Dog Food For Chairs: Disney World May 2025 Introduction and Index

It’s a Real Trip After All

The Most Magiclomp Place on Earth!

Here are some introductory highlights for those who haven’t followed the entire planning trail for this trip.
(Translation, everyone except my immediate family. I think there may be one or two others who do… but those balance out the members of my immediate family who do not.)

Rosa and Anabelle were both independently thinking about a Disney World trip to celebrate Anabelle’s graduation as it was getting closer. I was clueless about this fact.

I went from not knowing we were going to having the resort, Park tickets and flights booked, with Target Table Service meals selected in twenty-four hours.
(Foreshadowing- I will say “Foreshadowing” a great deal in this tale. Many times, it will really be “spoilers.” Other times it will be neither. At all times, I will not care.)

Key reasons for this trip:
Celebrating Anabelle’s Graduation from Villanova Summa Cum Laude with separate Bachelor’s degrees in Education and Chemistry
Bidding farewell to Dinosaur, and the remainder of DinosaurLand in Animal Kingdom.
Bidding farewell to MuppetVision 3D in MGM. (*Sniff* this one was big.)

Also- Attending the Flower and Garden Festival in EPCOT. Rosa and Anabelle have always liked this one.
Anabelle saw the Festival on her High School Band trip, and it was one of the few positives of that experience.
(She tried writing her own “Disney Story” then, but after her second day notes made her too sad, gave up. Alas.)
Rosa and I know we’ve seen this Festival. As none of our past trips line up with the current time of it, we have no idea when or how. Perhaps it was a Disney Dream.

In spite of what was a rushed start, the general idea of this trip was a more leisurely one for just the three of us as opposed to the more extensively planned and chaos prone visits when the entre family of nine goes.
(Yes, a “leisurely one” for us still involved targeting eight straight days of Disney Parks running as close to Rope Drops and Park Closings as we could manage.
Also, shut up.)

We had some initial plans to make it more leisurely, such as “we may not need a full meal plan.”
(Foreshadowing- A quick calculation showed the few “must do” meals cost the same as the difference between “Quick Serve” and “Standard” meal plans, meaning we got one anyway. It was the correct choice. YAAY!)

In general, we held to our version of the leisurely idea, skipping many of the “E ticket” attractions on what became a trip with a lot of time for our favorite “Just Be In Disney” locations. This included a focus on EPCOT, the only Park we set up two full days in.
(Foreshadowing- Plus, a bit at the end.)

While there was a strong character focus on this trip, because they were actually scheduled, (YAY!) it is not as much as it may first appear. This is because of narrative structure. (He said trying to sound like he knows what he’s doing.) Detailing a character experience with no wait that lasted a couple of minutes can document: initial reactions, conversations, handler and photographer interactions, poses, hugs and farewells. Meanwhile, a half hour of waiting, boarding, riding, getting bumped and stuck before leaving, and exiting can be summarized as, “We rode the small world. YAY!” (Shows will get more of a description for variations we hadn’t seen but can also take more time to enter, watch and leave.)

Planning was intense in and around everything else going on in our lives, and there was a huge amount of that. I honestly felt this trip was not going to happen to a greater degree than any other on many occasions.
The Big Three threats.
A) My Achilles tendon completely separated just after we booked the trip and needed to be sewn back together with a piece of my toe tendon just over six weeks before we left. When the surgery was first scheduled, I was told I’d be “walking on my own” by the time of the trip. After surgery, I learned this meant, “on my own in an immobilization boot.” (clomp clomp clomp)
(Foreshadowing- Part of the stress was finding one that fit over my own shoe, which was alternated between the standard one and saved a great deal of wear and tear on every other part of my foot, leg and hip. Shoutout to the folks at TayCo!)

I was worried Anabelle would freak out over this as much as I was initially, before I got two weeks of practice clomping around expertly in a walking cast. Following her first concern that I would want to cancel the trip. (Yielding another- “We are &$%#ing going!”) she quickly changed gears to saying. “The feet pictures are going to be EPIC!”
(Foreshadowing- That running gag ran away and, oddly, there were virtually no pictures focusing on my constrained foot.)

B) Rosa’s 2002 Mountaineer was smashed by a woman in a Honda going fast enough to push that beast of a vehicle ninety feet sideways, including up on the curb and back down again. Amazingly, and with a bit of “Someone watching over her” Rosa was unhurt, but the car was totaled.

C) Newark airport (our only choice for direct flights given the airline we have miles with and our location) had signal black outs, one runway under repair, a shortage of controllers and a mess of scheduling problems. One of those problems cancelled our 6AM flight a couple weeks ahead of time, though it took off early almost every other day. They put us on a flight with a stop over in the even more issue plagued Washington DC area. Rosa worked some more magic and got us on an 8AM non-stop flight.
(Foreshadowing- Technically “C” was a subset of “concerns the country and possibly the world were going down the toilet.” But it had the most direct impact.)

Miraculously- “Holy Crap we’re going to Disney World!”
YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY!!!!!

As always, day names provided by Anabelle.

Not as always, she provided them over 180 days in advance instead of right before they were needed. It is possible the loss of MuppetVision provided extra tragic motivation. She tried including a tribute to Dinosaur but was too distraught and is still in denial.

A Salute to MuppetVision 3D But Mostly, Sam Eagle
Day 1- A Salute To All Of Our Return, But Mostly The Functional App
Day 2- A Salute To All Animal Kingdom, But Mostly The Lion King Show
Day 3- A Salute To All Future World, But Mostly Imagination
Day 4- A Salute To All StarWarsLand, But Mostly Ronto Wraps
Day 5- A Salute To All Princesses, But Mostly Merida
Day 6- A Salute To All The Tusker House, But Mostly The Bread Pudding
Day 7- A Salute To All The Flower And Garden Festival, But Mostly The Booths
Day 8- I'm Going To Go Back There Someday... (Plot Twist!)

Here are the links for those who actually do care about the planning minutia, which includes movie reviews this time, because we are insane:

Menu Interlude Part 1

Menu Interlude Part 2

Menu Interlude Part 3

Planning Part 9