Toddler Travel Archives - Page 4 of 16

Jan 13 2016

Daring to Disney: Saving money by staying off site

When I had originally booked this trip, we originally had booked two rooms at Port Orleans: Riverside for seven nights at a rate of about $200/night. After much thought, however, I ultimately cancelled that reservation and booked a vacation home rental. So we would experience Disney staying off site. The question is, how much money did we end up saving and was it worth it?

The rental property

So we ended up renting from Sweet Home Vacation. They have a bunch of properties located all over the place, though many of them, like ours, are fairly close to Disney World.

We rented a three bedroom apartment complete with kitchen and two living rooms (Sun Lake Condo 2). It was a great location; it never really took us longer than 15-20 minutes to reach any of the parks.

Having three bedrooms was super useful. My parents stayed in one room, M stayed in a second with one parent while Baby H stayed in the master with parent #2 (we rotated).

Sweet Home Vacation did a good job of taking care of us. They provided a pack and play and stroller on request, although they didn’t include a sheet for the pack and play so we didn’t use it. We brought our own strollers as well but it was nice to have a stroller at our property to give us options.

I think having a ton of space, especially with a toddler and infant, was invaluable and singlehandedly justified our decision to switch. The kitchen was useful for heating up things and would have been more useful if we had stocked up on groceries on day one and cooked. Having two living rooms meant adults could find space away from the kids when necessary, and a laundry machine completed the useful appliances available to us.

The condo wasn’t perfect – the A/C was kind of uneven, although that didn’t totally matter since the weather was kind of cool.

Ultimately, not looking at cost, moving from Port Orleans Riverside was the right move. We missed out on some of the Disney magic and it would have been nice to have access to multiple pools (we never checked out ours as it was a bit chilly), but when you have little kids space is the real key. However, staying with Sweet Home Vacation did add some costs in terms of convenience.

Renting a car

We were probably going to rent a car anyway, but when we decided to move off site we were locked in to renting a car. As I mentioned in my planning post, I used Autoslash. We ended up with a rate of $100 for the week for a standard car from EZ Rental (same as Advantage). If I have one beef with Autoslash, it’s the inability to eliminate certain car companies from their price slashing.

If we didn’t have kids, EZ would have been great. But we have two kids, and I had to wait in line for over 30 minutes to get our car (at least we didn’t have to take a shuttle). Luckily the kids kept it together but it could have been a real disaster. My parents got a rental from budget for $180, in retrospect I would have paid the extra $80 for the quick car service (or even just a shorter line).

Money saved meant more money for dessert

Another thing we lost moving off site was Disney’s Magical Express. If you’re not familiar with the service, basically they tag your checked bags with special Disney tags at your origin and they show up at your hotel sometime the night you arrive. Then you just take a bus directly to the hotel and skip baggage claim and all that.

We really ended up needing something like that, since I had to use some space from my dad’s car for luggage. If not for that, I would have had to upgrade the car which would have added to cost.

Another added cost was parking at the theme parks, which cost us $20 today. I could have saved money on that, but that’s for a later post.

Final Cost Analysis

So here is how much things ended up costing us.. I used $175/night as the rate for Port Orleans: Riverside since that’s the lowest price I found with various discounts after we had already switched (yes I kept an eye on it).

Item	Port Orleans: Riverside	Off-site condo
Total Room Costs	$2450	$840
Rental Car Costs	$100	$100
Parking Fees	$0	$240
Miscellaneous Purchases	$0	$100
Total Overall Cost	$2550	$1280

So we saved about $1200 overall for the cost of some convenience (the Magical Express). So we ended up with a lot more room and some freedom and saved a bunch of money. All in all I think it was the right decision – maybe when our kids are older it’ll be worth the extra premium. I’m sure on site hotels have the Disney magic but…well, maybe next time. If you want to read more about deciding about on and off site, I found these posts by Dia invaluable.

Suddenly M has started asking for a twin bed

Final Thoughts

I’m super happy we took my friend’s recommendation and checked out Sweet Home Vacation. While we may have lost out on some of the Disney magic and lost the convenience of the Magical Express, we saved a bunch of money and ended up in a condo that was a lot better suited for our needs with a three year old and an infant. I should have saved even more money – that’s tomorrow’s post.

