[Recently my family had to opportunity to stay in a Walt Disney World area vacation home for an entire month. To say the least, it was a wonderful experience to get away from the maddening crowds after an equally wonderful day at a park or two and just kick back and relax with a cool drink sitting on the lanai and watching Wishes or Illuminations. However, thru this experience I have gained some added insight as the pros and cons of staying in a vacation home when your main agenda will be visiting WDW on a frequent basis. Allow me to share these insights:

Depending on where your vacation home is located (we were only 4 miles from the AK), there will be a lot of driving involved. While we could get to and from any park in less than 20 minutes, the miles added up. In all, I drove over 600 miles during our stay, not including the 200 miles to and from the airport to pick up the kids and grandson. That is a lot of miles any way you look at it. Granted, we made several trips per day to the parks (the grandson had to take his morning and afternoon naps) and a few trips to Downtown Disney. Then there was the hassle of parking (we had Annual Passes, so we saved the $9 parking fee per day, which would have really added up) and getting to the parks themselves, either by walking, riding a tram, ferry boat, or the monorail.

Since we were staying off-property we could not take advantage of the extended park hours available to guests staying on-property. That was a real bummer.

Any gifts we bought we had to schlep or store until we were ready to leave a park. That was a major hassle. Being able to send your purchases to your on-property room is a great perk.

One of the things I love to do is ride the WDW busses. Sadly, I did not ride one bus during the entire month, even though we could have.

To visit a WDW resort for a meal, or a walkabout (other than at the MK) we had to check-in at the security gate and go thru the whole "Who, what, and why" process and get a parking pass. The guests behind us never seemed to be happy, even though we were in the "Happiest Place on Earth," to wait while the guard was checking my driver´s license, license plate (tag) etc.

All in all, we had a grrreat time staying in the vacation home. However, we have decided our next extended trip to the WDW area will be split between staying at a Disney resort for a couple of weeks and then staying in a vacation home. That way we will have the best of both worlds

pictures of vacation home by Jiminy Cricket