I just bought 4 plane tickets leaving DAY and arriving at MCO on October 18.

I guess I just committed to finally taking a Disney trip after procrastinating for three years.

We first thought about doing a full-tilt, two-week Orlando trip in 2005. The kids were 7 and 4. Seemed like good ages. But that was the summer Jamie decided to try to take her career in a slightly different direction – doing so involved quite a salary cut at the time. No Orlando.

In 2006 we wanted to go again, but by the time late spring rolled around, we were moving to Dayton. No Orlando.

We said we’d do it again in 2007. We really thought we would, but couldn’t bite the bullet financially. Two weeks of doing it up Gonch-style at the Orlando theme parks can get costly and we had shit to pay down. We briefly considered breaking the trip into two smaller trips – one week at Disney and one everywhere else, but still kind of never committed and more time passed.

Here we are in early 2008 and with Jeff having just taken another trip to Orlando and actually doing the Disney thing (and telling me about it), I started to get the itch again. I’d spent some time this past week looking at pricing and stuff.

Then oddly enough, Jamie comes home one evening telling me about a guest at the hotel who was telling her about taking his kids to Disney recently and them being totally unamused. Turns out they’re a few years older than our kids and are entirely at the ‘too cool for this’ age. Something just clicked. The window of opportunity was closing. We needed to get the kids down there and do the corny family Disney vacation before it was too late.

We spent an evening or two looking a little more seriously at the trip, still kind of wondering how much we really wanted to drop on a week at Disney World. The I get an email from AirTran going off about great fares through November if you book soon, so I took a look. (we tend to fly AirTran anyway and it’s probably one of the better choice out of Dayton)

They had the nonstop to Orlando available at $99 each way. I took it as a sign. (they had 1 stop flights at $79, but who wants to stop?)

This evening we figured ‘fuck it’ and bought the plane tickets.

Now I have as many as 8 months to fret over the details of a week at Disney and finding the value that works for us. So if anyone can tip me off to some good resources, I’d appreciate it.

So we’ve committed to the third week of October (the 18th to the 25th) at Disney World. I figure that we’ll do the other half of the trip (everything else in Orlando) most likely in 2009 or 2010.

I still want to get back to California and do more parks than Magic Mountain and Knott’s…

…and there’s still Texas…

sigh.