Khokhonutt
DIS Veteran
- Joined
- Sep 28, 2004
How is the planning coming along? Have any other questions?
The only thing I've seen that stands out as remotely problematic that I haven't seen mentioned yet is that MM is only available at Disneyland with a 5 day parkhopper ticket. It's also only on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays in the Disneyland park (the other days have EE for resort guests at DCA) so you'll have to decide if you want to use it on Tuesday morning or Thursday morning.
I just want to say I love a family that vacations together with their adult children. As an adult who tries to vacation with her parents at least once a year it's nice to see other families making that effort too. Hubby and I will be heading to the parks in June too for a 5.5 day trip using the APs we bought last August on an 8 day trip to Disneyland. I think 5 days will be awesome, but then I'm of the opinion that you can never have enough park time!
AZ, as far as park planning goes, I feel like we've done about as much of the formal planning as we can for now. At this point I'm reading the boards and other Disneyland related material to see what we might have missed while we wait on official park hours to be released. I've done the calculations on when we need to put in reservations. I realize it's not as big of a deal to get in on day 1 of ADRs at DLR, but the planner in me will want to have the ADRs "in-hand" and know I can always try to change them later.
Alli, we hope to continue our family vacations with our kids as long as we can. We're happy that they want to spend time with us and it's important to us to give them options. When my wife and I were in the military, we felt very limited when it came to vacation. Nothing against the rest of our family, but we felt every vacation had to be a trip home. Some of that had to do with money being tight, some had to do with seeing home. Either way, we wished we did more vacations to see other stuff.
Since our kids have been in, we've done our best to visit them where they're assigned. We didn't make it to Korea, when our son was there. The plane tickets were just ridiculous, but we'd love to go back there someday. We did visit him in Hawaii and we've now visited Arizona and Vegas. We've told the kids that they are always welcome here at home, but we don't want them to feel obligated to kill all of their leave time coming here. With that in mind, we've worked on doing vacations near where they are, so we can do cool different stuff together. We'll do that as long as we can, but realize at some point they're going to start their own families and have those priorities. At that point we'll just hope they continue to allow us to tag along.
I actually have done quite a bit of thinking about MM and I understand we'll only be working with Tuesday and Thursday at DL. That was one of the things that really had me indecisive on where to stay and whether it was worth the significant cost to stay in one of the DLR resorts to get the EMH every day. In the end, we decided to live with the one MM and do what we can to work around that.
Assuming park hours are the same as they were last summer, our plan right now will look something like this:
Day 1 (Sunday): We won't use park tickets this day. We'll hopefully arrive in Anaheim between 9am and 10am and head straight to the hotel. We'll see whether we can check into our room and park. If yes, we'll get moved in, then head over to DTD and the DLR hotels. I'd like to see each of the hotels, just to see what they look like. We'd like to grab a drink and snacks at Trader Sam's and then grab something to eat in DTD. We'll probably find a place to watch the fireworks, then head to hotel to get ready for our first parks day. If we can't park when we arrive, we're going to head down to the Dim Sum restaurant I mentioned earlier in this report. We'll eat lunch, then come back and check in when our room is ready, then continue with the DTD and DLR hotel exploring we planned.
Day 2 (Monday): Park orientation. The primary goal this day would be to get the lay of the land. We'll go into DL at their rope drop, cruise around. Ride where we see a decent wait, grab fast passes that make sense but mainly spend the day orienting ourselves. I think we will do our Blue Bayou ADR this day as an early lunch. I've heard making an 11:30 ADR gives us the best chance at sitting by the ride, so we'll try that. We've got park hoppers, so we'll likely roam over the CA at some point with the goal of getting back to DL in time for fireworks. With this being the first day, I'm not sure how much time we'll spend back at the hotel. We'll play that by ear.
Day 3 (Tuesday): DL with a plan. We'll use our MM this day and hit DL with a planned split shift. I'm leaning towards using one of the planner apps, most likely ridemax, on this trip. I've never used a planning guide at WDW, but we know those parks well enough that we never felt the need. For the relatively low cost I'm curious how a plan using an app would go. Basically, though, we'd hit MM rope drop, ride all we can until around lunch time or so, then head back to the hotel for a break and return later to close the place down. Assuming we got to see the fireworks at DL on Monday, we'll probably try to do WOC on Tuesday night.
Day 4 (Wednesday): CA with a plan. I know the DLR resort guests will have EMH at CA this day, but we'll hit regular rope drop and follow a plan to hit as many rides as we can in CA. Again, we'll break around lunch time and head back into the parks for the evening. We have a list of rides that we want to ride during the day and at night, including RSR, so we'll try to time some fast passes for that. Worst case, we've done the single rider line on Test Track. I've read the system works about the same at RSR, so we'll do that if we don't get the fast passes we want.
Day 5 (Thursday) & Day 6 (Friday): What we plan for these days will largely depend on what we've gotten done on the first 3 days in the parks. Thursday should be our one day when we can hit CA at rope drop and be on an even playing field with the DLR hotel guests. With that in mind we'll likely rope drop CA and hit the morning with a plan. From there we'll float between the parks as warranted. I mentioned the day and night rides. At this point we have the following try to ride day and night rides in mind:
- Jungle Cruise. This has always been one of our favorite do it both during the day and at night rides at WDW.
- Matterhorn
- Radiator Springs Racers
- Monorail
- Big Thunder Mountain Railroad
Feel free to poke any holes in what we have planned so far. I'm always interested in hearing what others with more experience have to say.