Shock Horror Question

[LakeAriel]

We plan our first 4 trips to each park in order of favorite and then play by ear. If we wish to go on say "Splash Mountain" again or missed it, it would be Magic Kingdom next day and so forth. ADR's don't dictate where we go because most of them are in Epcot anyway. Late hours will alter which park we do after dinner though..

 

[mom2taylorandemily]

Me, well I'm a little anal about my planning. I think I have a little bit of OCD. I plan every almost every meal as well as the the ADR's and character meals. My DH is the spontaneous one and boy does he give me grief about all my planning, he says, "you're not leaving him a day to do just what I feel like doing when I wake up, there is no spontanaity." So, my plan was to leave him one day where he gets to say "what do I want to do today?" He will no TS meal that day as I will have nothing scheduled, I do this just to prove to him that planning is the key. After looking for 2 hours to find a TS meal and the kids whining at him that they are hungry he will get the idea.

 

[Kick Save]

Ah, so refreshing to read all these people who still wing it...knowing they'll be caught in a line somewhere while I follow my touring plan...

Seriously, in the first few pages of the UG it explains that Disney does everything in its power to know where "they" will be and at what times and how to control "them" when they get there. Everything from Disney's side is planned to the letter...when to have what shows, when to have parades, how long each ride should be, etc, etc all in the name of crowd control. Planning your day around Disney's handling of the masses should make for a much more enjoyable trip.

For our trip next week, each morning is planned out with a touring plan of some kind and each afternoon/evening is scheduled around our ADR of choice. Not so much touring in the afternoons, we take a relaxed approach and see what we can see and ride what we can ride. But, we've usually covered so much in the mornings that it doesn't matter. It may sound rigid, but it's really not, good bit of flexibility built in. Most trips we end up cancelling an ADR to head to a different park that evening, anyway. But, I'm sold on the touring plans in the morning...all of futureworld and fantasyland done by 11AM? I'll take it...

 

[DebIreland]

This year we *plan* to be spontaneous and go with the flow on at least 2 mornings, 10 to 12.30 on Oct 31st and Nov 3rd. Oh how I wish I was kidding!!! Honestly, I'm not a rigid person in life at all, that's probably why I work at home freelance with different hours each and every week and a different income every month but when it comes to WDW, I just couldn't imagine the horror of arriving with no plan and 3 kids in tow! Oh no! That would totally stress me out!! I love planning! and yes, we really have planned for 2 mornings to be, um, unplanned

 

[msinformation]

My DH and I have been struggling with deciding how much to plan. I have done copious amounts of reading, both online and in books, because I want to know as much as I can. Actually scheduling is another story, though. We each went to WDW once as kids, although DH was very young so this is essentially his first trip. We're only going to be there for 5 days, so we're trying to fit in everything we want to see. On the other hand, I don't do super well in extreme heat, and we both like to have some relaxation time in our vacations. We've decided to tentatively plan on taking afternoon breaks to return to the hotel, swim, eat lunch, etc. We've also planned the first three days of our trip and where we'll be each day, and we hope to get to the large majority of our "must sees" during that time. Then we're going to leave the next few days a bit more open. And most importantly, we plan to be flexible. Even though we've planned things pretty rigidly on some days, we want to adjust to the heat, our energy level, etc. If we need to rearrange, we will!

Of course, we missed booking during free dining and only have two TS ADRs scheduled. (I do think the free dining has had a major impact on ADRs. When I called about a month ago times were already pretty booked up for the end of August!) Because we don't know how much we'll feel like eating (and to save a little $), we decided it would be better to stick to CS restaurants for most days.

Let's hope our strategy works!

 

[apirateslifeforme]

I'm a loose planner - for most of the trip, I decide what park I want to visit on which day and what rides/attractions I want to see the most. I'm not much for TS restaurants (maybe only one or two), I really prefer counter or just snacks, so that keeps me flexible. Parades, too - I just don't care for them, so I check the times and sort-of plan for visiting busier attractions at those times. When all else fails, there's always FP. And I leave a day or two wide open for "whatever" - I can sleep in, then visit whichever park, or walk around the resort, whatever catches my fancy. I've never been disappointed, never felt that I've missed anything, and I've only been there 3x since 1997.

 

[klwdisney]

Every time we go I plan stuff in advance and every time we go those plans are thrown out the window as soon as we get there. We always wing it and do what we feel like doing at that moment. Never had any problems either. If that restaurant is full we move on to another one. If the park is too crowded for our tastes, we'll move on to another park instead.

I personally could not handle an itinerary vacation. But that's just me.

 

[hidmickey:myantidrug]

We plan the first night of our trip which parks we're going to on which days. We know the things we want to do and see but don't plan it out for every thing. We only eat once a day, usually counterservice so that doesn't impact us; when we get hungry, we'll eat but we're usually too caught up in the fun that we don't think about it.

 

[jennyl772003]

Me and DH have never been big planners. Last year was the first time we ever made and ADR! We don't like having the stress of feeling that we HAVE to be somewhere at a certain time. This is vacation after all!

This year is a bit different, Because of free dining we have an ADR made for just about every day. We at least know where we will be at for dinner.

We do make rational decisions on what park we will go to on a day by day basis. If a park is having EMH, we will stay away from it. If a park is packed, we will go to a different one. We don't have our trips planned out ahead of time though.

We don't wait in long lines. We don't miss out on fast passes. We go on all of the attractions we want to. We have a great time. We even sleep in some mornings!

Don't think you have to have every minute of your day planned out to have a good time!

 

[mking624]

Does anyone NOT plan their trip to WDW. Do you just get up and decide which park to do that day or the night before decide?

