Pin Trading, part deux

OK, your kids want to pin trade. You could always get a starter kit with a lanyard and 4 or 5 pins. Don't pick the kit for the pins, you'll be trading them out anyway, unless you want to spend even more money on another pin set to trade. In fact, you'll probably buy another set just to trade. Buying pins from Disney can be expensive, especially if you need 20-30 pins that a kid can easily trade in a single trip. Instead, you can buy them from eBay in bulk for little more than a dollar a pin. You don't know what you're gonna get, but you're going to trade them anyway. You've got to be careful to get genuine Disney pins. You can minimize risk by buying from sellers with excellent feedback ratings, and who've been doing it for a while. For those of you who are new to eBay, there are excellent guides, including this one.

More on Pin Trading on an upcoming post.

Pin Trading - 2 minute intro

If you don't know what Pin Trading is... here's a quick intro: It's a way to keep your kids (or yourself) busy while not riding an attraction, while also spending more than you want on little cloissonne pins. Actually, if your tired of waiting on lines and would like to talk to Disney cast members, pin trading is great. Basically, you can trade pins with any cast member carrying pins (unless their pins are on a green lanyard, who are restricted to trading only with children.) The cast member will trade any pin with you, one for one, so long it's an official Disney pin, and s/he doesn't already have that pin already.

If you start pin trading in the parks it can get quite expensive, even if you start with the starter kits in the shops, because any talented kid can make a dozen trades in a couple of hours.

I'll give tips another day on how to save money on pin trading, and how to get better trades, but I'll start with this tip:

Don't pin trade on your first trip! Pin trading, along with character greetings, are designed to keep you busy and off of the attraction lines. While it can be great fun, make sure you get your attraction rides in. If one or two members of your party are pin trading, the clock ticks and the lines get longer. There's so much to do at Walt Disney World, don't get sidetracked and miss that ride on the Tower of Terror or Space Mountain. Save pin trading for a second or third trip to WDW. Don't worry, it makes money for Disney, so it will be around for your next trip.

Driving to Walt Disney World

Hold on - this is going to be a long post. So far, I've been posting quick little tips on how to make your vacation to Walt Disney World a little easier, or a little less expensive. That's for those of us who don't like to read long stories about how great my trip was, or don't want to hear about my special experience with a Disney cast member. But I feel that this topic warrants a longer, in-depth analysis, to allow you to decide for yourself whether or not you should forgo the airplane and take a family road trip.

Saving Your Money or Saving Your Mind

Let's start with the biggest reason with why you might want to drive to WDW instead of flying: cost. For me and I suspect anyone with a family who lives more than 300 miles away from Orlando, airline ticket costs for the family starts in the area of $500 and goes up, especially during school holiday seasons. Driving can save money by using an asset that you already have, the family car, and using it for travel to and from your destination as well as around the WDW area, avoiding car rental costs as well. In my estimates, a family of four from the Northeast United States can save around $800 by driving instead of flying. That's almost the cost of 2 adult and 2 child tickets to WDW for a week (about $900.)

To figure out the cost savings, I've created a handy calculator that you can use to see what it would be like for your family: Distips Fly Vs Drive Calculator. I've included costs that you may not have considered, but are certainly worth adding. For example, insurance and depreciation costs for your car. You pay car insurance and the extra hundreds or thousands of miles put wear on your car that no one else is paying for, unless you're borrowing Uncle Bob's station wagon. Also, if your road trip takes more than a day, you'll need to pay for the hotel or motel along the route. On the other side, there are also some costs that you need to consider when flying. If you don't have a relative that can drop you off at the airport, taxi or car service to and from your local airport can be a little expensive. On the Orlando side, it's easier with Disney's Magical Express free bus service to their hotels but you could also be renting a car from one of the extremely convenient rental agencies. So I've listed these costs and placed preliminary values on both sides of the coin. It's up to you to adjust the numbers to see your own individual savings.

