bettymae1121
DIS Veteran
- Joined
- Jan 5, 2010
Pre-trip Report, Part 3 - Park touring plans, and FP+ Moonlight Madness!
Links to Part 1 and Part 2
Author’s Note: Even though I’m not going to post this trip report until just before our trip in April 2018, I am writing Part 3 coverage in February 2018.
Just before Christmas 2017, the prices finally dropped (a bit) for the flights so I snagged 3 seats on United non-stop service for $305 each. Not great, but not too bad, this gets it down by $135 over what I’d originally budgeted. That should about cover Grumpy’s turkey leg tab for the trip. Sadly, I’m only slightly kidding…
I also got a bit of good news just in time for the holidays, my medical issue isn’t serous and at this point won’t require surgery (though it needs to be monitored and may require it later). Phew! With that load off my mind, the family and I really enjoyed the season.
In early February, with our FP+ date fast approaching, I decided to go ahead and purchase the park tickets and photo memory maker pass thingy. Naturally Disney announced they’d raised their prices for admission the day before I planned to make the purchase.
Thanks, Disney! As a famous DISer once wrote “Love ya, mean it!”.
Anyway, back to planning. With our “which park what day” and ADRs in place, the next thing to figure out is what FP+ we want to book for each day, and what time to shoot for. For this, I turned to Touring Plans and the Unofficial Guide to get their recommendations.
Unfortunately, I had put this part off like a kid puts off a book report “I’ll get around to it, eventually” I kept telling myself. Plenty of time to worry about that later!
“Eventually” turned out to be the night before the 60 window opened.
Oops! Oh well, no help for it. I waited until DD was in bed for the night and sat down at my trusty desktop computer. Shouldn’t take that long to sort it out, right?
About 10 minutes in, my brain started to hurt. The same way it hurt when my science teacher tried to explain some of Einstein’s theories back in high school. I could follow along to a point, and then it felt like my mind just hit a wall and wouldn’t go any further. Good golly, why does Disney need to make this so dang difficult? (only I didn’t say “good golly” and “dang”. But this is a family friendly board…)
After going round and round with their suggested touring plans and custom touring plans and customizing suggested plans, I decided to take it back to basics.
What do I want our first day at MK to be like? What will DD probably want to do first, as we walk down Main Street and she sees Cindy’s castle for the first time?
Well, she’ll probably want to go see the castle.
Then once we’re near the castle she’ll spot all the Fantasyland rides on the other side, and will want to do them. Once we are in Fantasyland, she won’t want to leave – at least not right away.
So – essentially it’s the “if you give a mouse a cookie” approach to WDW planning.
So, I went with it. We’ll spend the morning in Fantasyland, which works perfectly because we have a BoG reservation for lunch. Thus, on Touring Plans DIY tour plan customizer, I just put that we wanted to tour from park open until 1 PM and then used the filter to only show Fantasyland rides. I clicked on all the rides, then on “optimize” and then used what it spit out to determine what rides we’d want FP+ for and at about what times. I entered those FP rides/times in my Excel file to refer to later when the 60 day window opened.
Ok so that takes us to lunch time, what are we going to do in the afternoon until our diner reservation at Cindy’s? Well, Tomorrowland is right “next door”, let’s do that. I repeated the same process on touring plans, only I put that we would be “arriving” at 1 PM and touring until, oh around 6 or so. This way we can optimize a plan for Fantasyland in the morning and Tomorrowland in the afternoon, and not have the software try to get us to run back and forth between lands. I still had one FP+ reservation left so we used it for Space Mountain. Clicked “optimize” and bam, workable touring plan.
Since we’ll be doing another full day at MK later in the trip, I saved the rest of the park for then. Splitting the park more or less in half and going over two days really allows us to minimize both walking and waiting, and having to drag DD out of an area before she’s good and ready to go. By that point in the trip I figure it won’t be so hard to get DD to leave one land for another so I didn’t break that 2nd full day up, even so it doesn’t have us walking a huge amount – so that works for me!
