My wife and I are coming up on our first anniversary and we are planning a Disneyland vacation. We did a similar vacation on our honeymoon when we used our CityPass to spend 3 days hopping between Disneyland and Disney's California Adventure (DCA), then a day at Universal Studios and a day at Sea World.
This time we're just thinking of doing a 2-day park-hopper between Disneyland and DCA. My wife came across a site that we've been looking at a lot to decide how we want to do our vacation. Getawaytoday.com lets you choose from the dozens of hotels that are around Disneyland and get a packaged deal that includes park tickets. You can choose the number of nights in the hotel and number of days you want to spend in the park/s. We found several offers that add a third night in the hotel for free. They do also offer the CityPass as an option.
Now that we have the stay and play figured out, what about travel and food?
For travel, I've been looking at this site that roughly estimates the cost for driving. Fuelcostcalculator.aaa.com takes the information for your make, model and year, then you select your start and destination cities and it will use average gas prices and the information about your cars MPG (miles per gallon) and calculate what you should expect to pay in gas. It doesn't have a list of all cities, but we just choose the nearest start city and destination, then round the result very conservatively.
We do what we can to avoid paying for food inside the park. I would highly recommend this because the prices in the park can be up to 300% the cost of what you would normally pay. We just bring a small bag and fill it with sandwiches and snacks that we can eat throughout the day. That should be enough if we start the day with a good breakfast. If not, there are a few places just outside of the park.
What Disney vacation tips do you have?