I've come to use these calculations over the years to see whether the driving vacation was worth the effort. And believe me, it is an effort. If it were saving me only two hundred dollars, I'd be on a plane. Why? Because it is an effort to plan and a long trip. From the driver who needs to drive 1000 miles in two days to the kids who are eternally bored and fidgety in the back seat, it is not a task to be entered lightly. You need to figure how much that effort is worth to you to balance this side of the equation. Another factor is if you are traveling two or more days each way, then lost vacation days come into play. Do you want to cut a 7 night stay in WDW to 5 nights, with four days of driving? That might be a little bit too disappointing for you or the kids, so think hard about balancing the work with the fun. A vacation with nearly as much driving as there is playing may not be worth it for some or all members of the family.

So you've run the calculator, and decided to go for the drive. Hey, you have good memories of family road trips when you were young, and you haven't seen any of the Chevy Chase Vacation movies recently. Get in the car and drive! Hold on a minute. Just like a trip to the WDW theme parks are better if you know what you're getting into and when you're prepared, a family driving vacation is that much easier if you've got a plan and are stocked up with the right equipment for the adventure.

Driving Gear

Let's start with the equipment. We all know that a good GPS device can help you keep you headed in the right direction. But if you have access to traffic data, it's even better. Knowing which road to drive can be hampered if you hit rush hour traffic on the weekdays or beach traffic on the weekends. So if you're GPS has traffic data - great. Some alternatives are Google Maps and Bing Maps on an iPhone or equivalent (see below.) Both these services offer traffic data so you can try to avoid the red lines, or at least take a stop to have a meal and wait for traffic to lighten up.

Music and Movies. If your family truckster or minivan has DVD play for the kids in back, it will help quell the "I'm bored" laments from the rear seat. If you don't, you may consider getting the little portable DVD player. For yourself, bring appropriate music or recordings that will help you stay awake on the long drives. I've found that listening to podcasts of radio shows and audio books help more since they engages my mind more than a pleasant tune.

Games. I Spy and Punch Buggy don't seem to cut it with today's increasingly wired kids. A Nintendo DS or Sony PSP can kill time in the car and can also be used in line at the theme park attractions. Just remember to make sure the kids enjoy the attractions instead of the video games when you're finally at WDW.

Travel guides. A few years back, I found a book in a flea market called Drive I-95, and since a large stretch of my trip was along that highway, I picked it up. It listed gas stations, hotels and eateries at every exit and made it easy to plan for the next stop. There are other highway exit guides such as The Next Exit which you can use all around the USA.

Snacks. Look for snacks that will keep the driver awake and the kids quiet. I'll leave it to you to figure out what your kids will like, but for the driver I recommend snacks that require some degree of chewing or crunching without filling you up to much. Nuts, trail mixes, jerky and chewing gum are some examples. Beverages that taste fine at room temperature are good too. Water is great and as an added bonus, it doesn't stain when it spills. When I need a caffeine break, bottled Starbucks Frappuchino tastes fine cold or lukewarm.

SmartPhone Apps. I’ve used a Blackberry and an iPhone for the last few driving trips and both proved useful. But the range of apps on the iPhone make it great for a long drive. Here are my favorites, and they’re free:

Google Maps is excellent, especially with live traffic data.

Yelp helps locate dining options.

Cheap Gas! gets data from Gasbuddy.com for the best prices on gasoline near your current location.

Pandora offers streaming music if you didn’t bring along enough recorded music.

(* if you have any tips for good iPhone app, let me know and I’ll update my post!)

The Driving Plan

I've hinted at it before, and many of my prior tips suggest it - the most important part of any successful project is planning. A vacation to Walt Disney World is no different. What's interesting about a WDW vacation is that it can be planned out to an extraordinary detail because of all the books and web sites devoted to WDW. In some cases, such as dining reservations to popular restaurants, it must be planned out months in advance. The same goes for driving to and from your vacation destination.