For our second full day of the trip in Epcot - I approached differently, partly because of the tiered FP+ system and partly because we tend to tour Epcot in a circle (it’s just too big to bounce back and forth). We are staying at Dolphin so we’ll be entering at the International Gateway. That’s not too far from Soarin’, so we’ll do that first as stand-by, and from there tour more or less clockwise until we get to the entrance to WS at Mexico, again working perfectly as we have lunch reservations for San Angel Inn. Using that as a template I filled in the FW rides for the morning and FEA for just after lunch (Norway being close to Mexico and all) and presto! Touring plan with the minimum amount of walking and waiting. We then tour the rest of WS in a clockwise manner until we get to Morocco and our dinner reservation for Restaurant Marrakesh. If we have time and energy we can finish WS after dinner before heading “home” back through Int’l Gateway.
For HS, I just made FP+ for times I thought would work, honestly it’s such small park now with so much torn up that it doesn’t mater that much.
AK, however, drove me bonkers due to the tiers. You can’t do both Pandora rides on FP+, you have to pick one. And if you want to ride both and not have a wait entering into triple digits, you need to be at rope-drop and stampede to the one you don’t have a FP for. Unfortunately, my ideal plan had us arrive later than usual for us, about noon, so we could sleep in a bit that day. But when I did that I could not fit in all the rides before I figure DD would conk out on us as the waits were too long. Also it looks like AK is only having a late showing of RoL (8:45 PM) and DD is just not going to last until then no matter how late we get to AK. So I revised my plan to arrive at rope drop and leave after dinner, probably around 6:30 or so. And since we aren’t staying for RoL I’m going to cancel the RoL dinner package at Tusker House and hopefully book a regular reservation for Tiffins. Once I had us arriving at 9 AM, the touring plan fell into place nearly effortlessly. Almost the same amount of time in the park, but shifting it by 3 hours made a huge, huge difference in the amount of attractions we can experience.
Our final day at MK (and last full day of the trip) I figure will be more of a “highlights of the MK” type tour, we’re well all just want to re-ride our favorites. I don’t know what DD’s favorites will be so I just picked some FP+ times for rides I figure would have long waits and we’ll more or less just wing it until our desert fireworks party. I didn’t even book a dinner ADR, I figure we’ll just grab some dogs at Cassy’s.
So, from the time I sat down at ye olde desktop to the time I had workable touring plans with FP+ times to shoot for, was 2 hours and a couple of Advil. But I saved probably that much time waiting in line per day of our trip, so worth it in the end. I set my alarm for 5:45 AM the next morning (FP bookings open at 6 AM my time) and hit the hay.
The next morning, bleary eyed and mumbling something about spoiled only children, I started booking the FP+ times. Actually, this part went pretty smooth, by the 3rd FP I’d gotten the hang of it and was knocking them out pretty quick. I got very close to all my target return times for all rides on all days.
Except one.
Toy Story Mania has ZERO times available for the one and only date we’ll be at HS. And this is another day I’d planned on starting the day late so we could sleep in. No doing the Buzz and Woody 100-yard dash at rope drop. HS is our third day in a row park touring with no breaks, we are going to NEED to sleep in that day. Still, it seemed weird that I wasn’t able to get a time at all, I know it’s one of the most popular attractions not just in HS but in all of WDW but they shouldn’t have booked up that fast. After a bit of Google-foo, I found out that for the month of April TSM only has one ride track running due to the conversion of the ride to the new Toy Story Land, and thus no FP+, it’s standby only. I imagine the only way to do this ride with a reasonable wait is to RD it. So it’s looking like we’ll have to skip the ride on this trip unless we get lucky and the standby wait isn’t stupid long, but I doubt we’ll get that lucky.
With FP+ times in hand, I went back to Touring Plans and input them into my customized tours.
We are go for launch in T minus 60 days!
I have only a few things left to do at this point. I need to cancel the RoL package and re-book for Tiffins. I need to keep checking on the Frozen desert party at Epcot (they still haven’t released April dates yet….grrr….), and I need to book the town car service for here at home and in Orlando.
