Mid-Day Break "Strategy"

[ArielSRL]

I have a 5 & 2 yr old. We went last June and are going again this June. It's HAWT! So, the plan is rope drop til about noon-ish, back to the resort for swim and/or rest, back up and out by around 4 or 5ish. Last year we were at SSR and we drove to every park (I probably wouldn't have to MK, but we had an ECV so it was easier just to take it in the back of the SUV). This year we are at Wilderness Lodge, which is very close to MK. We'll do bus or boat there (no ECV this time) and drive everywhere else.

We like the breaks bc even if no one naps, everyone gets a break from the heat and the stimuli. We also rent a double stroller so if the boys want to nap at other times, they can. They easily stayed up til 10 or 11 on the trip.

Figure on an hour each way for travel between resort and park.

 

[SaintsManiac]

I would also suggest taking a break mid week if possible and schedule a slower resort day if possible to let the kids catch up on sleep. Bedtimes tended to go out the window on our trips. Even with a resort / Disney Springs day, my DS then 3 and 4 had epic meltdowns the Fri of each Sat to Sat trip. HE was just done.

This is gospel! We were so exhausted after 3 full days, so we all needed a break. It was perfect timing as we had our MVMCP on the 4th day. We slept until almost 11am and it helped so very much. Even after that DD5 was close to a royal mess by day 6. The only reason she made it was the promise of MK on the last night ha!

 

[ArielSRL]

Amazingly enough, other than a mini melt down at a way too late dinner on arrival night, we never had another one the entire 7 day and night trip. But we did religiously take a midday break every single day. So I'm going with that strategy again.

 

[Beer Me]

We always plan a mid-day break. A dip in the pool and a cold beer or two is rejuvenating and makes me feel like I'm on vacation. Allow an hour each way if using the bus but it usually won't take that long.

 

[Kamy04]

Thanks!

We do have a resort day planned, but not sure which day lol. The addition of the Star Wars Tour has us in flux since DH and DS1 might do that. IT will either be Friday or saturday (we are there tues-tues). Our resort day will probably include the Lego store for all three boys!

 

[HydroGuy]

A lot of people will tell you - and I agree - that when it comes to mid-day breaks it may be better to consider MK and Epcot different from AK and DHS. MK and Epcot have longer park hours so you get more bang for the buck on mid-day breaks than with AK and DHS which close earlier.

I mean, if you take a mid-day break from AK to PoR and if you leave at 1PM it could easily take an hour to get back to your room (more on that below). You get to your room by 2PM, and settle down for a nap shortly thereafter hopefully. Awake and ready to go by maybe 5PM. Then back to AK and arrive by 6PM. And the park closes by 7 or 8PM. And you still need to eat dinner. Not really worth it.

What that means for you is consider not taking taking mid-day breaks on AK and DHS days and just powering out until your kids are done for the day. And saving that wasted time going back and forth on buses.

Also, if you have not done so, it is a good idea to plan entire days to rest. Take the whole day off and stay by the pool or go to a movie at Disney Springs and stay cool in the June heat. Rebuild energy.

If you can't work in a whole day off, consider planning half days off. Maybe a late start day or two where you do not get to the parks until noon. In that case, appropriate FP+ is critical and, by the way, one of the significant benefits that FP+ offers.

Since you asked about when to make FP+ reservation, in general I advise for you to make your FP+ reservations for earlier in the day when you know you will be there. Get them all completed with the last FP+ for 1-2PM if possible (you can go right at 1PM for the last FP+ and leave the park, if you have a break planned.

With regard to PoR travel time and the 90 minute report, I have never stayed at PoR but I do know a few things:

- people tend to think of travel time as from arrival at the bus/boat/monorail (e.g., transport) stop until transport dropoff. A more fair accounting is (if you are leaving the park) the time it takes from being inside the park to get to the transport pickup location, of course waiting for the transport, then getting to your hotel and then all the way to your hotel room.

- PoR has lots of bus stops and is more spread out (which both add time), and with younger ones it can take a lot longer to walk places. Some people with teens or or only adults in their group forget or just don't know how long it can take to move around with young children.

- It is not hard for me to imagine it taking possibly 90 minutes to leave from a big park like Epcot (again with young children - so think of that taking 20-25 minutes just to get to say a bus stop from World Showcase a mile away) and get back to the hotel room at a spread out resort like PoR.

When I have long transport times like that, or want to get places where you cannot take a bus direct (say from one hotel to another) I get a taxi (or maybe Uber - never used Uber at WDW so have no idea how well it works). For $20 you can save a lot of time and that extra sleep for a child.

