think it had about a 70% crash rate. I don’t think it’s still around, but it isn’t worth it anyway.
Hotel – This is going to be cheating a bit, but hear me out. My wife was able to get a government rate or deal by being a Marriott ranking member. However, the deal wasn’t a big savings. There were other hotel options for a similar price that maybe had a little less luxury or a slightly worse location. The biggest factor in getting a cheap price was that it was the middle of February. We lucked out and got great weather most of the time.
Unfortunately, in our search for a dog friendly hotel, we didn’t realize that Marriott charges a $100 per stay pet fee. My wife said that when she was booking this was a hidden fee a few clicks away from the information that the hotel was pet-friendly. We were only staying one night, so this was a tremendous surcharge. Next time we’ll go with a Hilton that I think charges only $50. We might even be able to do better than that.

The big draw for us to go to New York City was the Pokemon store. My kids are completely obsessed with everything Pokemon. I’d tell you how many episodes they’ve watched, but it’s embarrassing. Did you know there are almost twice as many Pokemon episodes than Simpson’s episodes? There’s a reason why it is the the highest grossing media franchise. It’s just a little shy of being as big as Star Wars and Harry Potter combined.

There’s one lie in the previous paragraph… there’s no such thing as Pokemon store in New York City. It’s a Nintendo store with a section devoted to Pokemon. However, I believe it is the only Pokemon Center outside of Japan. The trip to Japan from Rhode Island isn’t something we are entertaining any time soon.

I wouldn’t have known there was a “Pokemon store” in NYC if my wife hadn’t stumbled upon it a last fall on one of her Broadway tours. She came back and reported that it was nearly a whole floor of Pokemon stuff.

Sadly, on our trip the Pokemon stuff had been reduced to around 20′ x 20′ area. They didn’t have any of the popular Pokemon… not even a stuffed Pikachu. It took awhile, but eventually the kids warmed up to a couple of the options that they had. I’ll have to get my Magikarp some other time. Overall they were happy at a cost of around $30 or so.

Next we went to FAO Schwarz. (Yes, it’s back in business.) The kids had a ton of fun in exploring all the stuff there. We spent hours there and they ended up only wanting to buy a couple of Kinder eggs for a few dollars. Compare that to Trolls’ Experience which was $30 a person for an hour show. We avoided that one.

Another frugal win was Dylan’s Candy Bar. Three floors of candy is fun for any kid. While it might not strike people as frugal, it worked out relatively well for us. It was a slow evening so they took us in the cafe without reservations. Fortunately they were still having happy hour, which meant cheap appetizers and drinks. I hear it’s not uncommon to pay $15-$20 for a glass of wine in NYC.

Our sour patch drinks (drinks with candy!) were $6 each. The kids mostly eat appetizers like mozzarella sticks and chicken tenders so it worked out. It was also helpful that we found that there were a lot of dollar a slice pizza places. The slices are quite big and four slices were enough for a late lunch for our family. Filling up on all that was key to avoiding the big ticket items at Dylan’s. The price of food and drinks at Dylan’s was $50. Factoring the pizza and lunch and dinner was under $60.

We also stopped at the Lego store, but it was a disappointment as well. Some of the things that their artists built were amazing, but it was small and not really that much to do other than look at the few big things and buy Lego sets.

The next morning my wife went to get some bagels to bring back to the hotel for breakfast. When in New York, you have to get some bagels. Unfortunately, they were surprisingly expensive. I think my wife said it came to around $20 for bagels and cream cheese. She said that next time it would have been cheaper to just get the cream cheese at the grocery store on the corner. One the bright side, the kids loved them and they were big enough for two meals.

Throughout the stay, we filled in some of the other time with Pokemon Go. I’ve become quite attached to the game (I’m 2-3 years behind everyone else), especially since it’s something the kids share in. Pokemon Go is, of course, free and all the famous places in NYC means that there’s tons of stuff to do in the game no matter where you are.