Other Posts in this Series

Flights, Hotel, and Car

Making Disney Dining Reservations

Saving Money on Disney Tickets

Using Touring Plans (the non-touring plan parts)

Optimizing a visit using Touring Plans’ touring plans

Saving money by staying off site

When a Disney annual pass makes sense

Touring Epcot attractions with a toddler

Touring Animal Kingdom with a toddler

One perfect day at the Magic Kingdom

Dining Reviews

Tips for parents of toddlers and infants

Things I wished I knew before I went to Disney

Jan 05 2016

Daring to Disney: Optimizing a visit using Touring Plans touring plans

As I mentioned in my last post, Touring Plans is a web site dedicated to making the Disney experience either. The site is named after their touring plans – itineraries designed to minimize your wait times in the parks. According to the website, “using a touring plan is 5 times more important than picking which park to visit.” In this post I’ll discuss really optimizing your time at Disney using Touring Plans!

Follow the trip in real time on Twitter or Instagram!

Now as you’ll see in this post, touring plans are really well suited for Type A sorts. If you are happy to wander in the park and go where the wind takes you, touring plans aren’t for you. If you are trying to squeeze every last drop of fun and maximize every last second in the parks…well, the year long subscription is only 13 bucks.

To be clear up front, I have not yet gone to Disney, so I cannot evaluate how well Touring Plans did at this very moment. I will, however, go through how I used the website (paid subscription) to optimize optimize optimize our times in the parks. Or at least attempt to. Once we’re back, I’ll come back with some thoughts on how well everything went.

Pre-set Touring Plans

Part of the overwhelming nature of Disney is that there is so much to do. Four parks, dozens of things to see/do/experience in each park, etc. etc. What’s good for adults? What’s good for toddlers? What’s good for families traveling with grandparents? I found that the pre-set touring plans on the website really helped me to narrow down what I wanted to see.

If you have a paid subscription, you have access to all the touring plans that Touring Plans have come up with. There a ton of different touring plans for different preferences – I counted 14 for parents of small children in the Magic Kingdom alone. Some are very specific, like utilizing evening Extra Magic Hours, while some are more general, like “hit up all the highlights in a day” sort of plans. Each touring plan has a list of recommended attractions to see – they are listed in a recommended order of visiting (usually with busier attractions front loaded). Of course, these are just lists that don’t take into account predicted crowd levels for a given day, time of year, what time you’re getting to the park, etc.

As an example, I chose the “Two Day Dumbo or Die” plan for small children. Here’s the top of the list of attractions they recommended:

I chose similar plans for each of our days in the park (having already used the crowd calendar to decide which days we will go where). Of course, this just gives you a list of attractions to see, not very fun in and of itself. Where I really started going nuts was with the personalized touring plans and optimization software.

Personalizing and Optimizing your touring plans

If you subscribe to Touring Plans, you can copy one of the pre-set templates and fiddle with it on your own. So for example, if you look at the above, I determined that the Haunted Mansion might be a bit much for M, so I took it off. I also threw a couple extra rides on It’s a Small World onto the touring plan, an extra Dumbo ride, and subtracted things like Wishes (she’s too young and she already told us she doesn’t want to go because it’s too loud, though of course I’ll ask again). You also give Touring Plans your expected date at the park so it can factor in crowd levels.

Once you have your personalized touring plan, you have the option to optimize, evaluate, or view and print your plan.

Viewing and printing your plan is obvious. The “optimize” button takes all the attractions you are interested in, throws it into some kind of algorithm, and then spits out the best possible order you can visit the attractions. You can add in rest times, breaks, dining reservations, etc. at certain times to help break up the day and the software can account for that as well. The “evaluate” button updates the wait and travel times for the attractions in the order you have them listed. So, if optimize spits out something you don’t necessarily like, you can move things around a bit and then see how that affects your wait times. Every step of your touring plan has something like this:

Touring Plans calculates your estimated wait time, the duration of the ride, and the amount of time it will take for you to walk to your next step. You can tell Touring Plans what you want it to optimize in your touring plan. There is a slider for you to give your preference of walking less or waiting in line less and a slider for you to estimate your walking speed.

Finally, once you are done, Touring Plans spits out a map which is useful to get a general feel for the geography and the ground that you will be covering.

I started getting a little crazy with this information, but I should talk about how Touring Plans works with Fast Pass+ first.

Using Fast Pass+ with Touring Plans

If you already have Fast Pass+ reservations, you can add them into your touring plan and Touring Plans will take them into account. Interestingly enough, Touring Plans sometimes doesn’t use your FP+ reservations. When that’s the case, it explains why (usually it’s because they don’t think they are going to save you time). If you want to still use it, you can “force” the program to use it via the Evaluate button as discussed above.