Oh and if anyone is interested, here is how the spreadsheet is looking:
Next Up: Pre-trip Report Part 4: Last minute revisions and the final count down!
Links to Part 1 and Part 2
Author’s Note: Even though I’m not going to post this trip report until just before our trip in April 2018, I am writing Part 3 coverage in February 2018.
Just before Christmas 2017, the prices finally dropped (a bit) for the flights so I snagged 3 seats on United non-stop service for $305 each. Not great, but not too bad, this gets it down by $135 over what I’d originally budgeted. That should about cover Grumpy’s turkey leg tab for the trip. Sadly, I’m only slightly kidding…
I also got a bit of good news just in time for the holidays, my medical issue isn’t serous and at this point won’t require surgery (though it needs to be monitored and may require it later). Phew! With that load off my mind, the family and I really enjoyed the season.
In early February, with our FP+ date fast approaching, I decided to go ahead and purchase the park tickets and photo memory maker pass thingy. Naturally Disney announced they’d raised their prices for admission the day before I planned to make the purchase.
Thanks, Disney! As a famous DISer once wrote “Love ya, mean it!”.
Anyway, back to planning. With our “which park what day” and ADRs in place, the next thing to figure out is what FP+ we want to book for each day, and what time to shoot for. For this, I turned to Touring Plans and the Unofficial Guide to get their recommendations.
Unfortunately, I had put this part off like a kid puts off a book report “I’ll get around to it, eventually” I kept telling myself. Plenty of time to worry about that later!
“Eventually” turned out to be the night before the 60 window opened.
Oops! Oh well, no help for it. I waited until DD was in bed for the night and sat down at my trusty desktop computer. Shouldn’t take that long to sort it out, right?
About 10 minutes in, my brain started to hurt. The same way it hurt when my science teacher tried to explain some of Einstein’s theories back in high school. I could follow along to a point, and then it felt like my mind just hit a wall and wouldn’t go any further. Good golly, why does Disney need to make this so dang difficult? (only I didn’t say “good golly” and “dang”. But this is a family friendly board…)
After going round and round with their suggested touring plans and custom touring plans and customizing suggested plans, I decided to take it back to basics.
What do I want our first day at MK to be like? What will DD probably want to do first, as we walk down Main Street and she sees Cindy’s castle for the first time?
Well, she’ll probably want to go see the castle.
Then once we’re near the castle she’ll spot all the Fantasyland rides on the other side, and will want to do them. Once we are in Fantasyland, she won’t want to leave – at least not right away.
So – essentially it’s the “if you give a mouse a cookie” approach to WDW planning.
So, I went with it. We’ll spend the morning in Fantasyland, which works perfectly because we have a BoG reservation for lunch. Thus, on Touring Plans DIY tour plan customizer, I just put that we wanted to tour from park open until 1 PM and then used the filter to only show Fantasyland rides. I clicked on all the rides, then on “optimize” and then used what it spit out to determine what rides we’d want FP+ for and at about what times. I entered those FP rides/times in my Excel file to refer to later when the 60 day window opened.
Ok so that takes us to lunch time, what are we going to do in the afternoon until our diner reservation at Cindy’s? Well, Tomorrowland is right “next door”, let’s do that. I repeated the same process on touring plans, only I put that we would be “arriving” at 1 PM and touring until, oh around 6 or so. This way we can optimize a plan for Fantasyland in the morning and Tomorrowland in the afternoon, and not have the software try to get us to run back and forth between lands. I still had one FP+ reservation left so we used it for Space Mountain. Clicked “optimize” and bam, workable touring plan.
Since we’ll be doing another full day at MK later in the trip, I saved the rest of the park for then. Splitting the park more or less in half and going over two days really allows us to minimize both walking and waiting, and having to drag DD out of an area before she’s good and ready to go. By that point in the trip I figure it won’t be so hard to get DD to leave one land for another so I didn’t break that 2nd full day up, even so it doesn’t have us walking a huge amount – so that works for me!