For your drive, it's important that you plan your route and give yourself a realistic schedule to travel that distance. This means that you need to account for traffic patterns around large cities, including rush hours and weekend getaway traffic. For the route planning, a variety of sites and trip planning tools are available such are Google Maps, Mapquest and Bing Maps on the web. I personally use Microsoft Mappoint as I can customize driving times, incorporate meal and hotel stops and insert a fudge factor for unscheduled stops that are inevitable with kids in the car.

For traffic, you need to know when is the best time to drive through a metropolitan area. A good site to research this is Google Maps (http://maps.google.com). When you have a map up, you can turn on the live traffic view. But what’s really good is that you can actually get an estimated picture of what traffic will be like during a specify time and day of the week. When you click on the "traffic" button on the map, a popup legend shows up. On this legend is a small link next to the words "Live traffic" called "change". Once this link is clicked, you can adjust the day of week and time of day. If this much planning is too much, just remember that weekday rush hours usually run from 7am to 10am and 3pm to 6pm. Weekend highway traffic builds up around noon, so it's best to get up early and on the road before the sleepyheads.

If your trip needs overnight stops along the way, I've found that the chains that cater to travelers and offer breakfast to be a good value. Hampton Inn, Holiday Inn Express, Wingate, and the various suite and inn chains dot the exits around the interstate highway system and allow stops without straying far from your route. If you travel during the weekend, I recommend is look for hotels that may cater to business travelers such as those around airports. This class of value hotel is well represented in TripAdvisor reviews, where you can separate the nice hotels from the seedy ones. Also, before my trip, I print out a color Gas Price Temperature Map for the regions that I’ll be driving through. This map from Gasbuddy.com helps me decide whether or not to fill up the gas tank before I cross state borders.

Finally, I'd like to discuss safety. Make sure your car is in good shape by having it checked by a mechanic and don't forget to have your tires checked. You don't want to have a breakdown halfway to Orlando, and spend the rest of your vacation trying to get your family and vehicle back home. More important than having your car ready for the trip is having your driver ready. Driving can be very tiring and having an additional driver to switch off with can make the trip quicker as well as safer. Make sure you get plenty of sleep before your drive, as well as during any stopovers. If you haven't made this type of trip before, I recommend that you attempt shorter trips before longer ones. I worked myself up from 250 miles, to 400 miles to finally the 1000 mile Orlando drive, paying attention to how well my body and mind held up on the trip. If you're not sure about driving 8 or 12 hours a day, plan on making that extra stop. A full night’s sleep and a short drive on the second day may be better than driving all day and arriving late at night and tired such that you'll wake up late the next day. Your body may still need another day to recover.

That's enough caveats for driving - what other benefits are there to driving to Walt Disney World beside the money savings? Well, for one, it's your own car, which for many of us is larger and more comfortable than a budget rental car. If your car is a minivan or SUV, you can probably bring more luggage. And that luggage doesn't have to be hauled in an out of an airport, poked and prodded in security or worse, won't be one of the 25 million bags lost each year by the airlines. (By the way, that's the actual amount of bags lost in 2009. Luckily most made their way back to their owners, eventually.) For some people, avoiding airport hassles is worth a whole day's travel. Overall, a well executed driving vacation can be less stressful that a series of flights. And once at WDW, having a car, be it your own or a rental, opens up some money saving choices such as non-Disney hotels, vacation rentals, shopping and rentals plus easier access to non-Disney theme parks such as Universal Studios and SeaWorld.

So the final calculation in making your decision to drive instead of fly involves much more than just the money it may save it. It's a whole different experience, one that can be tiring or relaxing, time consuming or rewarding. You can start with my calculator but you need to finish with a plan.

If you decide to drive, Happy Trails!

Useful links

Distips Fly vs Drive Calculator
Google Maps
Gas Buddy
TripAdvisor

iPhone Apps

Yelp
Cheap Gas!
Pandora

copyright © 2010 Choi Kwok

Contest for Florida Gardening Residents

For the Epcot Flower and Garden Festival , Disney is running a community gardening contest:

http://www.epcotgardencontest.com/

Looks like you need to be a Florida resident, and write an essay about a community garden. There will be 54 prizes comprising of a pair of 4 day "Dream Passes"

Grand prize is Disney will custom design your community garden with plants from their Flower and Garden Festival.

