Finally Part of the Disney Vacation Club!

Hello everyone, you all know me as the monthly recipe columnist.  What you don’t know is that we recently became part of the Disney Vacation Club (DVC) family!  I want you to know that one of my Dreams came true!  So I will share with you on how we made our decision, planning our very 1st DVC vacation with our own points then a trip plan and report after our trip!  This will be in parts as I don’t want to bore you!

This is how our story starts, friends of ours have been members from almost the beginning with ownership at Disney’s Old Key West.  We wanted to visit Disney in 1998 this being with my husband Keith and daughter Alicia.  My DVC BF Nancy ( will now be known as Nancy) said you have to stay on property it is the best way to experience Disney!  With that we booked the Caribbean Beach Resort and fell in love with it and planned to go back.  Well a few years later Nancy & her hubby invited us to go on vacation with them to Disney when we decided we wanted to go back.  They booked Disney’s Vero Beach & Disney’s Wilderness Lodge for all of us.  The three of us were so blown over with the gorgeous resorts as we had no clue back then what they were all about!   At that time we didn’t have the best computer to look everything up.  But, the beach being on the ocean, steps away from the resort. The wonderful food we found and tried there.  Then onto Disney Wilderness Lodge.   We didn’t know about the character breakfasts, we ate with Pooh, Tigger, Eeyore and Piglet.  We didn’t know about the Electric Water Parade that we ran from our room to see when our friends told us it was coming or the boat to Magic Kingdom which was so amazing to ride.  These were all new adventures for us. We actually sat down in 2001 to talk to a Disney DVC member rep but it just wasn’t the right time to buy points with just buying our house.

Over the years we visited Disney 5 more times bringing us up to a total of 8 resorts so far.  Our stays include Beach Club Villa’s, Disney’s Saratoga Resort & Spa, Disney’s Port Orleans Riverside, Disney’s Beach Club Inn, Disney’s Port Orleans French Quarter & Disney’s Animal Kingdom Lodge Jambo House.  The DVC resorts were stays with Nancy and a gifted stay to Alicia & I for her high school graduation.  During many of these trips we would stop in to speak to a DVC member rep but it just wasn’t the right time to buy.

But my last visit to Disney’s Animal Kingdom Lodge Jambo House  was so amazingly breath taking that I was determined to talk my family into becoming a member!   I came home & I figured out how we could do it and told my dear husband it just makes sense. He said can we stay at Vero Beach again I said if we own of course.   Finally he agreed so this February we became members at Disney’s Saratoga Springs Resort & Spa!  We went to visit my daughter at work and  he said to her Welcome Home! She practically dumped her glass at work that she was wiping.  We surprised her but good!

This proves even with time, 10 years in the making you can have a Dream come true!  Time and patience worked for me! I have to thank my friends Nancy and Phil, her husband for showing me this Dream to continue our travels and adventures for years to come!  To be continued, I will tell you my first adventures on booking your own DVC vacation in my next post!

Have a Magical Day!  Darlene

Tags: Disney Vacation Club, Disney's Vero Beach Resort, Disney's Wilderness Lodge, DVC

This entry was posted on June 23, 2012 at 8:00 AM and is filed under Columns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.