A Quick Visit to Disney World

So last month I had the chance to visit Disney World for three days. I'll never be one to turn down a chance to hang out with Mickey at the Magic Kingdom, so even though it was short notice and a short trip, of course I jumped.

My husband and I had talked about doing a "seat of the pants" Disney trip with minimal work ahead of time and few frills- we wouldn't be staying on property,  leave the pin lanyards and autograph book at home, and we wouldn't be doing any fancy dining. I learned that while you can get away without the kind of big planning I did for our 2015 trip, at a minimum you need to pick a park to visit each day, book FastPasses at the 30 day mark and think about a meal or two you'd really like to have. Not too much to worry about.

This stuff saved my bacon for four days outside in the Orlando sun. No joke.

What that did mean was me waking up at 4am one day when I was in California because that was the 30 day mark for one of our park days.  FastPass reservations open at 7am and that means 7am Eastern Standard Time, or very very early California time. I can't say I was happy about the early reveille but what can you do. The Mouse requires some sacrifices.

That being said, this little bit of effort went a long way. We got FastPasses for our favorite rides and even got a breakfast reservation at Kona Cafe, one of my favorite places to eat at WDW, and a dinner there a couple of days later. A good breakfast is essential to take on the Magic Kingdom and the Poly starts any day off right. While we were in Florida we managed to book a nice dinner at Disney Springs for our last night as well.

Yes I drank this entire French Press of Kona coffee on my first day.

Speaking of the Polynesian resort, we used Lyft quite a bit to get around Orlando used the Polynesian resort as our base. This tactic worked well because it was much easier to find our pickup at the resort versus the Magic Kingdom, which is always swamped with ride sharers. I had mixed results with Lyft; some drivers were great and knew their way around while others- well, I think some folks maybe were just new to Orlando and concepts like Disney and SeaWorld proved challenging.  But everyone was courteous and friendly.

But I would definitely recommend Lyft to get around Orlando if you're not staying on property. Disney has its own Lyft-affiliated ride sharing service called Minnie Vans that while pricier than a regular Lyft, includes perks like insider Disney tips from the cast members who drive the vans. Anyone can use the Minnie Vans with the My Disney Experience app.

Please take that advice that has you baking in the sun all day so I can have the park to myself at night.

One big improvement in My Disney Experience over our last trip is that the app now lets you order food online for pickup at some quick-service dining locations. This functionality helped shorten line time and wait time during our visit to the land of Pandora at Animal Kingdom and I wished I'd known about it earlier in our trip. You can also split up Fast Pass parties now so you don't have to do everything with your group.

My overall takeaway from this trip can be summed up in five words: Visit the Parks at Night. I don't care what anyone says about rope drop and how it's essential you get to the parks when they open. But hey. If you listen to that advice and bake all day in sun, I can have short lines and more fun at night. Because OMG Disney is like a carnival at night. It's beautiful and lit up, you get fireworks, you get cooler temperatures and you get a full day's worth of fun if you get there around 3-4pm and go until it closes or you drop. Get your FastPasses for between 3-6pm, do indoor rides while it's still hot and sunny and then play outside until 11pm or later. Shop, get ice creams, go on rides and just generally rock the park at night. I will never go for rope drop again.

Disney World Part 4: On the Ground At Disney

Magical Express
Use it, love it. If you're staying on property you won't have to lift your little finger to get around. They'll pick you up at the airport and take your luggage right to your room. There are buses, boats and a monorail to get you anywhere on Disney property you want to go. My husband didn't get behind the wheel once during our stay- not even on Tomorrowland Speedway.

Crowds
It's bad. Plan on it being bad and be pleasantly surprised if it's not.

Walking
You'll be doing it. A lot of it. I thought I was a pretty good walker but I was not prepared for the miles and miles of it, even with a good touring plan. Comfortable shoes are a must. 

