In the previous post I covered how I’m approaching planning for this upcoming trip a little differently. I’m planning to have very few ADR’s, make minimal use of lightning lanes, and rarely if ever set an alarm. You can read that post here if you haven’t already. Now in this post I’m going to walk through each day of our trip and explore what that looks like.
Quick overview of the trip before we dive in. We’ll be staying 5 nights at Port Orleans French Quarter (our favorite moderate resort by a wide margin). We have 3 day base tickets and tickets to after hours at the Magic Kingdom.
Day 1
We’ll be in the Tampa area for a wedding so we will have a rental car. We won’t be keeping that for the duration of the Walt Disney World portion of the trip. I am a huge proponent of staying in the Disney bubble and making use of the on-site transportation options. At Port Orleans French Quarter that means busses to the parks and Disney Springs with the additional option of taking a boat along the Sassagoula to Disney Springs as well. One of the great aspects of French Quarter is that it’s such a small resort the busses are rarely crowded. Sometimes the busses will be shared with Port Orleans Riverside, French Quarter’s must larger sister resort, but that’s rare. In our experience, French Quarter bus transportation is excellent.
I plan to arrive at the resort, before official chec-in. I don’t expect the room to be ready early, but I do want to get there early to put in a request for a renovated room. Port Orleans French Quarter is in the process of undergoing a room refurbishment and the new rooms look fantastic. Based on recent reports, the only buildings still open have all been renovated and this request may be unnecessary. We’ll see.
If the room isn’t ready I’ll drop the bags off at bell services and then go return the rental car. There is a rental car center on property over near the Magic Kingdom. Convenient. I’m not quite sure if I’ll have easy access to Disney transportation or if I’ll to take an Uber/Lyft back to French Quarter from there. We have no real concrete plans for arrival day so the future is wide open.
After getting settled we’ll take advantage of the aforementioned boat transportation to Disney Springs for the evening. We do have an 8:45 ADR at Morimoto Asia, but that’s more of a placeholder in case the springs are bumpin’ and quick service options aren’t enticing. I’m better than 50% to cancel this. We’ve never eaten at Morimoto and it generally gets good reviews, but it’s not a must do for us or anything. After spending some time at Disney Springs we’ll head back to the resort and relax. I have a feeling we’ll need it after a weekend of wedding festivities.
Day 2
This trip is going to be interesting in that we won’t step foot in a park for the first 30ish hours on property. On Day 2 we have tickets to the After Hours event at the Magic Kingdom. That event officially runs from 10pm – 1am (this old man is going to need some coffee for sure) but you can enter the park as early as 7pm. That’s exactly what we plan to do. This will be our only time in the Magic Kingdom during this trip so we’re going to maximize it.
I have a 5pm ADR at Grand Floridian Cafe as placeholder reservation in case we get antsy and want to leave the resort. Otherwise we’re probably just going to eat at the Sassagoula Floatworks and Food Factory, the quick service option at the French Quarter. They have the usual disney quick service fare of burgers, tenders, pizza, as well as some cajun options like gumbo and jambalaya. During our 2023 trip I had both and found them quite delicious.
Regardless of how we fuel up for the late night, I intend to take full advantage of the complementary water, soda, popcorn, and Mickey Bars at the after hours event. It’s rare that you get anything free from Disney so we’ll make the most of the rare opportunity and bring some drinks back to the room. Bottled water isn’t cheap at Disney and Florida tap water is gross, unless you like notes of swamp water and dirt in your H2O.
Our 6 hours in the park will focused on experiencing our priority attractions
Day 3
Day 3 is definitely going to have a late start. We probably aren’t going to get back to the resort until 1:30 or 2am and we’re not going to run ourselves ragged this trip. The plan is to sleep until we wake up naturally and then head over to the Animal Kingdom. AK is generally considered a half day park right now. So this is the perfect park for a late start day.
There isn’t much of a plan for this day apart from show up to the Animal Kingdom and go with the flow. I’ll almost definitely pay for a Lightning Lane Single Pass for Avatar Flight of Passage. This is one of my favorite attractions in all of Walt Disney World and I’m going to ensure I experience it. The other option will be to get in the stand by line just before the park closes, which is currently scheduled for 6pm (why so early Disney?!?). This may be the play so we can enjoy an near empty Pandora at nighttime. We’ll see.
I’m assuming that we’re going to be pretty tired at this part after a very late night and 6ish hours of touring Animal Kingdom. We’ll probably just eat at the Port Orleans resort complex either at the quick service or maybe Boatwrights, the table service over at Riverside. If we’re feeling frisky maybe we’ll head over to Disney Springs. That seems unlikely though because the next two days are going to be spent at the largest park on property, EPCOT.