If you haven’t made your FP+ reservations yet, there is a way to get Touring Plans to recommend FP+ to shoot for, though I found it a little difficult to figure out at first. Basically, you need to open up the FP+ reservation tab in Touring Plans and tell them how many FP+ reservations you have to make. Everyone of course gets 3, but there might be instances when you have less than that. For example, Jess and I are planning on heading back to the Magic Kingdom one night on our own – we can theoretically “save” a third FP+ reservation for the night and thus would only have 1 to put into our separate touring plan. We’re not, but I’m just saying that is a possibility.

The group one and group two business is for parks like Epcot that have tiered attractions. For example, you’ll never be able to reserve a FP+ ahead of time for both Test Track and Soarin’ in the same day. Anyway, after you’ve put in the number of FP+ selections you have, hit optimize and Touring Plans will recommend which rides to use them on. Then you can go to Disney’s site and try to sync as much as possible.

Going down the touring plan rabbit hole

So I optimized our touring plans for a couple of days in the park (though not the last day because I want to see what M is into) over a month ago. A funny thing happened when I logged in last week. I hit “optimize”, and lo and behold, Touring Plans calculated a whole new order of attractions for us! My guess is they use Fast Pass data or…I don’t know, magic? Either way, it threw a real monkey wrench into things because I had spent the last two weeks going over our first Magic Kingdom day itinerary with M. (I know, I know, maybe that wasn’t wise but I was excited and she was too).

Long story short, I spent a few hours messing with our touring plans – moving a ride from one day to another, flipping around FP+ options, splitting FP+ options – it got pretty intense. Of course, I loved every moment of it. It’s kind of silly – who the heck knows if their estimates are going to be on point? – but I took extreme joy in fine tuning our plans. I spent most of my time on the Magic Kingdom stuff, though we have a full day at Epcot that I want to maximize as well. Animal Kingdom is whatever and we likely are going to pass on Disney’s Hollywood Studios because M is too young (though Star Wars stuff is tempting).

Anyway it will be straight up hilarious if the touring plan completely sucks and is off – but I think it should be okay (we’re also not going at an extremely busy time so that’s going to help a ton). Either way, I’ll be sure to let you guys know. At the very least, I think I got my money’s worth just “gaming”.

Our Magic Kingdom plans

So we’re likely spending three days at the Magic Kingdom – this is what I’ve got on tap for us.

On the first day, M and I are going to “rope drop” – aka get to the parking lot by 8:15 AM and to the turnstiles by or before park opening. After hitting Winnie the Pooh first, we’ll hit a few attractions in Tomorrowland including a FP+ reservation at Tomorrowland Speedway. I was really nervous she wasn’t going to be tall enough to sit behind the wheel herself (we’ve been on similar rides and she’s always been disappointed). Thank you, growth spurt! After we’re done with Tomorrowland we’re going to spend the rest of the day in Fantasyland – FP+ at Peter Pan, Enchanted Tales with Belle, and Little Mermaid (we’re working with four adult tickets so I’m playing fast and loose with our FP+ reservations. I’d play even faster and looser but I’d like us all to ride some stuff together). Hopefully we squeeze in two rides on It’s a Small World and Dumbo before we take M home for the night. After her nap Jess and I are gonna head back to the park and hopefully do Pirates, Haunted Mansion, and one or two thrill rides.

On our second day we’ll hit the attractions in Frontier and Adventureland that we missed – Jungle Cruise, Country Bears, etc. etc. I FP+ most of the same things from Day 1, figuring if she likes them a lot we’ll probably want to skip the lines. That second day is also a day we can take her to see shows if we think she’s going to be into it, and we’re planning on hanging around for a parade. By then I’ll have gauged how she does on rides and we’ll be able to talk about whether she can do something like Haunted Mansion. I sincerely doubt it but who knows. That’s also the day we can do stuff like ride the train or ride the People Mover six times in a row if she wants (or if I want…pretty sure I’ve done that before).

For day three, I’m planning on taking all her favorites and throwing them all into one mega over-stimulation station of a touring plan!

Anyway, after typing this last section, I realize nobody probably cares except me (I’m including my wife, parents, and even M) but you know what I’m so excited it just came out! Sorry!

