2nd week of Jan.- 1st time visit

[alliandchris]

My husband and I are both going to be 1st timers to WDW this Jan 7-14, 2010. We have heard this is a pretty good time to go. Would you all agree? I did see that there is a marathon being held there Jan. 7-9 and didn't know if that would impact crowd numbers by much or not.

We are staying at the Animal Kingdom Lodge and will have a rental car the whole time.

Any tips/suggestions you may have for us would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks in advance!
Alli

[Daddy_of_Princesses]

We were at Disney in Jan of 07 when they had the marathon. I don't think it effected the crowd at the park too much, but did have an impact on traffic. But even that wasn't too bad, of course I was on a Disney bus so I didn't have to deal with traffic personally.

[dmartin69]

You have picked a good time. The crows should be much lower than the holiday craze and other than traffic the Marathon should not effect your vacation...

[xenole]

The marathon weekend runs technically from Thurs 7th Jan - Sun 10th Jan. The marathon is on the 10th; half on the 9th; 5km at Epcot on the 8th and the marathon Expo opens at the World Wide Sports area on the 7th onwards.

There are a couple of things on the Sunday night that are ticket only so that may add a few extra people, plus families and friends of the 1000s running in the events will be there.

The half / full marathon start at 5:40am so a lot of people would have finished by the time the parks start to open - may cause a few problems on the roads for cars / buses though a they'll be closed or have reduced access especially around Epcot for a while after.

Think the Animal Kingdom area is around 16 miles into the marathon so probably the majority of the runners wil be passing through there between 8-9am assuming they are going to finish in 3.5-5 hours.....think 9:30-10:30am should see the last runners through that area as that's the max time allowed for them. Last year, around 12000+ people did the half but they all finished by 10am so were all at Epcot then so that shouldn't affect much at all.