Premier Passport

Disney just announced a new bi-coastal annual pass valid for both Walt Disney World and Disneyland resort theme parks. Price is $700 for both adults and children.

Some upgrade info:

If you have annual passes for both WDW and DL, then Disney will send you the new Premier Passport with the expiration being the later date of either pass. Cool.

If you have an annual pass for either, you can upgrade with the price difference between the list price of your passport and $700, keeping the same expiration date.

If you have a WDW Magic Your Way ticket, you can upgrade at Guest Relations at WDW only (not in Disneyland.)

Win Vacation for 4, including stay at Cinderella Castle Suite

Disney Family Movies is holding a sweepstakes from now until February 8th for a 5-day, 4-night vacation (3 nights in a 2 bedroom suite, plus one in the Cinderella Suite.) Vacation includes 4 5-day Park Hopper tickets and a $1000 Disney gift card.

This uses your Disney.go.com registration info. Enter once per day through 2/8/2010.

Enter here: http://www.dadt.com/dfm/offersandsweeps.html

Pizza Hut Orlando Vacation Sweepstakes

Almost missed this one. Ends tomorrow! Pizza Hut is offering a sweepstakes for a 4 person, 4 night vacation to Orlando that includes 2 one-day theme park tickets to Disney, Universal or Seaworld parks for each person. Enter Here: http://pizzahutreunion.com/

Universal Studios Contest

OK, it's not Walt Disney World, but Universal Studios is close enough, and face it, you want to check out the Wizarding World of Harry Potter when it opens in the spring. And while you're in Orlando, you can drive down I-4 and visit Walt's World.

Well, Universal is holding a contest at http://www.theroadtohogwarts.com. Register for one entry, and play the games for additional entries. I'll get the little tipster to play the games. The grand prize is a 3 night vacation for 4 including airfare, hotel and tickets to the Universal Studios parks for the grand opening week of the Wizarding World.

The main problem is that Universal doesn't yet know when they'll finish building the Wizarding World of Harry Potter so the dates are TBD. You'll get a little leewwaty to choose when during the opening week, and you should find out 60 days in advance.

HGTV Walt Disney World Vacation Sweepstakes

Win a five day, four night vacation at Walt Disney World, including airfare, hotel and 5 day park tickets for four persons. One of the four nights is in the Cinderella Castle Suite inside the Magic Kingdom!

Enter here: HGTV Disney World Vacation Sweepstakes

Note: You can enter once per day!

Smartphone for theme park wait times

Within the same week, we get not one, but two smartphone apps for helping you decide which attraction to go to while you're in the theme parks. This promises to give the connected folk a little help in avoiding those dreaded long lines at the parks, but we may have some more head injuries whilst their eyes are looking down at their phones instead of where they're walking.

The first, Mobile Magic, is from Disney itself, and provides pictures, maps and attraction descriptions along with the wait time and fastpass information. However, live information on wait times is available only to Verizon Wireless customers, and it will cost the $9.99 for 180 days. Looks great, but limiting it to Verizon only bums us iPhone users. More info on Mobile Magic on the Disney Parks Blog.

The other app, from the great folks at TouringPlans.com is Lines. It's actually a web site, m.touringplans.com, and it works great on iPhones. It also provides wait times and fastpass estimates, and it's much slimmer, efficient interface. Sorry, no maps nor ride descriptions... just the wait information. It's included in your touringplans.com subscription which is normally $9, but is currently half price, or free for 45 days if you've purchased one of their excellent books. The data on m.touringplans.com is very precise, and looks to be very useful when in the park, but I haven't verified the accuracy of the live data since I'm not an Orlando native. More info on Lines.

For all of you über-planners out there, I would recommend the less expensive touringplans option. If you want the maps and attraction notes, and you're on Verizon, then Mobile Magic looks nice.