Our own Haunted Mansion

Anyone who knows me, knows that I'm nuts about Disney. I love Mickey Mouse, I love their movies, I love to go there (and right after I go there, I start planning my next trip almost immediately!). Being a SoCal native, I'm fortunate enough to live relatively close to Disneyland and have gone many times over the years.

I've not ever been to Walt Disney World and it's definitely a goal of mine to make it there someday.

However, did you know that it's really really expensive?!

Not just the tickets, but I'd definitely want to stay on the resort property and that's pricey. And of course, we'd have to fly to Florida which in itself, is certainly out of our budget. So what's a Disney-maniac to do?

Well, for starters, she enters every online contest she can to win a trip to Walt Disney World, Disneyland or on a Disney Cruise! In a search for Disney contests, I came across one for a 5-day trip to WDW, including the hotel, tickets, a video camera and $500 Disney Dollars.

This is a video contest and I've never entered a video contest before. I had to borrow a video camera from my brother as we don't own one. In my research on video contests, I discovered that odds of winning are better because many people find it too time consuming to enter so there aren't as many entries as ordinary contests where you simply type in your information. In this contest, there are still 3 days left to enter but there are less than 750 entries as I write. Those are pretty good odds, right?

The kids and I discussed our video for a few days. They were wanting to recreate the Alice in Wonderland ride but I told them that we really didn't have the props to carry that off. We determined that the Haunted Mansion was our best bet. We wrote up a little script, gathered some props from around the house and in the span of a few hours on Sunday morning, we got our video done.

Tell us what you think!



Personally, I think it came out pretty darned cute. The Girl had some trouble with her lines and we had a great many outtakes (she kept saying her lines and then asking, "Was that perfect?"). I do think her Madame Leota is classic though! And The Boy really got a chance to ham it up on the re-creation of the Doom Buggy! Don't you love his Pluto hat? He wears that every time we go to Disneyland.

And I think our ghost looks great, even if I didn't get much cooperation on that end... I would have liked to see him wrapped up more like a mummy but he was having NONE of that!

The contest closes at the end of this week and the winner is announced at the end of the month. Keep your fingers crossed for us!