With the exception of this trip (since we're doing free dining), we are typically like this. We sleep in, wake up and decide what park to go to...then we get there about 11am the earliest. A "horror" moment for those who love to plan plan plan...but we love it.

 

[Scraper]

S ometimes We play the game of which ever bus comes first we go to that park.

 

[disneymama73]

S ometimes We play the game of which ever bus comes first we go to that park.

The shock! The horror!

 

[Gabkatt]

Planning and looking forward to it is at least half the fun for me.

I agree! We took a long 12 day trip a few years ago with passes for every day. We knew we would see everything so we didn't push it or plan that much, but the rest of our trips have been 7 days or less with 5 day passes. We had to plan to fit it all in and like finnster77 said " its half the fun for me!"

 

[jsmla]

I'm a planner. When our kids were little I made a detailed itinerary for each day of the trip. Now that they'll both be in college DH has requested that we go with the flow a little more. So, this trip I have a plan for 4 out of 5 mornings and only 2 out of 6 evenings. I'm planning for not planning. Actually, unbeknownst to DH, I have secret evening plans for those "spontaneous" nights. You know, just in case.

 

[amyminzey]

We are disneymooning during January 2008, and I have been researching, planning, researching, planning for about 6 months now (not including the past few years when we said we were going to go and then never got to!). We will be there for 14 days. I would love to be able to wake up and just say, what would you like to do today? But, with the ADR's, I find that virtually impossible. We are thinking about purchasing the 10 day park hopper w/ water parks and more tickets, so we will be able to be a little spontaneous some days, but not completely.

 

[Kick Save]

I posted earlier as a planner, and must say the non-planners seem to equate having a plan to removing all spontanaity...the two are not mutually exclusive. It's not an either/or type thing. We have a good plan and still do a LOT of things unplanned.

To each their own...but keep not planning, makes my mornings easier.

 

[Simba22]

when DBF and I went last May, we stayed off-site and did not plan what to do on what day until we woke up that morning. Now that we are staying on-site, we are planning our days in advance so we can take advantage of EMH

 

[DisneyLover1091]

We normally don't have a set schedule but we do talk about it. It's just not a "Cast In Stone/Written Down On Paper" kinda a thing.

 

[paintnolish]

During all of my roughly 20 trips, we have never, ever planned anything other than our hotel reservations and buying our theme park ticket. We go there and depending on the weather and emh, we decide which park to go to for the day. I have never, ever park hopped. However, we usually go in the off season. This year since we have the dining plan, we had to decide which park for which day so we could make our adrs.

 

[CleveRocks]

Does anyone NOT plan their trip to WDW. Do you just get up and decide which park to do that day or the night before decide?

My wife and I took our then-5 year old and 2.5 year old in May 2005. We were born-again first-timers, as we were last in WDW in 1990. I definitely did NOT want to have to conform to any kind of plan or schedule. Our lives are like that 7 days a week, and I wanted freedom from that. We both work full-time in professional, stressful jobs with lots of responsibility, plus there's also that little parents-of-two-preschoolers-thing.

I just used my brain.

And here's something to make many of your heads spin and have purple heffalumps fly out your ears -- we let our 5 year old son decide which park we went to each day.

In the months leading up to our trip, I had a great time learning everything I possibly could about WDW. Thank goodness for DISboards. I also went to MANY other websites and some other message boards. I studied the Unofficial Guide and Birnbaum's like they were the Bible itself. I gathered every piece of knowledge that was gatherable (is that a word??!!), plus got a lot of opinions along the way, from the DIS and the other places. I got all the info I could possibly get except what I could get from actual experience.

My 5-year-old ALSO had an encyclopedic knowledge of everything a 5-year-old wants to do. He watched that WDW planning DVD every night for about 6 weeks leading up to our trip. He could tell me from memory what attractions and rides he wanted to do in each park. Star Tours excited him more than anything, so on our first day in Florida we got to MGM by about 5:30 p.m. based ONLY on his stated preference at lunch that day. Later that night when we asked him, he said he NEEDED to go to MK the next day to ride Goofy's Barnstormer and do Mickey's Toontown Fair. With that info in mind, I prepped him for what we'd be able to do that first time in MK and what we would have to wait for another day during the week (as we weren't into being absolute commandos).

I had some generalizations in my head, such as avoiding a park on EMH day (if not using EMH), not waiting in a long line for Spaceship Earth at the beginning of the day, the ins and outs of FASTPASS, and other ideas and thoughts obvious to we who are well-versed in WDW knowledge.

Basically, I learned the information BEHIND what goes into making a kick-a$$ touring plan, and I knew how to use it. I was able to make decisions on-the-fly, and it worked perfectly. We did and saw EVERYTHING we wanted to, in a very efficient and FUN manner, because when I was presented with any situation I knew how to assess all the available data and devise a really good plan for what to do over the next few hours.

We had a dinner ADR (then called PS) for each day, but that was a "just in case" thing -- we're more the counter-service type on vacation, anyway. I canceled each ADR as soon as I realized we wouldn't be in the "right place" that evening. We did do Hoop Dee Doo Revue, and since I'd already paid so much money for it I was pretty motivated to make that appointment. We also kept one ADR for a character dinner (we really only wanted to do one, anyway). And you know what, my wife and I felt kinda stressed having to time it just right to get to that ADR. Even with a good touring plan, there are uncontrollable variables such as transportation delays, long lines at rides, not wanting to wait around too long ahead of time, etc.

To me, it was fun, it was like being a detective, or an artist. It was a really fun challenge, I enjoy mental puzzles. And this was one with a good cause -- my kids' smiles.

We'll be doing it exactly the same this November. And by exactly the same, I mean no prior planning of touring plans.