PhotoPass/Memory Maker
Use it, love it. If your budget allows, buy Memory Maker so you can download and print as many of your PhotoPass pictures as you want. There are dozens of professional photographers all over the parks and they will take great pictures of you and scan them to your Magic Band. Yes they will take photos with your own camera if you want, but theirs are better than yours, most likely, and the pictures will be better too. I was thrilled with my PhotoPass pictures and loved all the opportunities to get great pictures of my husband and me on our big trip.

Our Park Bag
We don't have kids, so our park bag was pretty simple. We had one backpack and filled it with

• Ponchos for rain (we used them!)
• Ziploc bags for the cameras in case of water rides
• Autograph book and markers inside a Ziploc bag
• Travel-size sunscreen bottle
• Paper copy of each day's touring plan in a plastic sleeve
• Each day's park map

Whenever Jeff went on a roller coaster I didn't go on, rather than pack his camera in the Ziploc bag he'd just hand off the whole backpack to me and I'd hang on to it. Keeping the autograph book and pens together in a sealable bag was just good organization. The sunscreen and ponchos were necessities. I don't understand anyone who comes to WDW without ponchos.

FastPasses and Touring Plans
If you're going to a Disney park, get FastPasses. Just get them. Get them and do a touring plan because even if you've been there before I think it really helps to have your day organized. That said, there will be times when you depart from it, but it really helps to stay focused and do the things you came there to do.

With the My Disney Experience app you can cancel and rebook FastPasses pretty easily if your plans change, and we used this feature often once we got the hang of it.

Our best days in the parks started early, followed a plan and departed from the plan when that made more sense. Get the FastPasses for the super-popular rides after say 10am, start as early as you can and have a touring plan that gets you moving right away.

We used TouringPlans.com and highly recommend it. That said, I don't recommend the app unless you are a dedicated app user. Honestly for me, bringing paper copies of the touring plans in our park bag each day was easier than checking the app all the time. And our phone batteries didn't drain as fast!

One last thing about rides. The newer coasters have something called the single rider line. My husband does coasters and I don't, so rather than burn FastPasses on rides I wasn't going to do, he did Expedition Everest, Chevrolet Test Track and the Aerosmith Rockin' Roller Coaster as a single rider and walked on. He even lapped the Aerosmith coaster a few times as a single rider. And I went shopping in the meantime. It worked out!

Character Meets
I love character meets and I wanted to do a lot of them on this trip. So I booked us a lot of character breakfasts and left the rest (except one) to chance. That's right- I didn't plan any character meets in the parks. If I happened to see one going on and I wanted to do it, I'd get in line, or I'd pass if not. If Character Meets are a big priority check with cast members and plan it the way you would plan FastPasses (and you can use FastPasses for a bunch of them). I did a ton of them without planning and that worked for me.

The only one I planned was Jack and Sally at the Halloween Party. I was a little bummed I didn't get to meet Gaston, but it wasn't worth building my day around and I have no real regrets.

Freebies
There are loads of freebies in the parks. Collectible cards, snacks, other stuff- just put "free stuff at Disney" into Google and there are whole pages dedicated to the topic. I didn't go out of my way for anything (okay maybe I did for a free square of Ghirardelli chocolate- I'm not made of stone) but I enjoyed the things I came across during our days.

Hidden Mickeys
Again, didn't go out of my way but enjoyed the ones I happened to find. Next time I'd love to spend more time hunting them down.

Disney Springs
Disney Springs is a big shopping and dining area outside of the parks and resorts but on Disney property. There's a lot to see and do and eat and buy but it's a freaking zoo. Seriously, we went there on a Tuesday night and it was like Times Square. Go but be prepared.

And that's it for my series on Disney vacation planning! Ask me any questions in the comments and thanks for reading!

Disney World Part 3: The Travel Binder

I am kind of a planning geek.

And Disney is like the Olympics of travel planning. I swear I did more work to plan our 8-day trip to a Florida resort than I did to plan our 2-week drive around the coast of Ireland.

And I needed a place to keep all that paperwork. Hence the binder.