For our second full day of the trip in Epcot - I approached differently, partly because of the tiered FP+ system and partly because we tend to tour Epcot in a circle (it’s just too big to bounce back and forth). We are staying at Dolphin so we’ll be entering at the International Gateway. That’s not too far from Soarin’, so we’ll do that first as stand-by, and from there tour more or less clockwise until we get to the entrance to WS at Mexico, again working perfectly as we have lunch reservations for San Angel Inn. Using that as a template I filled in the FW rides for the morning and FEA for just after lunch (Norway being close to Mexico and all) and presto! Touring plan with the minimum amount of walking and waiting. We then tour the rest of WS in a clockwise manner until we get to Morocco and our dinner reservation for Restaurant Marrakesh. If we have time and energy we can finish WS after dinner before heading “home” back through Int’l Gateway.
For HS, I just made FP+ for times I thought would work, honestly it’s such small park now with so much torn up that it doesn’t mater that much.
AK, however, drove me bonkers due to the tiers. You can’t do both Pandora rides on FP+, you have to pick one. And if you want to ride both and not have a wait entering into triple digits, you need to be at rope-drop and stampede to the one you don’t have a FP for. Unfortunately, my ideal plan had us arrive later than usual for us, about noon, so we could sleep in a bit that day. But when I did that I could not fit in all the rides before I figure DD would conk out on us as the waits were too long. Also it looks like AK is only having a late showing of RoL (8:45 PM) and DD is just not going to last until then no matter how late we get to AK. So I revised my plan to arrive at rope drop and leave after dinner, probably around 6:30 or so. And since we aren’t staying for RoL I’m going to cancel the RoL dinner package at Tusker House and hopefully book a regular reservation for Tiffins. Once I had us arriving at 9 AM, the touring plan fell into place nearly effortlessly. Almost the same amount of time in the park, but shifting it by 3 hours made a huge, huge difference in the amount of attractions we can experience.
Our final day at MK (and last full day of the trip) I figure will be more of a “highlights of the MK” type tour, we’re well all just want to re-ride our favorites. I don’t know what DD’s favorites will be so I just picked some FP+ times for rides I figure would have long waits and we’ll more or less just wing it until our desert fireworks party. I didn’t even book a dinner ADR, I figure we’ll just grab some dogs at Cassy’s.
So, from the time I sat down at ye olde desktop to the time I had workable touring plans with FP+ times to shoot for, was 2 hours and a couple of Advil. But I saved probably that much time waiting in line per day of our trip, so worth it in the end. I set my alarm for 5:45 AM the next morning (FP bookings open at 6 AM my time) and hit the hay.
The next morning, bleary eyed and mumbling something about spoiled only children, I started booking the FP+ times. Actually, this part went pretty smooth, by the 3rd FP I’d gotten the hang of it and was knocking them out pretty quick. I got very close to all my target return times for all rides on all days.
Except one.
Toy Story Mania has ZERO times available for the one and only date we’ll be at HS. And this is another day I’d planned on starting the day late so we could sleep in. No doing the Buzz and Woody 100-yard dash at rope drop. HS is our third day in a row park touring with no breaks, we are going to NEED to sleep in that day. Still, it seemed weird that I wasn’t able to get a time at all, I know it’s one of the most popular attractions not just in HS but in all of WDW but they shouldn’t have booked up that fast. After a bit of Google-foo, I found out that for the month of April TSM only has one ride track running due to the conversion of the ride to the new Toy Story Land, and thus no FP+, it’s standby only. I imagine the only way to do this ride with a reasonable wait is to RD it. So it’s looking like we’ll have to skip the ride on this trip unless we get lucky and the standby wait isn’t stupid long, but I doubt we’ll get that lucky.
With FP+ times in hand, I went back to Touring Plans and input them into my customized tours.
We are go for launch in T minus 60 days!
I have only a few things left to do at this point. I need to cancel the RoL package and re-book for Tiffins. I need to keep checking on the Frozen desert party at Epcot (they still haven’t released April dates yet….grrr….), and I need to book the town car service for here at home and in Orlando.
Oh and if anyone is interested, here is how the spreadsheet is looking:
Next Up: Pre-trip Report Part 4: Last minute revisions and the final count down!
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