Hello all! We just got back from a wonderful trip yesterday. It was me, DH, DD4, my mom, and my MIL. We stayed offsite at Windsor Hills, which we've done before and I still love but must admit that driving and parking at the parks (especially MK) is getting a little old.
Some good and not-so-good takeaways are below. Apologies in advance if this is too long!
Good
Some good and not-so-good takeaways are below. Apologies in advance if this is too long!
Good
- Weather! It was hot, but none of us found it unbearable (even my 71-year-old MIL who tends to be a complainer haha). Very little rain, except for one extreme thunderstorm
- Rope drop! We have done Disney many, many, many times but have never been able to get ourselves out the door in time to rope drop. This time, we made it a mission since our FP options were limited 30 days out. I am a new lover of rope drop! We arrived at MK on Sunday 5/5 to RD SDMT. We were only a couple rows back from the rope at 8:20 and had only about a 5-minute wait. At Epcot, I was able to get a FEA FP for 2 PM so we rope-dropped TT and Soarin. We were finished both by 9:40 (after a quick scare at TT about the ride going down)
- TSL EMM. This was definitely worth it for us, as my DD is currently obsessed with all things Toy Story
- Spike the Bee scavenger hunt in Epcot. My DD LOVED this as she loves scavenger hunts, hide and seek, etc. However, the prize at the end is pretty lame IMO considering this is a kid's activity (sew-on-patches)
- Other guests. Everyone seemed to be generally in a good mood and we had friendly chats with many people in lines, etc
- Rides going down
- This was a major issue at MK specifically. Our first day in the parks (Sunday) I had FPs for HM and Splash in the morning, and BTMRR after lunch. HM went down and we received an anytime FP. I switched our BTMRR FP for POTC and we decided to use the anytime for BTMRR since it's right next to Splash. We stop at IASW on the way, which goes down when we get there. Rode Big Thunder, walked over to Splash for our FP. Get to the FP entrance and Splash goes down. We got bombarded with an epic thunderstorm in the afternoon but we start heading over to POTC for that FP, only to have that go down as well. We left the park at that point as we were all exhausted and not willing to wait in long lines. HM, Splash, and POTC never came back up before we left
- Our second day at MK was Tuesday. Luckily I had booked a Splash FP for that afternoon as well since it's our favorite ride and what we were looking forward to the most. We get to the park around 10 in the morning to discover that Splash, SDMT, Space, and something else (can't remember what) are all down. We had planned to do some non-headliners that morning anyway but at this point I'm about to flip out if Splash doesn't come back up in time for our FP. (It did thankfully.) In the meantime, wait times for the other rides were increased since so many headliners were down at once. We ended up having a good day at MK that day as we were able to use FPs and be strategic about which rides to hit when. We never did get to HM and IASW though because the lines were too long all day for us (30 mins +)
- TOT went down in the morning on Monday which wreaked havoc on wait times later since they're only operating one elevator
- FOP rope drop. I will admit that I am aware that we did not get there early enough. It was our last day and we just couldn't drag ourselves out of bed super early again. We got in line for FOP at 8:30 and waited 90 minutes. This is no one's fault but ours, but I will not be doing that again. That ride is just not worth it to me. There are other things we missed out on in the park that we ran out of time to do because we lost so much time in the morning and my DD was done