Next time we go to New York City, we’ll try to stay longer. I regret not having the time to coordinate a visit with a college friend. We’ll also bring the kids to museums, botanical gardens, and things like that. If there are any New Yorkers reading this who has tips for kids age 6, please drop me a comment.

Despite the efforts to save money, we probably still spent close to $500 (especially with the dog hotel charge) for the day. I understand it’s hard to call that frugal, but it could have doubled if we decided to splurge at one of my wife’s favorite restaurants (Mastro’s) and did the Troll’s Experience. Frugal in New York City is definitely a relative concept.

Do you have any tips for frugal activities in New York City? Let me know below. (You’ll earn 3,278 bonus points if they are friendly for kids in the 5-8 age range).

Travel for Free by Hacking Your Taxes?

September 18, 2018 by Lazy Man 3 Comments

Many personal finance bloggers love to write about travel hacking with credit cards. As you can tell by that link, I’m one of those bloggers who have written about it in the past.

Last year, we had a lot of expenses in renovating some investment condos. It required us to put up a significant amount of money into the projects. It’s money we had in our various emergency funds. My wife and I applied for quite a few credit cards that had bonuses for spending a minimum amount. Most of them earned us the equivalent of $500 in travel if we spent $3000. That’s the equivalent of getting more than 16% back as long as you use the points.

Back then, I would keep track of what all our points/miles and worth. It was around $6,000 which is pretty exciting! It wasn’t all from the credit cards. Some of it was from saving up Marriott points for years at our timeshare. Some of it was from my wife’s work travel.

We used some of them late last year and will use some more this year. We’re saving up a large portion for a potential return to Australia. Hopefully our trip won’t collapse the United States’ Financial system like it did 10 years ago.

You’ll notice that this article has been about my travel hacking last year. Why? We haven’t been able to do it much this year. Many of our expenses aren’t ones that we can pay with a credit card. Our mortgage can’t be paid with one. The kids’ school can’t be paid with one. We don’t pay for electricity due to our solar panels. I like to reduce our expenses on all the other stuff, so there’s often no guarantee that we’ll get to the minimum spending necessary to earn the rewards.

Then I read an article from Joe of Retire by 40. He’s hustling for free travel using credit cards. I’ve been following Joe’s blog for a long time and we have a lot of financial similarities. One of the differences is that he’s paying estimated taxes on his blog earnings. We don’t pay estimated taxes. I’m an employee of my blogs S-Corp (and have taxes taken out as part of payroll). My wife also chooses to withhold a little more money on her day job.

It turns out that you can pay taxes with a credit card. The processing fees vary, but it looks like it can be as low as 1.87%. (Why would anyone choose the other options to pay more?) If you had to pay $10,000 in taxes that’s $187 in fees. At first it sounds like a raw deal.

However, if you are putting it on three credit cards that have $3000 minimum spending, it could earn $1500 back in travel points depending on the credit cards. Would you pay $187 for $1500 in travel rewards? Of course, right? If you are going to travel anyway, that’s $1300 in free money.

I have to admit that I really haven’t looked at changing our withholdings. It’s been nearly a couple of decades since I even thought about how it works. I usually like, “Set it and forget it.” It fits with my whole Lazy Man brand. However, I’m willing to change my ways if it means an extra thousand or two a year in free travel.

I have to admit that I’ve never heard of anyone doing this. (That doesn’t mean it hasn’t been written about before as it is pretty close to Retire By 40’s plan.) Maybe there’s a gotcha that I’m not seeing?

So to recap, here’s the plan to hack free travel with credit cards and taxes:

Increase ~~withholding~~ allowances so less tax is taken out of your paycheck. (Needed a correction there.)
Get a credit card that offers a $500 reward for spending $3000 in the first 3 months. (That’s an example. I’ve seen a lot of these around.)
Use the credit card to send a tax payment to reach the minimum.
Pay off your credit card from the money that wasn’t taken out of your paycheck in step 1.
Repeat steps 1-4 quarterly or as often as you can depending on how much tax you need to pay.
Enjoy your reward bonuses (minus a little in fees for using a credit card) of travel.

