Three days!!!

When my niece was eight, I told her that I would take her to Disney World - when she was twelve. "That's half my life!" she complained. To an eight year old, four years seemed like an eternity. But we did go to Disney World, and for every year after that, Heather and I have had our thing - Disneyland. Once a year, just me and her. I have the best aunt job ever.

BugVision glasses on, waiting underground for our first "It's Tough to be a Bug" show.

Of course there are other close people in my life - Rob, Thomas, Alice - who also enjoy Disney but Heather is my Disney Twin. If we lived in the Pacific Rim world, we would be mentally compatible for drift, and effortlessly crush any Kaiju coming our way. As long as our way was Disneyland.

She understands the park the same way I do. You have a plan, hit the park early, always do rope drop, make use of Fast Passes, pin trade when the crowds come in and then retreat to your cool hotel room with a bucket of Tony Roma's ribs to watch TV and relax until the crowds disperse and the park is yours again. We've been doing this for three years and we've got it down. I look forward to this trip ALL YEAR. This year has the added bonus that she's started watching Star Trek: Voyager, so we can watch it together in the afternoons. Disney, Star Trek, more Disney. I feel faint just thinking about it.

Little girls who think they're princesses don't get more excited than I do about Disney.

We got delayed this year because of conflicting schedules, but managed to squeeze this in ahead of her first day of high school and my business trip. We leave in three days, and I am beyond all reasonable levels of excited. Little girls who think they're princesses going to a real magic kingdom don't get more excited than this. I've been going through my pin collection, pulling out my least favorite ones for trade. Which Ursula should I keep? Do I break up the Muppets? What are my chances of finding a Baloo to keep Mowgli and Colonel Hathi company?

A few of the hundred or so pins I've collected since our first Disney trip together.

And I've been studying the Disney line wait times for two weeks, using all three apps I downloaded from the iTunes store. Radiator Springs runs out of Fast Passes early, so we'll need to grab one in the morning. Not before hitting Toy Story Mania though, because those lines also build in the morning and there are no Fast Passes there. California Screamin' seems to have lost much of its lines to the opening of Cars Land, so we could grab a Fast Pass for that one on our way out of Toy Story Mania, and still be able to get one for Radiator Springs ten minutes later.

Are you keeping up with all this? If you are, I'd like to know, because if you're tracking this we're probably Disney compatible too.

So. Three days. Between me and the trip stand two 12-14 hour work days, but I'm keeping my eyes on the prize.