Astute readers may doing the math and realizing that one Animal Kingdom and two EPCOT days will use up all 3 days of our passes, meaning that we won’t be experiencing Hollywood Studios this trip. That’s exactly right. We made the decisions to skip HS this trip. Although Hollywood Studios has some of our favorite attractions – Slinky Dog Dash, Tower of Terror, and Mickey and Minnie’s Runaway Railway – it’s also by and large one of the most difficult parks to tour without either planning ahead or waiting in some extremely long lines. Lastly, we absolutely love EPCOT and the Festival of the Arts. So we decided to skip Hollywood Studios and spend 2 days at EPCOT so we could really experience everything there is at that park.
Other equally astute readers may be muttering to themselves that HS is categorically the better park than Animal Kingdom right now. I don’t disagree. But when looking at this trip as a whole, Animal Kingdom is exactly what my overall plan needed. An undemanding park that we could stroll into at whatever time we wanted, spend 4-6 hours there and experience everything we want to at our own pace. I also love viewing the animals on the walking trails and the Kilimanjaro Safari. We skipped Animal Kingdom during a trip in 2020 and I really missed the park. I’ll probably say the same thing about Hollywood Studios, but as my lovely wife rightfully reminds me – we don’t have to do everything on every trip.
Day 4 and 5
One of the reasons for two EPCOT days is to take the pressure off and let us experience EPCOT as it’s intended to be experienced. Trying to cram World Showcase and the area previously known as Future World into 1 day especially during a festival is a recipe for 25,000 steps while also somehow waiting in multiple hour+ long queues. Test Track is down for refurbishment so that will put considerably more pressure on the other top tier attractions like Frozen, Remy’s, and even Soarin’. Frozen and Remy’s especially are likely to have long queues throughout the day. If either goes down then forget it, it’s going to be a madhouse. During our 2023 trip, Frozen was down for most of a day and during our trip earlier this year we tried to rope drop Remy’s only for that to be down for most of the morning. I’ll have to look at the data, but right now both of those feel unreliable to us.
One of the two EPCOT days will start relatively early. Maybe not hardcore rope drop, but get to the park around park open. The plan will be to rope drop Frozen, hoping most guests entering from the International Gateway go to Remy’s first. If Frozen experiences issues or it seems very crowded, we’re happy to experience Soarin’ as our first attraction. Soarin’ remains in my top 3 favorite attractions at Walt Disney World.
Depending on crowds I may opt to purchase Lightning Lane multi pass for one of our EPCOT days. I’m going to scope out quickly lightning lane return times are going once our purchasing window opens. If I’m seeing low availability for top tier attractions I’ll pull the trigger. I really don’t think the value is there for lightning lane multi pass at EPCOT for most people. Frozen, Remy, and Soarin’ are all Tier A attractions. That means you can only pre-book one of those. With good planning you could probably get Remy/Frozen ahead of time, get an early return time for a Tier B attraction and then quickly get Remy/Frozen for later in the day. Probably. If you can’t do that though then you’re paying for Remy/Frozen, hopefully Soarin’, and then the Tier B attractions. Objectively, the Tier B attractions aren’t that great these days and generally don’t get waits much higher than 20-30 minutes.
So why am I considering buying lightning lane for EPCOT? Flexibility. For a small investment, I can ensure that our two days at EPCOT are as relaxing and stress free as possible. If by using lightning lane I’m able to experience all of the EPCOT attractions in 1 day without spending a ton of time standing in lines and walking between France and Spaceship Earth that means that I’ll be able to really be in the moment when the festival booths and experiences are open. That’s worth it to me.
Day 6
Departure day. Our flight doesn’t leave until 5pm so, I’ll request a late check out and see if my hot streak continues there. I’m 2 for 2 with these requests. I don’t think it’s too much of a burden to Disney to give guests another hour in the room and we really appreciate the more leisurely pace as we get ready to go. We’re obviously never happy about leaving so we’re not exactly moving quickly when packing to go.
We’ll leave our bags at bell services and take the boat over to Disney Springs for our last meal on property. We have another placeholder reservation at Summer House on the Lake and this one we’re likely to keep. It’s a new restaurant and we’d get to end the trip with a new experience! Something to look forward to I suppose.
Conclusion
This trip is going to be a complete 180 for me. Like many (most?) of you I am a type A planner through and through, especially when it comes to Walt Disney World Trips. I’m leaving that part of me at home for this trip and I’m committed to see how it goes with a more laidback Dude-like approach. I didn’t explicitly mention it, but we’re also trying to be a little more budget conscience for this trip. Doing so goes hand in hand with this approach though. We spend a disproportionate amount of money on food and beverage during a normal Disney trip. We do a lot of table service meals and enjoy specialty cocktails at most of them. This trip we’ll do a lot more quick service and save some money while having less rigid plans. I’m excited to see how this goes. If Disney trips require less planning AND cost less we can go more often. That’s how this works right?