What do you think? Does it work?

We Disappeared on an Tiny Island (Summer Hole 2018)

June 19, 2018 by Lazy Man 4 Comments

I hope all the fathers out there reading this had a good Father’s Day this weekend. It’s hard not look at the news headlines and realize that not all fathers had a good day.

We just finished up the two week period between the end of school and the start of summer camp. I call this the “summer hole” because my wife and I are kid care for two full weeks. (Summer hole is a particularly bad name since it isn’t summer and hole sounds bad. Unfortunately, I can’t think of anything better.)

Last year was our first year at our school and it caught us by surprise. The school didn’t really announce, “We end everything two weeks before the other schools, good luck with summer camp that doesn’t begin until then.” My wife didn’t plan to take vacation until late and we weren’t prepared. This year things went smoothly, but we saw parents of children in my youngest’s class (their first time) get surprised too.

The first week started with graduation and school-organized play-dates for the kids. You can laugh about the accomplishment of graduating pre-school, but it is certainly cute and entertaining for parents. We did some local things for a day or two and then it was time for my 20th college reunion followed by our annual trip to Block Island.

College Reunion 2018

There’s a reason why everyone says that time flies and 20th reunions are one of them. I wasn’t a huge fan of my college, but it is hard to argue with free tuition at one of the best liberal arts educations in the country. I did make a great group of friends and it was a good opportunity to catch up with them as our lives have moved in different directions.

The big theme of the party, at least for men was, less hair and bigger bellies. I wasn’t an exception to that. We were all reminded of what we looked like 20 years ago so that others could recognize us.

My wife felt like the school really went all out, which I agreed with. My kids, age 4 and 5, were somewhat excited about the new place, but bored easily.

As my wife says, reunions are odd. If you wanted to keep in touch with people, you probably would. Most of the people I’d want to get back in touch with live across the country and didn’t show up. Even if they did, it’s hard to re-kindle a friendship over such a distance with families moving in different directions.

I wish I had a more personal finance angle to share about this. We stayed only 24 hours because my wife was hosting some out of town coworkers in Rhode Island. That was minor pit stop before…

Block Island 2018

If you’ve never heard of Block Island, you are a normal person. There’s a better chance that you’ve heard of Nantucket or Martha’s Vineyard. Those islands are known for being popular vacation escapes off the coast of Massachusetts. You aren’t allowed onto those island unless you have a belt that has at least two of the following nautical symbols: anchor, whale, sailboat, ship wheel (helm?), lighthouse, sea star (starfish), or crab. Also, it seems like white pants and pastels are part of the dress code.

Block Island is a lot like Nantucket or Martha’s Vineyard, but much smaller. I described it a bit in last year’s Block Island review, but here’s a short explanation: Block Island consists mostly of the city with the fewest people (~1000) in the smallest state (Rhode Island). The island has one grocery store, one bank, and one gas station… and at least 15 beaches and hiking trails.

For us, it has a few advantages:

It’s close to us. We can get to ferry in about 30 minutes.
It’s a relatively frugal vacation. Plane tickets for our family of four almost always come in around $1000-$1500. Instead, we can bring our car and all of us on the ferry for under $100.
We are away form the “dishes.” We can be fully on vacation with no chores and away email messages that say, “We’re on an island with very slow Internet connection. We’ll get back to you in a few weeks.” That’s one reason why we leave one island vacation land to go to another island vacation land.
It’s more mindful travel… I think.
We can bring the dog. It’s become quite clear to me that dogs and planes don’t mix due to airline policies. Having someone sit the dog can be about $200 for 5 days in my area. (I know, I do a lot of dog sitting myself.)

This year we stayed at Darius Inn. That means we avoided the unsuitable, historical hotel with tiny rooms and little electricity from last year. We went from my worst hotel experience to my best. Darius Inn is like a bed and breakfast. The inn keeper made an awesome (if a little bit hippy on the quinoa and nuts) breakfast every morning. There were daily wine and cheese happy hours.

