15 Years and 3 Tries (AKA: Walt Disney World Hates Me)

For 15 years I’ve been trying to get to Disney World. Disneyland I’ve done. Probably hundreds of times by now. Mostly because it’s practically in my backyard. WDW, however, has been a pipe dream. That elusive temptress that beckons to me from across vast expanses of the U.S. “Come visit us. We’re so big here. There’s so much to do. Don’t you want to come see us?”

Alas, it’s not to be. I’m now at “3 strikes and you’re out” and I don’t even like baseball. My saga has been long and ridiculous, and I’m at the point where I’m just giving up. It’s too much hope. Too many expectations. And this is coming from someone who for several years bought 2-3 WDW tour guide books a year and read every page cover to cover, studiously making notes about where I would go and what I would see when I finally got to “the World.”

Let me take you through the events that got me here:

Attempt #1
My honeymoon. 1993. My ex and I loved all things Disney, so we thought the perfect honeymoon would be to take “The Big Red Boat” (Disney’s cruise line before its current incarnation) and then spend a week at the parks afterward. Sounds perfect, right? Except that we were poor and paying for everything ourselves. We had one credit card that was maxed out. So my dear mother offered to put the trip on hers and let us pay her back over time. We all went to the travel agent (yes, they had those before the internet), plunked down Mom’s card and were confirmed. We thought.

About a month before the wedding, I got a call from the travel agent that the ship’s itinerary was changing. Instead of leaving Florida 2 days after our wedding, it was leaving the day before. Obviously, this wasn’t going to work. In the early days of the cruise line, they weren’t running cruises back to back. The next one wouldn’t be for another month after the wedding. Well, that didn’t seem like much of a honeymoon. So we canceled, lost a deposit and figured we’d go another time. Ended up in San Diego for the honeymoon instead.

Attempt #2
The ex’s graduation. 8 years later. The ex was finally graduating with his masters in architecture. We were moving to San Diego. I had given notice at my job. I had put a deposit on a rental house in San Diego and given notice on the house we were living in at the time. The ex had quit his job. We had paid for the trip and were going to leave 2 days after his graduation ceremony. No cruise this time, but 10 days at WDW. At the Grand Floridian. The trip I had dreamed of and planned for so many years. Plane tickets were bought, spending money was set aside, everything about the trip was fully paid. We were even going to go to Discovery Cove so I could swim with the dolphins. Then the bottom dropped out.

About a week before the graduation, I got a call at work from the ex. Turns out, he wasn’t graduating. Turns out he’d been admitted to the masters program on probation on the condition that he raise his gpa. He didn’t do that. In fact, his thesis was far from being up to par and they were not only not letting him graduate, but they were kicking him out of the university. He couldn’t take another year and make it up. He couldn’t go into another program. He was no longer welcome at this university that we had taken hefty loans out for. And I had no idea about any of this until a week before my entire life was supposed to change.

Needless to say, this was not news that was received well. In fact, it was the catalyst to the divorce. The ex left to go to San Diego on his own, I stayed and got my job back, and after a while we divorced. Making those calls to cancel that trip and pull everything back (the trip and all the moving related arrangements) just about killed me. My mom was kind enough to make the calls about canceling the graduation party arrangements and contacting the out of town guests that they would not need to make the trip (I felt awful about all the travel arrangements that had already been made). So, WDW attempt #2 was down the drain.

Attempt #3
My graduation. 2008. The Boy lovingly offered to take me to WDW this year if I could stay within a budget. It was going to be a kind of graduation present. So, back to the bookstore I went. I gathered information online, I pored over guide books and blogs. I found the perfect time to go, the perfect package and the perfect price. I had received WDW gift cards for graduation and my birthday, so I used that to put down the deposit with the agreement that The Boy would get me a gift card to make up for it, so he was paying for the whole trip.

Very long story very short, The Boy’s card does not want me to go to WDW. When it was time to pay the balance, he used the credit card. But I started getting worried. So I had him call Disney to confirm. Twice. Everything was fine. Until it wasn’t.

Turns out that even though the credit card issued a confirmation number for the WDW transaction and showed that the money had come off the card, WDW showed that they never received funds. Many calls later, turns out WDW didn’t get the funds, but the credit card has already pulled the money from The Boy’s account, and it’s in the ozone somewhere. So, while a trace is being done, the funds are not available for use by The Boy. Of course, in the middle of all this is the deadline for payment to WDW or the trip cancels. The Boy can’t use the credit card, because the available credit has already been pulled for the phantom payment that nobody can find. Having no other way to pay for it, we had to cancel our trip. We still haven’t found the money (the credit card company is still “tracing” it, and who knows how long that will take). So, no WDW.

I am now convinced that there is some Dharma-like force that is forever keeping me from my WDW dream. Trip has been booked 3 times. Trip has been paid for 3 times. Trip has been canceled 3 times. I’m convinced that if we had been planning to go anywhere else instead, everything would have been fine.

I just can’t take it anymore. I’m at the point where I’m going to accept that I’m persona non grata at WDW and stick with Disneyland. I’ve never had a problem going there. I’ll just stay where I belong.

Oh, and hopefully we’ll eventually find the missing credit card money. Probably just in time for retirement.