I made a mistake.
What happened was this: In July I had a layover in Orlando. On this layover, I walked down to Disney Springs (to all you Southern Californians, Disney Springs is the Orlando equivalent to Downtown Disney). While I was in Disney Springs, I started feeling nostalgic. I love Disney! I had a Disneyland annual pass for 2 of the 4 years that I lived in Southern California. Loving Disney is not my fault! It is the most magical place on earth!
Anyway, so I decided to look at annual pass prices, because nostalgia. Basically, the prices were 1) insane, and 2) irrelevant because you can’t even by an annual pass to the US parks right now, they’re full.
A few weeks later, I got my schedule for August and was delighted to learn that I had the last week of August off! I could go on vacation! The obvious thing to do was to go someplace my airline flies direct to from Seattle that my old airline DOESN’T fly to. This meant: London, Paris, Amsterdam, Seoul, Tokyo, or Shanghai. Let me point out: HALF of those locations have a Disneyland! What’s a girl to do???
Well, we chose France, and then things got a little out of control. First, I was accidentally looking at Disneyland ticket prices in British Pounds instead of in Euros without knowing it, so the tickets seemed nearly equivalent to Tokyo Disney prices. So I got in my head all these dreams about going to Disneyland for a few days and told my kid we were going. It was a few days later that I realized the prices were different than I thought, as I had accidentally been looking at the price in Pounds.
So, now I realized the ticket prices were quite a bit higher than I originally thought. What to do about these unexpectedly high ticket prices??? The solution was obvious! Get an annual pass!
Yes.
That makes sense.
An American with an annual pass to Disneyland Paris…
The annual passes are SO CHEAP compared to the annual pass prices in the US. (<300 Euro for the most restricted pass), so the annual pass seemed like a great money-saving hack.
But, I forgot to factor in a few things:
- Flights. I’m a flight attendant! I fly for free, right? Wrong. I fly for nearly free. But I still have to pay for taxes when I fly internationally. That’s $85 round-trip per person to get to Paris and back. Guess where I could have flown for 100% free? Orlando or Anaheim.
- Lodging. Guess what I don’t have? An apartment in France! I’m pretty good at finding good deals on lodging, but that’s still around $100 a night for every night we’re in France. I kind of…skipped over…this little detail.
- Time. It’s around 10 hours to get to Paris from Seattle. Guess what I don’t have a lot of because I’m working for a new airline? Flexibility in my schedule! Getting to France for a quick little getaway isn’t really an easy or viable option.
But…I didn’t think about any of these little inconveniences or costs, so L and I have Disneyland Paris Annual Passes!
And now we’re kind of locked in to Paris as our major travel destination for an entire year, because like I said: It’s really really hard for me to get time off work, and now I feel like we better make sure to go to Disneyland Paris enough to make the cost of the annual passes worth it.
This might be one of the dumbest decisions I’ve ever made.
But…it sure is magical hanging out at Disneyland!
Adventure Fam 