I’ve never been treated so well staying away from home, which actually made me feel guilty. I’m not use to receiving such generous service.

In addition to saving money with the breakfast that was provided, we brought a lot of our own food. With the kitchenette available and the ability to pack a whole car, there was no reason not it. It’s a good savings, because buying from the grocery is extremely expensive (everything is shipped on ferry, so there’s extra cost to that.) The restaurant costs go up from there.

Here’s a little bit of what we did:

Took the kids and dog to the Block Island Labyrinth:

This is a favorite spot of ours. You are supposed to walk around a circular maze/path while you meditate. The kids wanted to run through it. It’s a different type of experience. Even our dog, Jake loved it. He’s like a giant dog on Easter Island:

We also searched for glass float globes. An artist comes to the island to hide 550 glass float globes every year. Find one and you get to keep. Seems like it would be easy, but he makes a few trips over the summer releasing about 75 at a time. There are quite a few people who are obsessed with the treasure hunt.

We thought our kids would love it, but it turned out to be too much walking. I thought for sure there would be a glass float in here:

The weather was rainy for half of our stay, so we spent a little time at the local library. It was literally next door to us at the Darius Inn.

Libraries are doing lots of innovative things nowadays. One day they had a walking book tour. The kids loved walking around reading the book through the various signs.

Unfortunately, my wife got news that she didn’t get the promotion she was hoping for while we were at the library. I didn’t have a magic wand to wave and make things better, but I did find this:

I took an “I’m proud of you!” for my wife and a “Be the change” for the oldest. My youngest got one similar to the “You are loved.”

They library also had a cool honor system program to clean up the island:

There’s some recognizable books in there, right? We booked it forward with a couple of children’s books that caught the kids’ eyes. And yes we picked up some trash, though we had already cleared out quite a bit on our nature walks.

Finally, we got ourselves one really nice beach day:

Then it was time for home.

Father’s Day (or The $11 Milk Shake)

I was going to write a little bit more about Father’s Day, but my dog is getting impatient for a walk and I have a dentist appointment soon.

Quickly, I can tell you that I am now equipped to properly go to Martha’s Vineyard or Nantucket. My wife found the perfect belt on Poshmark.*

After a Father’s Day lunch (me and my wife’s father were the guests of honor), we went on a walk to get some ice cream. I found a BOGO Father’s Day deal at Ben and Jerry’s which I shared with the kids. My wife wanted to try the fancy new milkshake place in town. The drinks look more like Edible Arrangements than a milkshake.

Unfortunately, I had to leave as my meter expired, but I heard later that it was an $11 milkshake. Looks like a lot has changed in the 20 years since I graduated college. Remember when a $5 milkshake was expensive? (Caution, adult language language:)

Question, it’s still okay to reference Harvey Weinstein movies, right?

This brings you up to date on everything over the last two weeks… with the exception of the two days it took to write and publish this.

* This conversation involved my wife trying to explain Poshmark to her sister with an instant classic, “It’s like Tinder for clothes…” Ummm, honey, is there something you aren’t telling me?

Disney World Review (Volume 2)

March 26, 2018 by Lazy Man Leave a Comment

Last month, I wrote how we were hacking our Disney World vacation. This is our second family trip to Disney World as that one was two years ago.

This trip’s “hacking” largely involved four things:

Using credit card signups to get airline miles saving us $1000 in flight
Bringing as much food and snacks as we could
Using my wife’s active duty status for discounted tickets
Using my wife’s active duty status to stay at the military hotel, which is an exceptional value.

(I know the later two items don’t apply to most readers here so I’ll leave all that military stuff towards the end of the article.)

Despite all the discounts and attempts at saving money, we probably still spend close to $4000 for the 5 days we were there. This is a lot of money, especially for someone who has gone on record as not even liking Disney that much. I like to think that this blog has a good dose of frugality in it, but it’s hard for me make that claim when our 4 and 5 year olds have been to Disney World twice.

