My 2018 Disney year

2018 has been an amazing Disney year for me, I visited two new Disney Parks and I experienced lots of Disney firsts.

This will be my last post until after Christmas, working full time in retail the week before Christmas leaves a person with little time to sleep or eat let alone blog. So I will be taking a week break from writing to concentrate on work. However, now seems the perfect time to sum up my Disney year.

As I said at the beginning of this post, 2018 has been a fantastic Disney year for me and I thought 2017 was amazing. Sam and I visited Disneyland Paris with my mum, brother and niece, then Sam and I visited Walt Disney World in September 2017 and November 2017. How could 2017 have been topped? 3 Disney trips to 2 different Disney parks.

Well, along came 2018 and it came bigger….and better. April 2018 Sam and I visited Shanghai Disneyland and Hong Kong Disneyland, in September we spent 11 days in Walt Disney World and finally in November we had a short trip to Disneyland Paris as an early birthday present for me.

Four Disney parks in an 8 month period. We are lucky we get to do what we do. We save our butts of and make plenty of sacrifices to afford these trips.

My top 5 2018 highlights

Visiting Shanghai Disneyland – This parks is frigging amazing and currently my favourite park. Minus the difference in culture, this park is incredible. When we visited it was only 2 years old. The park is HUGE (if you were to walk around the whole parks circumference, it is a total of 5 miles around). It has similarities with other Disney parks but also ‘new’ elements that I had not seen before.
Watching Mickey and the Wondrous Book – A 20 something minute show in the Hong Kong Disneyland park, it is by far and without doubt my favourite show in any Disney park I have visited. The original version of the song Happily Ever After originated here. In this show Olaf gets lost from his Frozen story and Mickey and Goofy try and return him to his home. On the way they visit many Disney stories and see many different Disney characters. The show is a mixture of English and Chinese. If you sit on the right of the theatre facing the stage there are English subtitles on a screen that can easily be seen.
Riding Pirates of the Caribbean in Shanghai Disneyland – BEST RIDE EVER!!!!! This 16 minute attraction has a mix of scenes and screens within the dark ride. Is the best attraction I have ever been on. If you ever find yourself in Shanghai or even Disneyland, go on Pirates of the Caribbean.
Visiting Disneyland Paris…again – Getting to visit Disneyland Paris and seeing it at our pace. The majority of attractions were closed on our last visit so we both got to ride and experience new things.
Seeing Duffy – Duffy left Walt Disney World in 2014, so when we visited the Asian parks this year I got to see my favourite bear again.

I do also have an honourable mention, during our Walt Disney World trip in September, we attended the Disney After Hours event in Magic Kingdom. The event is incredible, please see my review on this. A WHOLE Disney park with around 3000-5000 guests? We practically had the whole park to ourselves.

2019 will be an amazing Disney year too. We are not due to go anywhere until September, but we will be spending two weeks in the 3 Asian parks. After that it will just be the Original Disneyland, in California to visit and we will have completed all 6 parks. Each park offers something completely different and yet they are all so familiar. Disney and Disney parks are a great love of mine and huge part of my life. I hope 2019 brings so many new Disney experiences in order to keep writing my blog post, because with this I have truly found a passion.