Finally, it is worth mentioning that for anyone who might be open to bi-coastal Disney experiences, Disneyland Resort works much better in general for those with younger children IMO - because of the availability of nearby walking distance hotels, smaller parks and (usually) longer park hours. WDW works better as kids get older and have more energy and maybe a little more independence and do not fade every afternoon from exhaustion.

 

[Beer Me]

A lot of people will tell you - and I agree - that when it comes to mid-day breaks it may be better to consider MK and Epcot different from AK and DHS. MK and Epcot have longer park hours so you get more bang for the buck on mid-day breaks than with AK and DHS which close earlier.

I mean, if you take a mid-day break from AK to PoR and if you leave at 1PM it could easily take an hour to get back to your room (more on that below). You get to your room by 2PM, and settle down for a nap shortly thereafter hopefully. Awake and ready to go by maybe 5PM. Then back to AK and arrive by 6PM. And the park closes by 7 or 8PM. And you still need to eat dinner. Not really worth it.

What that means for you is consider not taking taking mid-day breaks on AK and DHS days and just powering out until your kids are done for the day. And saving that wasted time going back and forth on buses.

Also, if you have not done so, it is a good idea to plan entire days to rest. Take the whole day off and stay by the pool or go to a movie at Disney Springs and stay cool in the June heat. Rebuild energy.

If you can't work in a whole day off, consider planning half days off. Maybe a late start day or two where you do not get to the parks until noon. In that case, appropriate FP+ is critical and, by the way, one of the significant benefits that FP+ offers.

Since you asked about when to make FP+ reservation, in general I advise for you to make your FP+ reservations for earlier in the day when you know you will be there. Get them all completed with the last FP+ for 1-2PM if possible (you can go right at 1PM for the last FP+ and leave the park, if you have a break planned.

With regard to PoR travel time and the 90 minute report, I have never stayed at PoR but I do know a few things:

- people tend to think of travel time as from arrival at the bus/boat/monorail (e.g., transport) stop until transport dropoff. A more fair accounting is (if you are leaving the park) the time it takes from being inside the park to get to the transport pickup location, of course waiting for the transport, then getting to your hotel and then all the way to your hotel room.

- PoR has lots of bus stops and is more spread out (which both add time), and with younger ones it can take a lot longer to walk places. Some people with teens or or only adults in their group forget or just don't know how long it can take to move around with young children.

- It is not hard for me to imagine it taking possibly 90 minutes to leave from a big park like Epcot (again with young children - so think of that taking 20-25 minutes just to get to say a bus stop from World Showcase a mile away) and get back to the hotel room at a spread out resort like PoR.

When I have long transport times like that, or want to get places where you cannot take a bus direct (say from one hotel to another) I get a taxi (or maybe Uber - never used Uber at WDW so have no idea how well it works). For $20 you can save a lot of time and that extra sleep for a child.

Finally, it is worth mentioning that for anyone who might be open to bi-coastal Disney experiences, Disneyland Resort works much better in general for those with younger children IMO - because of the availability of nearby walking distance hotels, smaller parks and (usually) longer park hours. WDW works better as kids get older and have more energy and maybe a little more independence and do not fade every afternoon from exhaustion.

Good point about AK especially. Since it closes so early we normally plan a whole day. Obviously that could be changing soon.

 

[BigredNole]

Never trust a set time for Disney transportation. Plan for it to be very long and hope it is shorter. According to everyone else except the people that were at POR with me, the buses were the worst. That stay at POR is the reason we drive down and drive to the parks now. We never rely on Disney transportation any longer.Our 7 day trip was turned into a 6 day trip because of time lost waiting on buses.

 

[jwolfpack]

I have not read all the responses, but here's what we do / did when my kids were little. We typically go to Disney for 5-6 nights and always get to the park at rope drop. Some days, we stay until around 12:30-1:00, then go back to room for mid-day break. In these situations, we would try to have dinner at our resort (5ish) or early dinner back in the park planned. My fastpass stragety on those days would be to have 2 planned for around lunchtime and save 1 for around 6ish in the evening to be used after dinner, but before nighttime entertainment.

Other days (particularly days we want to see the 3pm MK parade, which is our favorite), we just power through from rope drop through the parade. If the littlest naps in the stroller at some point, great. If not, we are usually prepared to call it a day after the parade and go back to room for early dinner and early bedtimes. We would do all of our fastpasses between 11am and 2pm.

I find that in the middle of the trip, my family is always super grateful for one night at the resort swimming. We often do this after a morning / early afternoon spent at Animal Kingdom or Epcot as those are really half-ish day parks for us.

I try to make sure my family makes Wishes on our first night and last night. I totally agree that a mid-day break is helpful on SOME days, but you will wear yourself out if you try to do it everyday. I think a good mix of strategies is the best plan. Oh, and my kids usually go to bed early too, so I understand your concerns!