In my defense, both trips had extenuating circumstances. The first trip to Disney was planned because we had traveling there and we had an expiring week of a timeshare. It all timed up with the kids’ preschool spring break. On this trip, my wife had to be at the University of Florida to fulfill a distance learning requirement and the timing with that was also with the kids’ preschool spring break. The timing also worked out such that she could continue to her annual pharmacy convention while I returned with the kids.

Obviously we weren’t “forced” to go to Disney, but things fell into place. I think we’ll always want to do something during this spring break, because two weeks of staying around the house is a lot. If you have any suggestions of things to do in the New England area (we’d prefer to drive to save money), let me know in the comments. So far the leading candidate is to go skiing in New Hampshire or Vermont, which is less than ideal for me who doesn’t ski.

If it were summer, we’d do our Hershey and Crayola Experience trip in Pennsylvania, but Hershey is closed in mid March. It’s unfortunate, as that trip probably costs only 35-40% of what Disney World costs between cheaper hotels, tickets, and driveability. (Driveability is now a word if it wasn’t before!)

I think we’ll probably take a few years off of going to Disney . This will give us some time to save more money and perhaps bring the kids when they’d remember more and be able to go traumatized for life by Space Mountain like their dad.

In the meantime though, here’s our Disney review (with some bonus University of Florida coverage).

We started off our vacation with a bang… literally. About two minutes after leaving the Orlando airport in our rental car, we were rear-ended. I had been stopped in traffic for about 10 seconds, so it was quite the surprise. Everyone was shaken up quite a bit and most everyone reported some achy backs, except for me. Maybe the steering wheel helped. The person who hit us didn’t speak any English and tried to call 1-1-9 for the police. I called the police myself. After quite some time, maybe an hour, we had the nicest police officer in the world and he took our report. By this time, everyone was feeling a little better and less achy.

He cited her for being at fault. There was miraculously no damage to our car as the bumper did it’s job. I can’t say the same for her car as there were paint chips on our bumper. She told the police officer that her car was already like that which was fine with me.

By this time, we just wanted to get to Gainsville. It was way past the kids’ bed times. Everyone was tired and hungry from the flight and the accident didn’t make things any better.

We got to the hotel, a TownePlace Suite in Gainsville. My wife went to check-in while I got the luggage out of the car. I came in the middle of the conversation, but it was essentially Jerry Seinfeld when he was told they didn’t have a car reservation. They didn’t have the room with two queen beds as we had requested and only had a king bed. This is less than ideal for a family of four.

We were so unhappy with the situation that it took a bit for her explanation that there was a pull-out couch available. Our kids love “transformer beds” and we had plenty of room with the suite. One could say that it worked out better, because the king size bed gave us more room.

Gainsville: Saturday and Sunday

With my wife at her class, I had the kids. Fortunately, my wife left me with a plan. The Florida Museum of Natural History was perfect for kids 4-5. They even had an exhibit called the Scoop on Poop, which explained how people and animals all use poop differently. Most of the museum was free, but the poop thing cost some money. I’m not sure it was worth the $17 for the three of us. If it subsidizes some of the free exhibits though, it is a fine price to pay. The kids were entertained for hours with amazing things like a T-Rex skeleton, but also with many hands-on exhibits.

The rest of Saturday was spent catching up on things like calling insurance companies about the accident and catching up on sleep.

Sunday, we got off to a slow start as well. That’s the nature of the beast with 4 and 5 year olds. My wife once again came through with two tips of things to do. The first, go see the football stadium, should have been obvious. We gave that a shot, but it was closed on Sunday. We got some pictures outside the stadium with a Gator and, of course, Tim Tebow’s and Danny Wuerffel’s statues. I didn’t see a statue of Emmitt Smith, which would have been more impressive for me personally. Then again, I follow the NFL and not college sports.

