These have been some different postings for me this week. I’ve written everyday, It’s been more of a travel blog. And the focus hasn’t been blatantly about discipleship as it relates to men.

However, framed through Disney, these past several posts have been about time. Time with your wife. Time with your children. And as a husband and a father, that’s our spiritual responsibility. It doesn’t matter where or how, you are to invest your lives in your wife and your children.

That’s what God did. He invested in His Church and His children. He gave Himself away so we could have that relationship with Him.

God gave to the point of death of His Son, Jesus… for you and for me. Jesus died so we could have a way to relate to God. Sin was our barrier. And not just the death of Christ, but His resurrection is the frame that God puts over us when we accept the gift of salvation. While we still sin, God sees Christ and the price He paid for that sin. And that’s how we can have a relationship with the Father… and have peace, forgiveness, hope and a plan for our lives that’s much bigger than us.

I hope you’ve enjoyed walking through our week at Disney World. If you have any questions about the parks or planning, feel free to email me. And if you have any questions about how to have relationship with Christ, please email me as well.

Here’s some final tips on getting the most out of your Disney vacation.

As far as “free dining” goes, here’s the full disclosure. There is a cost to free.

First, there are selected days you can take advantage of this deal. For us, that meant taking our kids out of school for a week. Was it worth it? You bet. As a first grader and a sixth grader, our girls are at a perfect age to do something like this. They are doing well at school and they both have good relationships with their teachers. Homework was done on the flights and at night. So advantage vacation.

Next, the dining plan you wanted was tied to a resort type. The least expensive resort type (value) yielded the least expensive meal plan (counter service only). The plan we chose (one counter service, one table service) meant a resort upgrade to a moderate.

So if you went the least expensive way possible (this is based on 6 days of dining), you’d get about $600 worth of free food (depending on what you order).

For the moderate resort (you gain table service meals), you will pay about $450 more for your resort fee. But I calculated we received about $1200 in free food. The price range of our table service meals (for our family of four… Disney treated Gracen as an adult for pricing because she is older than nine) was about $90-$140. Character experiences were more expensive.

So the true cost of our dining was twofold. First, we paid the extra $450 for the moderate resort to gain us the table service meals. Second, while you don’t tip at a counter service meal, you do at a table service experience… and 18-20% is recommended (we never had service that caused us to think less).

So with the $450 resort upgrade and about $120 in tips, our dining cost us $570 for four people to eat two meals and four snacks a day. That’s $10 meal per person per day. And a $3 snack a day. Pretty inexpensive for a resort upgrade.

Oh yeah, we also got four free refillable resort cups. That saved us about $70 and we used them every morning and evening.

Here’s something that you can do to lower your costs even more… go to Wal-Mart before you leave and purchase snacks. You can take them into the park and it beats paying $3.50 for the same thing.

This was our first experience in a moderate resort. After two stays in a value resort (All-Star Sports and Pop Century), we moved up to Port Orleans.

Port Orleans has two resorts: Riverside and French Quarter. We stayed in the French Quarter. Why? The resort was smaller than Riverside. This meant one bus stop for us (four for them). Less stops meant we got to the parks sooner.

The difference between value and moderate are space. A few more square feet (it really is nice), two sinks instead of one, a retractable curtain that separates the bathroom from the rest of the room, a refrigerator, a larger laundry room… these amenities, while seemingly small, really enriched our stay.

Value resorts are still nice. Pop Century was a step back in time for the adults and still visually catered to kids. All-Star resorts may be geared to the kids more than the adults.

The best part of the moderate resort: two sinks. As a guy with a wife and two daughters, that one extra sink made helped out with time management (and being at Disney is all about time management).

Park hopping or not? That’s a tough one. We’ve always purchased it, so we did it for this trip. However, we only park-hopped once. I guess we paid for the idea that we could move freely between the parks, but that idea cost us less than $10 per person per day ($220 total)… kinda expensive for an idea. We left $184 on the table for those days we didn’t park hop. (I will mention that the previous two trips were for seven days in the parks, not six. The longer you stay, the more likely you will park hop. We were at that breaking point on a six day trip. That second day at MK and at Epcot had moments where we could have hopped. Add a seventh day and the value of this option increases significantly.)

Transportation to the parks and in the parks is relatively efficient. Buses run continuously to and from resorts, the monorail goes between Magic Kingdom and Epcot (with a transfer at the Transportation Center), the ferry runs to and from the TC to MK, there’s a boat that will take you to and from Epcot and Hollywood Studios, a train will take you from Main Street to Splash Mountain in MK, a ferry will connect to to and from the World Showcase at Epcot, and we had a boat that connect Port Orleans to Downtown Disney. Depending on your resort, some of these will transport you to and from there.

Or you can take your own car (or rent one if you fly). Is there an advantage to a car over Disney transportation? You tell me.

And I’m still trying to figure out why the Peter Pan had one of the longest wait times of any ride at MK. You go up. You go down. You fly. You get off. Yet people waited in line for over 45 minutes for this experience. I just don’t get it.

I had previously mentioned the photo pass… we collected three card during our week and we had a total of 473 pictures taken of us (as well as of our kids with characters) by a Disney photographer. And you have a choice to have a CD mailed to you with all your pictures or you can download them… or for about $20 more, you can download them and have a backup CD mailed to you.

There’s probably lots more I could get into, but I’ve got work to do going through my pictures on our photo pass. If we’re friends on Facebook, I’ll have all my pictures available to view soon.

Two thoughts and tips I’ll leave you with: Count the costs and have a plan. It will help you at Disney, but it’s what Christ commanded as well.

Are you willing to spend your life for Christ? It’s much more expensive than a trip to Disney.

And will you be intentional day by day with your relationships, your time and resources, your devotion, your marriage, your children. These are not separate pockets of our lives. They are the canvas faith is to be painted.

Thanks for taking the trip with us.