I did not take a picture of my binder but I just used a regular old 3-hole binder from the office supply store. You can go all disco and get a Disney-branded one if you want. I took various documents and print outs (more on that later) and slipped them into top-loading clear plastic sheets made for 3-hole binders and I was off to the races.

My binder was arranged to tell the story of our trip start to finish.

• Flight details from New York to Orlando,
• Master Disney reservation sheets, printed from My Disney Experience, showing all hotel details, dining, FastPasses and special tickets,
• Resort map,
• PhotoPass locations for places not in the parks, including our resort,
• Day-by-day calendar of all park hours for the week we were there, with all dining reservations noted for each day, so we could see each day at a glance,
• Park maps and touring plans (including FastPass times) for each park in the order we planned to visit, so Magic Kingdom map and touring plan followed by Epcot map and touring plan, etc. I also noted dining on the touring plans.
• Mickey's Not So Scary Halloween Party guide,
• Flight details from Orlando to New York,
• Extra plastic sheets for anything else that might come up.

I also included the following in my binder:

• Starbucks gift cards to use on the trip,
• Envelopes filled with tip money for the hotel staff,
• List of addresses for postcards,
• Luggage tags,
• Various personal things like my husband's anniversary card and the nail wraps I wore at Disney.

See my wraps?

My biggest source for printouts like park maps and park hours was the very awesome blog WDW Prep School. You can find it here. The single most useful printout was the day by day calendar. The funnest were the Mousekeeping envelopes. You don't have to buy her binder supplies to print out anything but these resources will really help you get prepared.

I pulled out my touring plans and park maps each day for my park bag. Those did not survive the trip!

Maybe I overdid it, maybe not, but everything I did helped smooth the way for a trip that was truly awesome!

Next week: On the ground at Disney.

Disney World Part 2: ADRs and Dining

Tonga Toast at the Kona Café

We spent 8 days at Disney and Disney's diverse dining options made planning some great meals a high priority. We like to eat out and Disney has so much to choose from, so it was a little overwhelming at the beginning, but I realized quickly that getting restaurant reservations lined up was the first big part of planning a Disney vacation.

You can pay for meals out of pocket or use a dining plan, which allows you to pay upfront for credits you apply to meals onsite. There are five tiers of dining plan and we chose the Deluxe Dining Plan (really the middle tier) which offers 3 dining credits plus 2 snack credits per day. Everyone warned me that this was more food than we could eat, and yes, they were right, and yes we'd do it again. For us it took away the anxiety of worrying about prices every time we sat down.

Disney table-service restaurants can be hard to book and you need to make your reservations (ADRs or Advance Dining Reservations) as soon as you can, ideally six months to the day before your arrival. To prepare, I used my guides, my internet research and some TripAdvisor reviews to pick our restaurants, then I made two lists:

• one list showing where we would eat breakfast, lunch (on some days) and dinner each day, and
• a list of meals in the order that we would book them online through My Disney Experience.

I chose restaurants roughly around where we would be each day. When we planned to go to Animal Kingdom, for example, I booked something easy to reach from that park. And so on. Coordinating dining with park plans means less running around- and that makes a difference!

My Disney Experience is the portal through which you plan your Disney vacation. You can do hotel, restaurants, FastPasses, special events and more.

Everyone said to book the most popular reservations as soon as you log on, and book them as far out in your trip as you can. So if you want to go to Be Our Guest for dinner, let's say, book it first but make the reservation for the last day of your trip. Do this because when you go online exactly 180 days from your arrival date (your ADR date), you can book dining for your entire trip, and the days at the end of your trip are going to be available to fewer people than those at the beginning.

The night before our ADR date we opened up a bunch of browser windows to My Disney Experience. We got up at 5:30 am the next morning, had a light breakfast and coffee and got down to business on two laptops simultaneously at 6am sharp.

Fire performer at the Spirit of Aloha Luau at the Polynesian Resort

Twenty minutes later we had all of our desired dining reservations.