The other suggestion my wife had was, “buy pants.” She checked the weather and saw that it was going to be colder than expected at Disney. For the most part, the high temperature was 68 with it typically being in the 56-62 range. I was the only one who brought pants. The kids and I went to WalMart and stocked up on whatever I could find on the clearance rack in their size. I found quite a bit for $3-4, but at the register they often rang up as just $1. I got my wife some leggings for $5. It got the job done and saved us from having to pay Disney prices for clothing.

Soon after the shopping we packed up everything and went back to Orlando where we returned our rental and took a car service to Disney. The service allowed us a 20 minute shopping grocery trip, which was very important to saving money while we were on the Disney property. We ended up using only 10 minutes, which was used to get milk, cereal, apple juice, soda, bagels, cream cheese, deli meats, bread, some kid-friendly snacks, some fruit, quite a few Lunchables, and some wine. For a few days our nutritional choices were… less than optimal.

We moved on to Shades of Green which is the military hotel on the property at Disney World. I’d post a picture, but immediately we all trashed the room by throwing our stuff everywhere. For our $155 (cheaper for most military ranks) we got a room big enough for 3 queen beds all next to each other, plus a separate area for the bathroom and closet. The room had two queen beds next to each other and a little dining nook with a place for one more adult to sleep a couch that opens into a single bed.

Disney World: Monday through Friday

We bought 4 day park-hopper pass. If we had more time, we would have gotten a 5th day. However, with Typhoon Lagoon closed for renovations there was nothing else we wanted to do. We also thought that taking a day off would help us get the most out of the other 4 days. If we go back again for a week, we might get the 5 day pass and take two days off.

Epcot: Monday

Monday was Epcot day. There was no great plan to it… that’s just when most of the FastPass+ were available. (This may have been because Tuesday is a lighter traffic day at the Magic Kingdom and we had better options on that day. By default, Epcot, which had many FastPass+, got moved to Monday.)

The first day at Disney World usually takes some getting used to. We had tickets from the military base, but they needed to be converted to usable Disney cards. That means a bit of a line at the ticketing center, which meant that we had to take a couple of modes of transportation from our hotel to eventually get to Epcot. It was about an hour, but that’s much better than the 3 hours it took us a couple of years ago when we stayed off the property. If you have any advice on streamlining this process, I’d be forever grateful if you’d leave a comment.

As I mentioned in my previous post, Epcot is our favorite place at Disney. Because our kids are younger, they take very well Nemo-type of slow ride followed by a huge aquarium. They love being launched into space. They are even interested in learning how plants grow for sustainability. The kids favorite ride had to be “Mission: SPACE” as they got to pretend they were on a real space mission. Best of all, the lines are very short for almost every one of these types of rides.

I would have liked to do the new Soarin’ ride, but the waits were often more than 90 minutes long. The good news that I’m sure it will be around for a few years.

There’s something for parents too. On the other side of Epcot there are various countries to visit with food and drink to sample. I think Maria from The Money Principle would have delighted seeing us dance to the “British Invasion” band with a Pimm’s in our hand. The biggest disappointment here is that you couldn’t get real poutine in “Canada.” Even the Disney employee seemed ashamed of the cheese sauce they passed for gravy at one of the stands.

Magic Kingdom: Tuesday and Friday

The Magic Kingdom is bigger than the other parks. The lines are longer too. Because of this we decided to give it two days.

Our kids are too young for Space Mountain so we didn’t have to worry about the long lines there. We could have walked onto Splash Mountain, probably because everyone had the same idea as us… who wants to be soaking wet when it is 55 degrees outside?

By devoting two days to the Magic Kingdom we didn’t feel rushed. We actually left each day fairly early and fit in all the rides that we really wanted to do.

There were two personal highlights for me. One was being called out at on the Monsters, Inc Laugh Floor. It’s a quick comedy that does an amazing job of being improv and having the cartoons mouths move perfectly with the on-the-spot jokes. I had made myself an easy target by putting my littlest one on my lap. We were a “two-headed monster”, so that got attention. Lots of Rhode Island jokes naturally ensued when they found out where we were from.

