Our hotel is booked.

The first thing you need to do when you visit Walt Disney World is book a hotel.  You have many categories to choose from and they can range in quality, and in proximity to the parks.  The first choice you have to make is if you want to stay on property or off of property.  The biggest difference you'll find between staying on or off property is the price.  Staying on property is always more expensive, and not just by a little bit.  Many of the cheapest hotels on property are more expensive than the pricier off property options, and keep in mind that there's a Ritz off property.  Almost all of the hotels on property are owned and operated by Disney, with a few exceptions, and all of the Disney hotels offer some extra perks such as transportation to and from the parks, Extra Magic Hours (extra time at the parks), and a general feeling that you haven't left the parks at all.

We decided that since this was to be an Epic "Disney" Vacation, staying on property was a must, so our next choice was what kind of hotel did we want to stay at.  Disney offers several different qualities of hotels on property, Value, Moderate, Deluxe, Deluxe Villas, and Camping.  We considered all of these options, however we cut out Value first.  We figured that Value resorts would be full of kids and families, and while Disney parks will be full of kids all the time, we thought living with them might be kind of crappy.  Both of us have stayed at Port Orleans before, a Moderate resort, and really enjoyed it.  So we played around with the idea of going back.  Deluxe was a thought, because as mentioned in the name of this blog, this trip is going to be "Epic".  We event thought about getting a cabin in the campground.  Then we came across the Deluxe Villas, or more to the point we discovered DVC.

DVC, or Disney Vacation Club is a timeshare thing.  I'm not too sure exactly how it works, but we learned that in some cases people who own "points" in the DVC sometimes have extra points.  You can buy these points on the open market and stay at a Deluxe Villa for about the same price as a Deluxe room.  Best of all for about the same price as this Deluxe room your villa will have one bedroom, and a kitchen.  This pretty much sold us as Allison is a breakfast monster (she loves breakfast) and we've read that breakfasts at the Magic Kingdom are regularly disappointing.

So when the time came, and we knew for sure that we were going on this trip (no more cancellations), we contacted a travel agent that could organize the purchase of points and allow us to stay at a DVC one bedroom villa.  We had several choices for places we wanted to stay.  Our first was the Yacht and Beach Club, however they had no availability for the time we were going.  Our second choice was right across the lake at the Boardwalk Inn, and it was good.  So we booked our room, bought our points, and we were set.

Once you get your room booked, this is when things start to happen.  Your Disney Experiences account can now be linked to something.  For those unfamiliar My Disney Experiences is basically an account you have on the Disney website that lets you build an itinerary, book restaurant (more on that later), book Fast Passes (more on that later too), and basically see what you may want to do on your trip.  With the hotel booked things started to get rolling.  We immediately got our accounts in order, made sure they were linked to our hotel reservation, and we even started getting mail to prep us for future planning options for our trip.

We're really happy with the Boardwalk Inn as it's in a prime location (walking distance to Epcot and Hollywood Studios), and it has stuff to do around it.  There's even a bakery just in front.  We looked online and thought that the rooms looked pretty spiffy as well.

This was the first step in officially planning our Epic Disney Vacation... Oh did we mention, we've decided to stay for 12 days... Epic.