Final Thoughts

Creating your own personalized touring plans with the Touring Plans software is every Type A Disney fan’s dream. Well, it’s mine, at least. We’ll see how well the software does – plus I’ll be monitoring crowds in real time using the Lines App. Hopefully I’ll have good news to report!

Other Posts in this Series

Flights, Hotel, and Car

Making Disney Dining Reservations

Saving Money on Disney Tickets

Using Touring Plans (the non-touring plan parts)

Optimizing a visit using Touring Plans’ touring plans

Saving money by staying off site

When a Disney annual pass makes sense

Touring Epcot attractions with a toddler

Touring Animal Kingdom with a toddler

One perfect day at the Magic Kingdom

Dining Reviews

Tips for parents of toddlers and infants

Things I wished I knew before I went to Disney

Jan 04 2016

Daring to Disney: Using Touring Plans (the non-touring plan parts)

With Disney fast approaching, I’ve been in turbo planning mode. You’d think that once you’ve booked your flights, hotel (though that’s changed), dining reservations, and tickets you’d be done right? For most people that’s true, but for the truly crazy – you can plan out your day to the minute thanks to Touring Plans. I went pretty deep down the rabbit hole so I thought I’d share some of what I’ve found out.

What exactly is Touring Plans?

Touring Plans is a website designed to help with Disney planning created by the same people who wrote the Unofficial Guide(s) to Disney. The site has a ton of features, including super helpful stuff about when to go, where to stay (including info on pretty much every single room in every single Disney resort), links to cheaper (barely) tickets, info on every single ride and restaurant, but most importantly: access to their premium touring plan creator and optimization software.

You can get a lot of this stuff on their free site, but signing up for a year long subscription is where the magic truly happens. The site subscription only costs $12.95 a year, though if you scroll all the way down on the homepage you can find a 20% coupon code making it even cheaper.

The crowd calendar is what initially attracted me to Touring Plans

Almost everything I’m going to be talking about is as a subscriber, I decided early on that ~$10 was well worth it. But I should let you know the one big caveat: you need to trust that Touring Plans has quality crowd calculators and line optimization software. They supposedly have people in the parks every day and they also crowd source data via their Lines app, but if you don’t trust their ability to make the right calculations then you probably think the entire website is a crock. I choose to think that they take their jobs pretty seriously and know what they’re doing, but I guess I’ll find out soon enough.

For what it’s worth, I’ve heard a ton of good things, but who knows. Anyway, let’s go through Touring Plans features one by one. They have a handy dandy checklist for planning a trip, so I’ll just use that. I’m sure they have a ton of features I haven’t even scratched the surface of too!

Pick Dates and Pick Parks

I originally paid for the Touring Plans subscription for one thing only: the crowd calendar and tracker. Basically, Touring Plans uses historical data, data they gather from the parks daily, and…I dunno, magic? They use this information to predict the sizes of crowds at each of the four Orlando Disney parks for every single day of the year. They offer an overall crowd level for Disney, along with individual crowd levels for each park. It’s on a scale of 1-10, with 10 being the most crowded. Also if you want to get into the nitty gritty they have graphs for how long you can expect to wait at certain attractions depending on the crowd level.

Graph of potential wait times with variance!

Without a paid subscription, you are limited in the days you can look at (usually I think it’s just some upcoming dates). With a subscription, you can look at all the days they have predicted thus far, up through a year in advance or so. So you can plan your vacation around less busy times. Most of these coincide with what you would think, but Touring Plans takes into account the school vacations of the entire country and just has access to more information than your common sense.

Another nice feature with the paid subscription is you can track dates – Touring Plans will notify you if the crowd sizes they are expecting changed. I booked this trip over six months ago and have received one or two such notifications for our trip.

Finally, using the Lines app, you can actually track how crowds are looking on the day of, including current wait times at the park. Obviously I haven’t tried this yet but I’m looking forward to seeing how well it does. Touring Plans also uses this information to reflect on how well their predictions went.

Find a Hotel

Touring Plans also has a lot of information about on site hotels. What is specifically useful is they have pictures of many (all?) of the rooms on site. They also will fax in a room request for you if there is a particular room you like. Their room search is very extensive. You can search view, floor, accessibility, walking distance from lobby – you name it you can probably search for it. While I think there are better resources out there when looking at Disney hotels, Touring Plans definitely has a lot of breadth that you can get lost in if you want to find that perfect room.