The other highlight was our trip on the Dumbo ride. There was a full camera crew there which felt a little odd. We thought it was a celebrity family, so we were trying to figure out who it was. This girl, her mother, and her grandmother rode the Dumbo before us and stayed on when it was our turn. Afterwards the camera crew asked me to stick around for a minute. (“Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up.”) It turns out that they might have gotten my elbow or something in the shot and wanted me to sign a release. I told them it was no problem, but I wanted to know what they were filming. They said it was a commercial to run on their blog. (I haven’t been able to find it, but if you three generations of blondes on a Dumbo ride, let me know so I can look for my elbow.)

There are probably a million Magic Kingdom reviews that are more informed than I am, so I won’t take up too much space here. One thing I can suggest is that the new mobile ordering system is fantastic. We’d order food on the way to a place and have it ready when we got there. It really cut down on the waiting.

The other cool thing that Disney is testing is a playground where kids can play instead of waiting in line. When it gets close to their time, they get paged to get back in line. This was listed as being tested at the Dumbo ride, but it wasn’t open because our lines were short.

Finally, because we were staying on the Disney property (and met certain requirements), we got Extra Magic hours on Friday morning. They are the best thing ever invented as it allowed us to fill in the gaps on all the popular rides that we would have missed because we were very late booking our FastPass+. We were able to do Peter Pan when it was a 20 minute wait until of 90 minutes after the park opened.

I want to share one tip on Extra Magic Hours. They only open some rides during the Magic Hours. Fortunately, they are some of the most popular. If you are looking to do another ride that isn’t open, but does get popular (the Haunted Mansion in the morning for example), it’s best to go as soon as the park opens to the general public. The park will still be mostly empty as it takes a couple of hours for everyone to fill into the park. We hit so many rides that by around 1:30PM on Friday the kids just wanted to go back to the hotel and swim.

Wednesday: The “Off-Day”

We wanted to have one day that wasn’t planned. That way we’d be free to enjoy a vacation of relaxing rather than, “I… must… do… every… ride!” My friend Ryan at The Military Wallet said that Shades of Green had plenty to do without going to the parks. He was correct as there were a few heated pools and the best playground I have ever seen. The kids had so fun on that playground that Disney World itself was boring in comparison. (That really hurt to hear, but sometimes the truth hurts.)

The off day was a lot of that until our reservations for Sanaa in an Animal Kingdom hotel. The “hook” of Sanaa (besides authentic African food) was that you could see the wild animals roam while you eat. Given the option of seeing a Zebra while I eat or not seeing one, I’ll take seeing one every time. We had reservations for 6PM, so we got ready at 4:15 to have extra time with the animals or just to explore the hotel.

Unfortunately, we were given bad information about the buses leaving every 20 minutes and they left only hour. We just missed the 4:30 bus by the time we got there. Sanaa is really out of the way. We probably could have called Disney’s Lyft-partnership thing, but it seems very expensive. We took our chances with the 5:30 bus, which only takes you to Animal Kingdom. From there you have to catch another bus to get to the hotel. It turned out to be nearly a 2-hour door-to-door trip.

The good news is that the food at Sanaa was amazing. Everything was great. We didn’t get a good view of the animals from our location in the dining room though. We were more in the middle of the restaurant instead of near the windows. We finished up dinner around 7 or 7:15, but by that time most of the animals had decided to go back to sleep. We caught our two buses back and got back and I remember thinking that it was a 5-hour trip for dinner. The math doesn’t add up as I’m recalling it now, but it isn’t something we’ll be repeating.

One of the reasons why we went to Sanaa in the first place was that it was one of the few places with reservations available. It seems the rest of the world knew that you need to book dinner reservations at Disney. I think someone told my wife this about 10 days before the trip, so we grabbed what we could. Sanaa seems to have a lot of availability because it is so difficult for most people to get to.

