Call me slow. . .I've never properly executed the RD-break-return plan and really just can't wrap my head around timing. . . So if you headed out of the park, say 1:00-1:30, did you eat lunch in the park as part of your morning touring, or somewhere along the way of your break? Then you're walking back into the park, 5:30ish (4 hours later), when do you eat dinner? (Maybe not everyone is a 3 meal a day family like me!) THEN, how late are you in the parks? I can imagine feeling well rested for a nice evening, lasting til 11 or so, but then you're looking at maybe 11:30-midnight before you're in your room and 12:30 to be asleep. Do you rope drop again the next day?
The midday break is so often recommended that I see the need/value, but I used to get to travel in fall and wasn't so hot that we HAD to do it & never really made it work out. Going forward, looks like school schedules will send us to WDW in summer, so I am trying to picture the days. . .
If it helps picture it, our last trip (last week and the week before), we usually went like this:
1) Try to wake up around 7:15 but have trouble getting everyone up on time.
2) Eat some small breakfast at hotel (we had a car, so I got cereal, milk, and Styrofoam bowls the first night, and we'd eat that the whole trip).
3) Try to get there for 9 a.m. rope drop but show up 10-45 minutes late...
4) Stay through morning, eat lunch in the park. Lunch varied from around 11:00 to around 1:30. If a late lunch, we'd have a snack mid-morning (cupcakes, or ice cream or whatever).
5) Leave somewhere around 2:30 or 3:00. If we had a late lunch, that was right after lunch; if an early lunch, we'd do a few things after. We had some sit-down lunches with reservations and some counter service.
6) Travel back to hotel
7) Spend about 2 hours at hotel. Usually, this meant my wife napping, my older daughter getting on her laptop, and my younger daughter and I swimming (sometimes just for 45 minutes or so, to allow time to then clean up...).
8) Return to park (or to a dining reservation) around 5:30-6:00. Given travel times, we were usually gone about 3 hours total. I agree that 4 would've been better, though. Most nights, we had dinner in the park, but one night was just near the park ('Ohana), and another night we skipped dinner due to a large, late lunch, but then had lots of snacks during the nighttime show.
9) Stay until 9:30 (Epcot), 9:45 (DHS), or 10:00 (AK) after seeing a nighttime show. We'd usually save one or two "top" rides (Epcot: Soarin', AK: Safari and Dinosaur, DHS: Frozen and Toy Story, MK: Big Thunder) for that evening, but not do much more. Our only exception was our final night, when we did several rides, did the dessert fireworks thing, saw the late parade, and stayed at MK until midnight (closing was at 11:00, but after the MSEP and pictures of the castle, and going in Main St. shops, we weren't leaving until midnight).
10) Try to get up again the next day to make rope drop but be too tired to do so - see item 1
We have done this type of approach before, and usually had good success with it - not getting too tired, and still seeing what we wanted to. But, this time we had a little more trouble. We've usually planned every 3rd day to be a break day where we can sleep late, but we didn't do it that way this time. Lots of our slow starts were due to daughters being a little older and moving slowly in the morning, but some of it was just us being tired from a late night the night before. Doing 4 days in a row of this (which we did at one point) was too much for us without having the full break day in the middle.
sad
with our annual passes, so I never feel pressured to stay at the park when the kids are tired and hot.