There are tons of search criteria to help you find the perfect room

Buy Tickets

If you want to get a feel for how much money you can save on tickets, you can use Touring Plans to do that as well. They have links to various places you can buy tickets for a slight discount (I assume they are some kind of affiliate links). Ultimately, I ended up making my own discount – check out the comments from that post for a lot of great ideas from people better at this than me!

Explore the Parks – Attractions, Shows, and Dining Options

Again, Touring Plans does a comprehensive job of listing all the attractions, shows, and dining options in the World. They have information about wait times, busy times, whether rides are good for kids, height restrictions, rider switch availability – again, it’s very comprehensive. They have a rating for pretty much every single attraction for every age level which I found very useful. I also found it useful to know what kind of “scares” to expect so I could decide whether to take M or not.

Touring Plans

Now the absolute, most wonderful thing about Touring Plans, to me, is their touring plan software. To simplify: they basically take all the knowledge they have about park attraction wait times, throw it into a computer, and help you determine the best route through the parks. But that is worth a post in and of itself, because I went pretty deep down the rabbit hole. Let’s just say that if you like maximizing itineraries and want to go to Disney, Touring Plans is the website for you. But more on that later.

Final Thoughts

Even without the touring plans themselves, Touring Plans is a great website for planning a Disney vacation. It can assist in planning every aspect of your trip, even if you are using the free version. If you pay a little bit of money for a year long subscription, you get a ton more features that personally got me more and more excited about the trip (if that were possible). Stay tuned to see how crazy using Touring Plans can get!

Other Posts in this Series

Flights, Hotel, and Car

Making Disney Dining Reservations

Saving Money on Disney Tickets

Using Touring Plans (the non-touring plan parts)

Optimizing a visit using Touring Plans’ touring plans

Saving money by staying off site

When a Disney annual pass makes sense

Touring Epcot attractions with a toddler

Touring Animal Kingdom with a toddler

One perfect day at the Magic Kingdom

Dining Reviews

Tips for parents of toddlers and infants

Things I wished I knew before I went to Disney

Oct 28 2015

Daddy and Daughter in D.C. – Flights and a Fun Friday

My wife and I decided to split the team and take two separate trips this past weekend. While she took our four month old son down to Charlotte to visit her sister (his first flight!), I took M to visit some friends in D.C.

Both trips were a resounding success, but I thought I’d share about the experience of taking a toddler on a vacation alone. M is turning 3 in January, for reference.

The Preamble

Packing for a toddler is quite a bit easier than packing for an infant. Or maybe I just stress out less about it. For starters, Jess had the brilliant idea of putting each of M’s outfits into big ziplock bags so I wouldn’t get confused. Of course, I still managed to get super confused (put a dress on backwards, put on emergency clothes instead of regular, etc.) – but imagine how lost I would have been WITHOUT the ziplock bags.

Other than that, I went with my normal strategy – extra diapers (potty training only 50% complete) and clothes in a bag inside the car seat bag, small carry on sized suitcase for everything else.

Overall, we traveled with the suitcase, car seat bag (stuffed) and car seat, cheap stroller, my backpack, and M’s backpack (which she just put miscellaneous toys in).

As I had mentioned, I paid for seats like a sucker (Deal Mommy posted about a better way). Minors under the age of 18 don’t need ID but I brought M’s passport in case, and we both have Global Entry and TSA Precheck so security was a breeze.

Article 1 – Legislating the Flight

I think I may have read somewhere that with toddlers you shouldn’t talk about exciting things too far in advance because they don’t have much of a concept of time. I don’t know if it’s too early or whatever but I had already asked M if she wanted to take the trip with me two weeks in advance so she knew it was coming. We pretty much talked about flying on a plane every single day for the two weeks leading up to it.

Thus, when we got to the airport, she was ready to go. She kept asking questions – “Where’s the luggage going?”, “Why does my stroller have to go under the plane?”, “When do we get to go on the plane?”

It’s amazing how fast kids pick up on things. At security, M saw me put our bags on the conveyor belt – for the rest of the trip, she put her own backpack up there (all the museums we visited had security plus TSA on the way back).

M was great on the flight – she spent preboarding and the first half of the flight talking to her doll about what was happening and taking care of it (mostly involving “reading” the doll books and giving it stickers), and then she spent some time watching a Youtube video of children song compilations.

She doesn’t get any screentime at home so she was super into it. Eventually I told her to take a break, and she did without a fuss (phew!). Ultimately, she picked up the tablet again, figured out how to unlock it (no passcode but still), and then found Alphabet Aquarium, which I didn’t even remember downloading. That helped her finish off the flight.