Next time we’ll focus on planning our food and FastPass+ rides faster. We learn something new everytime.

Thursday: Animal Kingdom

We probably should have just slept with the zebras. However at least we learned the important lesson that the buses only run once an hour. We were able to get extra magic hours in the morning. We rushed to the Safari, which is a highlight of the park. Most of the people were rushing to the new Avatar rides. Unfortunately, it wasn’t opening until half of the Magic Hours were over, and the line was already 30 minutes long. We had a FastPass+ for it at 6PM, but if we can get it done earlier, we could cancel it and reschedule another FastPass+ in it’s place. (We also wouldn’t need to stay for 10+ hours.)

I was disappointed that the Safari wasn’t going to work and a Disney employee overheard me and gave us a FastPass+ card for us on any non-Avatar ride. I wasn’t even complaining and here I was getting something for free? Wow, that’s different. We took our card and went off to the Dinosaur Land. The most popular ride there, Dinosaur (appropriate, right?), was only a 5 minute wait. It was my favorite ride in perhaps all of Disney, but my wife didn’t like it. My older child was a little scared, but the younger one wasn’t. We finished out Dinosaur land while everyone was at the Safari and Avatar rides.

By the time the park opened up, the Safari ride was a very short wait, so we practically walked right on. We were able to reschedule FastPass for the Nemo or Lion King show. The card that the employee gave us got us into the other one. We ended the day with the Na’vi River Journey FastPass+ we had. I would have been really disappointed to have waited more than 2 hours for it. The Avatar Flight of Passage is the signature ride, but our youngest was too small, so we’ll save that for next time. We had some petting zoo activities that was more appropriate for our age family anyway.

Disney World: Conclusion

I already mentioned this above, but it seems the three core things to plan are groceries (if you can manage it), restaurant bookings, and FastPass+ bookings. We didn’t wait in any line that was longer than 20 minutes.

With a little advanced planning (and if we knew when the Extra Magic Hours were going to be in advance, which doesn’t seem possible), we might be able to trim the Magic Kingdom to one day. That would give us time to do something like Hollywood Studios. We skipped it this time because last time there wasn’t too much for kids our age.

One thing we know for sure, each time we visit Disney we learn a few new tricks.

Shades of Green: Military Hotel Review

I gave most of the important highlights about Shares of Green above. It’s relatively cheap, very big, and has some great amenities for kids. There was one splash-pad area for younger kids who don’t swim (in addition to the two heated pools). However, it was too cold for the splash-pad to be fun. In the warmer months (or even a normal March), I think the kids would have loved it.

We were staying right near the kids playground which gave us quick access to Evergreen’s which has very reasonably priced pub-food and drinks. For dinners we mostly went to Garden Gallery despite the excellent reviews I read for Mangino’s. The reason: Our kids are very picky eaters and the Garden Gallery’s buffet-style service was ideal in making sure they found plenty of things they’d eat. I believe all the food was tax-free as it is a military property.

There was a small base exchange. The prices were probably not as cheap as a typical exchange, but they were certainly better than a typical convenience store.

One day we had a couple of turkeys outside on our patio area. Another day we had a peacock. We didn’t see any alligators fortunately.

There were a lot of places of Shades of Green that I simply didn’t get to. However, that’s a good thing… I was looking to just save as much money as possible and have a comfortable place to stay.

One of the key advantages to Shades of Green is being on the property and access to the Extra Magic Hours. However, the secret bonus to Shades of Green is that it is a 10 minute walk to monorail at the Polynesian, which means very quick access to the park. We breezed through security, which meant more time for the park. The kids loved the monorail too.

There is a small fridge (think college size) in the standard rooms, but no microwave. While I had heard there’s an area with a communal microwave in the laundry room, we never had a need for it.

After we got back, we learned that other Disney properties honored the military rate for the area. Next time we might look into that as a way to stay at a different place to experience some new things. However, it will be really difficult to beat the value at Shades of Green.