Disney World in O N E Day: what we loved, what we would do differently

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DISNEY WORLD!!!

This is a place I've been dreaming of going basically since I could talk. Finally as a 33 year old I went to Disneyland in California for the first time. What a dream come true. While there and running numbers in my head I knew we would never be able to afford to take our entire family of 9 to Disney together. The price tag and the logistics of a trip like that was just overwhelming to think about. 

It was that day in Disneyland that I came up with an idea, which Jason agreed to once I got back home and we would discuss. The idea was that one by one we would take each of the seven kids to Disney. It would be a one on one trip with the parent of their choice, and we would start and work our way through oldest to youngest. Now obviously this will cost us more in the long run because I will end up going over and over again. The thing I liked about this idea though, by the time they go on their trip, they'll each be teenagers. Traveling with a teenager is LOADS easier than traveling with little kids. I mean... it's a whole new world. It also has the added benefit of them being able to remember this trip FOREVER. It's such an amazing place to visit, and I don't want to break the budget to bring kids that are too young to be able to remember! This is just the perfect solution for our family. 

This brings us to the fall of 2018. Avery being a freshman in high school, we decided it was time to get his trip started! He and talked at length about our plans, debating between Florida and California. Each had positives and negatives. For me I was leaning towards Florida because of the Los Angeles traffic. We would also be going to Universal Studios and if you've ever been to Disneyland and then gone to Universal Studios Hollywood, you drive straight through LA. That amount of traffic is something I didn't want to deal with. At all.

In the end we got a good price on the Florida hotel and flights, and we booked while the deal was available. I'm SO GLAD we did.

Disneyland was amazing, but I was completely astounded by the size of Disneyworld. I had read as much as I could about the different park options there, but seeing it in person was something else entirely. Avery and I did the best we could to plan how we wanted to do Disney, and for price reasons we decided to just do it in one day.

Now here is my BIGGEST piece of advice about planning a Disney vacation. When you buy your ticket, you have to be SO careful about the dates you buy them for. When I bought ours I logged in, I punched in the date that our vacation started, bought our tickets, and thought we were all set. But here's the thing that this Disney newbie missed... I bought tickets for a "value" day. The only value day for the entire week we were in Florida, fell on the very first day we arrived. SO we either had to buy a second set of tickets or go straight from the airport to Disney and make the absolute best of it. So we decided to make the best of it and accept that we wouldn't be able to see everything but we would just have a great day anyway!

We flew overnight from Alaska to Orlando. Three flights total, we both hardly slept. We landed in Orlando just before noon, and by the time we got our rental car, stopped at the resort to change, and got to the Disney gates it was nearly 2 pm. SO I guess if you want to get technical, we did Disney world in half a day.

We had our plan of action. We knew we wanted to see the Magic Kingdom, Epcot, and Hollywood Studios. The Magic Kingdom was closing at 6 pm because of Mickey's very Merry Christmas party, so we started there. Now I know we could snag fast passes well in advance but as we knew our time frame was super tight, we decided to play it by ear. I had the Disney app on my phone and I was able to grab us fast passes that opened up suddenly, I'm assuming because other people decided they didn't want them. We were able to ride Splash Mountain and Space mountain very quickly with these, which was amazing because otherwise the lines were pretty long. In just several hours in the Magic Kingdom we were able to walk and see most of the sights, which in my opinion is half the fun. Those were the two rides we really wanted to experience there, so that was great! 

 

Next we set off for Epcot, which I was most excited about! We strolled right past the space part of Epcot and went straight for the World Showcase. This was just amazing. I could have spent an entire day there!! But we were on a serious time crunch so we breezed right through most of the countries. I have few regrets that day, but the biggest one is not finding the source of the amazing smelling food in the Morocco area. Oh. My. Yum. It smelled heavenly.  We ended up stopping and eating in France and it was beyond words for me. I felt totally immersed in French culture in that little corner of the world showcase. We ate in a little boulangerie, where all the employees had been born in France. The food was spectacular and I loved it! We finished up walking the rest of the way around the world showcase and had to make a move for Hollywood studios because it was getting dark.

We hopped on a bus over to Hollywood studios and by the time we got there it was definitely completely dark, which made it amazing to view all the Christmas decorations. By this point of our day we were beyond exhausted. We had traveled so far and hadn't rested yet, we had already done two theme parks and the five hour energies we drank had completely worn off. At Hollywood studios we were most interested in Star Tours and the rocking roller coaster with Aerosmith. We were able to get into Star Tours pretty quickly and regretted it almost immediately. Avery and I both have pretty strong stomachs and this seemed like a minor ride, but the virtual reality and 3D glasses and the way they moved the seats were a bad combo. We both almost barfed. Blech. We had one fast pass remaining and I had managed to get the rocking roller coaster with it.
Here's a trick- ahead of time you can't book fast passes from different parks for the same day. So when I had looked at booking things from the Magic Kingdom and Hollywood studios it wouldn't let me. But we had already used our Magic Kingdom ones, so it now let us book one in Hollywood Studios. We hit our time frame, walked into the rocking roller coaster, and were moments away from boarding the ride when they shut it down because of technical difficulties. We weren't really interested in anything else at Hollywood Studios, it was minutes away from closing now, so it was kind of a wasted trip there for us. Avery and I agreed that if we could do it again we wouldn't have bothered with Hollywood Studios, we would've preferred to spend our precious time in another park instead. Now this may not be a popular opinion, and I know that, but for us, we just didn't like it. It wasn't our slice of pie. 

Other than my ticket mistake I think we did relatively good for Disney newbies! My trip to Disneyland had been with a Disneyland veteran who knew her stuff, and a Disneyland employee. So this was my first go at flying solo, and my first Disney World trip so I'm okay with how we did!

 Until next time Disney... we are already in the planning stages of the next trip, with my Payton! Can't wait!! I think P's trip will include the animal kingdom and also one of the Disney water parks. He's not interested in Universal Studios, so it's going to be Disney all the way for him!