 

[cruising spud]

IMO-two things you need to keep in mind-

#1:assuming you are going to get to the parks early/ready for rope drop and realizing that there is a lot of stimuli, and keeping in mind that it could be hot, your kids (and you) are going to be tired
#2-your kids are going to want to swim

With this in mind and just what worked for us-when our kids were young, we always left the parks by around noon, got back to our room, went swimming, and then we all took naps. Once we got up, the kids got baths (they were too tired later in the evening), and we set out again around 5:00 pm. We had dinner and went back to a park.

A few other things we did to that helped us at Disney-I brought breakfast foods. As the kids got older, they would often walk to the food court to supplement what I brought. Having food in the room prevented us from having to take time to go out to eat. This made it easier to get to the parks before they opened.

I also brought snacks. This way, if, by noon, we were all too tired to eat at a restaurant (this was before there was a huge need to make dining reservations), we would eat snacks in the room before we went swimming.

Best wishes.

 

[Nancyg56]

Good point about AK especially. Since it closes so early we normally plan a whole day. Obviously that could be changing soon.

Yes. We still break every day, but when my DGD was young we looked at parks like DAK and DHS differently than MK and Epcot. WE did not always make RD, but we got there early and stayed until we were done for the day. This took pressure off of us when we returned to the resort. We relaxed, maybe swam, showered and had a nice dinner somewhere. But park time was over for the day.

MK and Epcot are different, IMO. They stay open later, offer plenty of evening activities, and take us more than one day to cover. We leave early afternoon, rest and enjoy the resort, and then back out for dinner and evening entertainment.

You never know how children will react to changes in their routine, but we found the 4 YO had more stamina than we did. My DD insisted she rest every day, but then she was good to go in the evening. We also adhered to the break mid trip.

If I was planning your trip, I would schedule FP in the morning, plan on a lunch in the park, after having checked out menus and logistics of getting to the restaurant, and then I would play it by ear from there. Know your park hours and what is happening in the evenings. Your kids may surprise you, and the "rules" they are comfortable with at home may just be more flexible than you think. One thing that we did with DGD was to take a ride on an attraction that she would be lulled to sleep by. For instance, in the MK she would relax on the steam train. In Epcot, the American adventure would put her right to sleep!! LOL! (Me too)

 

[mco65]

We never left the park when the twins were 2.. we simply let them NAP in their strollers while we took a break at a cool sit down restaurant. I would enjoy going back to the resort but it takes away a lot of time. But then again, its always busiest that time of day anyway. Driving your car/rental and parking vs taking the buses would likely be faster.. unless its MK. I think the buses are faster if your going to MK because you skip the TRAM portion of the commute from the parking lot to the gate.. So if going back to the resort at midday was a MUST, i would consider driving and parking vs the BUs... JMO

 

[buyerbrad]

For some "down time" we do the following in order ... Country Bears, Tiki Room, Dole whip while waiting for afternoon parade to start, watch parade.

We find this allows for some extended sitting time, no waiting in lines, air conditioning, and just an overall break from racing around the park.

We then have our Fp+ scheduled for Jungle Cruise and Pirates after the parade

 

[DG25]

It family is different and each family needs are different and they change with ages and seasons. We are an early to bed early to raise family. We take a mid day break and we plan, plan,plan. We are rope drop people, we are up by 6:30 and have no problem being at a park early, usually first in line because many times we are up even before 5. So if the park is early enterence and we start at 8 am, which is what we do a lot, we hit the first ride and then our for ride and usually get two big rides done in first 30 minutes. Then we have our second do 30 minutes later (1hr after park opens, and we do several small rides that have short lines, and we do that with our third fp. So by 11:30 we are done with for and have usually hit a good 8 to 10 rides. We are done, we head back to hotel and usually are there by 12 or shortly after. By this time we are very hot, so we all cool off with an hour at the pool, where we usually eat a qs meal or if in villa make a sandwich. This cools everyone off. And although there is a lot of walking, there really is not much running around and getting out the energy of kids so we find they are ready for a nap after swimming. So we are in bed by 1:30 to 2 and up by 4. We then head back to parks, for ADR or for QS, we find QStack better for that age, our night time strategy is not usually rides since lines can be very long, it is shows and fireworks and such, with maybe some of the shorter line rides, like people mover, laughing floor. So we usually can get 3 to 5 rides in, and the we find our spot for fireworks or do a show, this way the kids start settling down, usually about 8 or 8:30, depending on the kids they will fall asleep by then, and you may want to think about a stroller for the 6 yo if he will fall asleep, because it is a long walk if you have to carry a six yo. Hint here, we do not always stay in the park for fireworks, we watch illuminations from beach club or the bridges going out of parks, we watch the fireworks at poly beach, this way we are not having to hit the crowds. Food for thoughts, rent a car if possible, we rented one last time, $7 a night, it saved us lots in bus schedule, although many times rentals are not that cheap, but if you keep looking you might luck out like we did. We are always back at hotel by 10:30, but many nights we don't do fireworks and such and then we are back by 9. We also cheat if you want to call it that, we will watch the fireworks going to like wilderness lodge or fort wilderness by boat, then we get uber (if we don't rent a car), from WL or FW, the price is small to get to POR and you save yourself all that crowd on the bus. After doing buses with carriages and crowds at end of night, we desired to find other options. Like the fireworks and a boat to FW, we also do the fireworks and order uber from beach club, because it just is not worth it to us in the grand scheme of things to save $100 and have two miserable kids. Last time we left Epcot after fireworks, it took us 40 minutes in line to get on a monorail back to poly and the a walk to shades of green, just not worth it anymore, about $10 for uber and we were there in about 15 minutes. That was a few years ago. Anyway, hope that helps.