I realize not everyone will take this kind of approach, but it worked for us. Among the reservations we got were

• Chef Mickey breakfast for our first day; Akershus, Ohana and 1900 Park Fare later,
• Tusker House for lunch on our Animal Kingdom day,
• Spirit of Aloha dinner show on our last night,
• Be Our Guest for dinner. We were able to book BoG for breakfast when it became available for our dates later in the early fall.
• Jiko, Narcoossee's and Flying Fish for dinner.

Except for Tusker House and Tony's Town Square on our first day, we did not book lunches in advance. We both agreed that would be too much and wanted to be able to wing it a little in the parks. We were able to walk into Yak and Yeti in Animal Kingdom on our park-hopping day, which was pretty great, and had a nice variety of meals during the week. We also tended to book breakfasts early and dinners late, to minimize rushing around.

Try the Grey Stuff- It's Delicious! It's offered for dessert at Be Our Guest.

Overall I thought the Dining Plan was a good deal for us. Nothing is going to be cheap at Disney and the menu prices are outrageous generally, so having most of the food paid for up front was nice. The only thing I would do differently is try to use more of the snack credits. We did use some at the end for treats to take home and I am still enjoying those, I have to say.

The nicest meals I had were at Narcoossee's at the Grand Floridian and Jiko at Animal Kingdom Lodge. We ate at Narcoossee's on our first night and it was lovely to dress up a little and have delicious seafood in a Nantucket-style classy-casual place. Then we just got on the monorail and did a nighttime run around the Magic Kingdom. What could be better?

Next week- the travel binder.

Disney World Part One: Gathering Information

Before this year I'd never been to a Disney park, but for some reason I got a bee in my bonnet and when my husband and I were talking about where we might go on vacation for 2015, Disney was the winner.

This conversation happened in February and being the person I am, I started doing my research right away. I made a Pinterest board and got to work, and of course the first thing I realized is how much information is available on the internet. Blog posts, discussion boards- you name it. I read so many, about dining, about rides, about hotels, about planning. I pinned a bunch of sites and then I went to the bookstore and came home with two books, Birnbaum's 2015 Walt Disney World, The Complete Walt Disney World 2015 and got a detailed look at a third in the bookstore,The Unofficial Guide.

The Birnbaum book is the official guide- meaning the guide that Disney publishes about Disney, and as such it contains virtually no opinions about the parks besides "everything is awesome." It does have good information on Orlando hotels and attractions that are not Disney-related though, but for us, the wholly uncritical point of view was not helpful. If you want more opinions, I recommend two books, The Complete Walt Disney World and The Unofficial Guide.

The Complete Walt Disney World 2015 helped me a lot in planning FastPasses and picking attractions to make a priority. And it helped me a lot to just get to know what to expect overall. The opinions in this book are those of the authors, an Orlando-area couple who spend enough time at Disney to write books about it. The presentation included lots of photos and the book was easy to use. After the fact I found that my take on things wasn't always the same as theirs, but their opinions and commentary were still really helpful. I couldn't have done my planning without this book.

The Unofficial Guide is like the encyclopedia of Disney World. I didn't buy this book because I had already bought the other two, but I wish I had and if I go again I will. Not only does it have lots of opinions from its readers (maybe too many?) but it has some really helpful workbook pages to assist you in planning the nuts and bolts of your trip. It also has extensive coverage of non-Disney attractions and hotels in the Orlando area.

For our next trip I would also purchase a book on Hidden Mickeys, those images of the mouse scattered throughout the park that are fun to hunt down and find. I thought that was too much detail for the first trip, and I'm glad I didn't get hung up on it this time. I do think looking for the Hidden Mickeys would be fun next time, though!

Other great places to get information include Pinterest and the Disney discussion boards. The Disboard Disney Discussion Forums in particular are amazing and comprehensive, and you can get real-time tips and tricks from folks who have extensive Disney experience- and may be in the parks right now. If you have specific questions that the books don't cover, the Disboard is a great place to get answers.

Come back next week for part two of planning- ADRs!