4 Parks In One Day

[juuuliebeth]

I have plans to do 4 Parks in 1 Day in August. I accidentally did three in one day during my September 2015 trip, so I thought I'd actually try for all four. Here are my plans:

Monorail to Epcot
8am EMH at Epcot - rope drop Frozen and hoping for Soarin' afterward
Meet Joy/Sadness if not on previous Epcot Day, otherwise do some PhotoPass and whatever rides I can
11am Belle or Mary Poppins in World Showcase
12pm Belle or Mary Poppins in World Showcase
Walk/boat to Hollywood Studios
FastPasses for ToT, RnR, and TSMM
Bus or Uber to Animal Kingdom
Check Everest single rider and other wait times, maybe score 4th FP
5pm ADR at Yak and Yeti
Bus or Uber to Magic Kingdom
Check ride times and possible additional FPs
Enjoy Happily Ever After
Walk back to Contemporary

It's going to be an exhausting day, but I'm super excited about it. So long as transportation doesn't screw me up. I'm budgeting a little in for Ubers just in case.

 

[YawningDodo]

I've done four parks in a day twice, but both times I was by myself. It's really not difficult to do when you're traveling solo, but when you've got six people you will need to do a bit heavier preplanning than I did on my last trip (I had a vague idea that I might make it a four-park day, but didn't make the final decision until midmorning at my first park and more or less winged it from there).

There's no "right" or "wrong" way to handle it, but you'll want to have a rough schedule of when you plan to leave each park for the next one, and since you've got six people to wrangle you'll probably want to decide your must-dos for each park ahead of time since discussing it on the fly will bog you down. Other than that, my general rules for doing it are to take advantage of earliest-opening and latest-closing parks, and to think about park order in terms of transportation. AK is your outlier for transportation that requires taking a bus; the other three can be done in a string without using buses (the path between DHS and Epcot is perhaps a twenty minute walk if you're not willing to wait for a boat, and of course MK and Epcot have the monorail). On this last trip I went AK > bus to DHS > walk to Epcot > monorail to MK. The previous time I sacrificed transportation convenience for EMH and went MK > bus to AK > bus to DHS > walk to Epcot.

It looks like you're considering using a rental car, but I don't know that doing so will actually save you much time versus hitting the parks in a sensible order. I found on my trip in January that once I had entered Epcot, I remained within the security "bubble" while I rode the monorail to MK and was not made to go through a security line again when I arrived at MK's front gates. Between skipping at least one security line that way and the fact that Epcot/DHS is reliably less than half an hour's travel on foot, I think it might take just as much time to go out to the parking lot, fetch your car, and park it again as it would to take WDW transportation.

That being said, I really wouldn't worry too much about shaving transportation time. If you set a reasonable schedule and allow an hour between parks, you'll probably find that you're consistently ahead of where you expected to be throughout the day. I think my transportation times were more like twenty minutes to half an hour even when I had to take a bus; I just build in extra time because it feels better to run ahead of schedule than to fall behind.

 

[patch508]

I would like to do it, but the wife probably would not like it.