One funny thing – for some reason M believed that window shades should be closed for takeoff and landing – and seated in the window seat she made sure she complied with that rule. I know some airlines do that, though AA doesn’t.

Anyway, only a one hour flight, but zero meltdowns and the return flight was so uneventful it’s not even worth writing about. I’m not sure how Jess felt (though H apparently was a champ), but I definitely think 1 on 1 was less stressful for me than how I imagined 2 on 2 would have been.

Article 2 – Executive Decision Making

Leslie from Trips with Tykes once wrote about not stressing the nap when traveling with a toddler. I decided to take that to heart and also to its extreme – I didn’t stress bedtime the night we got there. After lugging the stupid car seat through the DCA terminal (when will I learn my lesson), and after taking forever to figure out how to work the radio on our fancy schmancy rental car (a hybrid!), and after M went nuts with my friend’s daughter’s toys – she didn’t get to bed until 11 PM – 3 hours past due.

I took this kind of laissez faire attitude towards naps/sleeping the entire trip – if we couldn’t stay on a strict schedule I just let it go. It ended up working out fine, she did most of her napping in the car and never really was overtired throughout the whole weekend.

Article 3 – Judicious use of Time

I’ve mentioned a million times that we are going to Disney World in a few months. The Unofficial guide recommends that you test your child’s stamina before going to Disney, so I decided to see what M was made of.

So Friday morning, after eating breakfast, we went in to the city. Over the course of about 5 hours we went to the Air and Space museum, the Museum of the American Indian, and the National Zoo – spending about an hour at each place.

A quick note on each. For Air and Space, I think it’s much better for older kids – there’s not enough hands on stuff for toddlers to do. M just ended up boarding and deplaning the DC-7 they have there like 10 times.

I actually just went to the Museum of the American Indian for lunch originally, but then noticed they have a special exhibit for kids right now based on the Great Inka Road. Essentially, there are a lot of fun hands on activities for kids of all ages. M was especially excited because they give each of the kids passports and the exhibit is littered with stamps to get. There is also an arts and crafts station, a skateboarding simulator (okay?), and the chance to build your own igloo (for older kids).

Pro tip: if you're not heavy enough to move the skateboard you actually end up with a higher score — Pro tip: if you’re not heavy enough to move the skateboard you actually end up with a higher score

We ended our day at the zoo, which is free although parking costs $22. My least favorite part of the zoo? It’s on a huge hill and I had to push a stroller up that entire thing. But elephants are cool, the apes are super cool (apparently the orangutans have free reign to climb structures between buildings, over the park), and we saw a panda even though it was sleeping.

We definitely pushed the envelope, did a ton of walking, but M handled it all in stride. It actually reminded me of the time Jess and I were in Paris and had the Museum Pass – Jess hated it because I made her go see every single thing and she didn’t get to enjoy anything (fair enough). That strategy worked much better with a toddler’s attention span!

Final Thoughts

Within 24 hours, M and I had taken D.C. by storm. If the trip had ended there it would have been a resounding success, but there was some more low key fun to be had the next day. Stay tuned.

Oct 22 2015

Parenthood is destroying all my “principles”

M and I are gearing up for a father-daughter bonding trip (while Jess takes H as we split the team). I’ve noticed that once again, as a dad, some long held principles of mine are falling apart.

I wrote awhile back about how I refused to pay for parking in Portland but how that was stupid (after which the comments proceeded to call me stupid, thanks all!).

This week I broke another principle of mine – I paid for seats on an AA flight. Yuck.

Basically, our flight was pretty full and there were no seats together available that were free. Now, I figured there was a 95% chance that they would be able to put us together at the gate/ticket counter, and an even better chance that some kind soul would be willing to switch.

However, I think the airline is within their rights to NOT seat us together (even though my daughter isn’t even three), and I was imagining a nightmare scenario where we couldn’t sit together. Super unlikely, but nonetheless it suckered me into paying $30 for seats for us.

Anyway, I’m not happy about it, but at least I don’t have to worry about it. On the way back, there aren’t even two seats together if I pay for them – AA said that they’ll put us together at the airport (I was on the phone with them adding an infant to Jess’ ticket). So hopefully that comes true.

But from now on, when I ask myself “Who would ever pay for those seats?”, I have my answer. When you don’t know who the sucker is, it’s you.

If people have surefire methods of ensuring we could have sat together without paying, I’m all ears.