 

[DisneyJen0504]

We are midday breakers! LOL. With or without kids we have always taken midday breaks and then we like to hop to a different park. Now that we have little ones we find that sometimes they are ready to go back out at night, and sometimes they aren't. Sometimes they nap in the stroller, sometimes in the room and sometimes not at all. Haha. We just went with the flow.

And for the 10+ trips we have been on staying on property it has never ever taken us more than 30 minutes from bus stop to room, usually less depending on the park. Buses are often empty midday and less people getting on and off at resort bus stops so it just goes quicker.

 

[tessio]

With our little ones we have never done a mid-day break at the resort but 'manipulated' things for a nap at the park. We use separate strollers so I can take one if they need a nap and my wife can take the other. At the Magic Kingdom I've walked back and forth under the Tomorrowland sign because of the relaxing spacey music. That seems to do the trick. There are also quiet places to walk like the pathway between Space Mountain and Storybook Circus, the 'quiet' tent at the Circus, and the entrance to the park (I don't exit, though.) Once they fall asleep I'll call my wife and meet up with her and our other little one or I'll get a quiet out of the way table at Cosmic Ray's and enjoy a cup of coffee and some quiet time!

 

[BebopBaloo]

On our first trip as a family we planned on midday breaks. We found that it worked out better letting the kids sleep in the stroller and either finding a quiet spot to relax, or hopping on the monorail and just riding it around. We have done mid day breaks if we planned on a different park in the evening. I commend your plans just be prepared to change your mind once there.

 

[BLLB]

We have always started at rope drop and left at 1 or 2. We started that when the boys were babies and are still doing it 17 years later!

 

[JZCubed]

IMO-two things you need to keep in mind-

#1:assuming you are going to get to the parks early/ready for rope drop and realizing that there is a lot of stimuli, and keeping in mind that it could be hot, your kids (and you) are going to be tired
#2-your kids are going to want to swim

With this in mind and just what worked for us-when our kids were young, we always left the parks by around noon, got back to our room, went swimming, and then we all took naps. Once we got up, the kids got baths (they were too tired later in the evening), and we set out again around 5:00 pm. We had dinner and went back to a park.

A few other things we did to that helped us at Disney-I brought breakfast foods. As the kids got older, they would often walk to the food court to supplement what I brought. Having food in the room prevented us from having to take time to go out to eat. This made it easier to get to the parks before they opened.

I also brought snacks. This way, if, by noon, we were all too tired to eat at a restaurant (this was before there was a huge need to make dining reservations), we would eat snacks in the room before we went swimming.

Best wishes.

"Hotel swimming pool," is the most common answer given by children as being their favorite part of their Disney vacation.

 

[champ1380]

OP I just wanted to say my husband is the same as yours. Mid day breaks are just as much for him as the kids. If he needs it, then do it. Adult male meltdowns are so much more embarrassing than toddler meltdowns.

We went when were kids were 2 and 5. Despite everyone saying that kids would be so worn out that they would nap in the stroller, no one ever did. My 5 year didn't nap period (and we tried), but just went to the pool with me while brother and daddy napped.

We made rope drop (even when we had to wake the kids up). Had to go breakfasts (cereal bars, bagels, fruit squeezes) in room/walking to bus. Scheduled fast passes for before lunch or right after lunch, ate lunch mostly at a quick service, and headed back to the hotel between around 1/1:30. Then nap/pool headed back to the parks between 4:30-5:30.

For us being flexible only works to an extent. Even if someone was feeling good at 1, if we didn't break there is a good chance by 2:30 they'd be miserable (cough:husband:cough). So better for us to err on the side of break.

The only exception was AK whet we did AM EMH and were done for the day by 2. But I believe they closed at like 6 then.