Our Disney Bubble
We travelled as a family of 5 with children aged 12, 9 and 5 for two weeks over the May half term holiday 2023. The first hurdle travelling as a family of 5 is the accommodation. Most hotels are not geared up for the larger family groups so our choice was limited – although Disney have definitely improved their offerings in recent years with the introduction of ‘5th sleeper rooms’.
ACCOMMODATION We stayed at Disney’s Contemporary Resort (https://www.disneyworld.co.uk/resorts/contemporary-resort/) – a Deluxe Resort that is on the monorail loop and just a few minutes walk to Magic Kingdom. We absolutely loved everything about our hotel. The hotel has just been renovated with a tasteful Incredibles theme. We stayed in the Garden Wing and had a room on the ground floor which was perfect as the higher rooms don’t have balconies however the ground floor rooms have a very narrow patio opening onto the lush gardens.
The hotel had a lovely pool and beach area and plenty of sun loungers for a relaxing few hours spent away from the bustle of the parks.
The monorail actually runs right through the middle of the hotel which my train mad boys adored. It was such fun watching the trains as we ate breakfast in the Contempo Café.
PLANNING & QUEUES I really didn’t do much planning for our days in the parks. I had made our park reservations ahead of time (as well as a valid ticket you will also need to make a park reservation for the park you wish to visit each morning). More details can be found here - https://www.disneyworld.co.uk/experience-updates/park-reservations/), but we tended to arrive and then plan our day based on the queue times.
I downloaded the My Disney Experience app before we travelled and for a few weeks before going I had been looking at the queue times so I had a decent idea of which were the bigger rides which we would have to queue for.
We never managed to get up early enough to take advantage of the Early Entry. We typically arrived at the parks around 9. This worked OK for us as we were pretty flexible with the rides we wanted to do. I would look at the app and see where the small queues were and we would head to those rides and get a few done quickly before braving one of the longer queues.
There are a couple of rides that always have bonkers queues – Slinky Dog, Rise of the Resistance, Avatar Flight of Passage and Seven Dwarfs Mine For these rides we had warned the kids before hand that if they wanted to do the ride we would have to queue so on those days we took extra snacks, note pads and pens and a few card games (top trumps and a Disney quiz card game) to keep them (and us) occupied in the queues. All rides are definitely worth the wait. They’re all amazing rides.
My son and husband wanted to ride the new Tron ride and Guardians of the Galaxy which meant joining a virtual queue. On those days I had to set an alarm for a few minutes to 7 and open the Virtual Queue on the app, assign the party and then at exactly 7 I had to select Join Queue. If you missed it by a few seconds you didn’t get on! You were then assigned a boarding group number and we just kept checking the app throughout the day for when we would be called to ride. Again, they loved both rides and would recommend them both.
FOOD Food was interesting! Disney haven’t offered dining plans this summer (2023). We did have dining credit to use but that wasn’t going to be enough for the full 2 weeks. I had taken breakfast items with us and I placed an Amazon Fresh order to arrive at the hotel of bottled water and some fruit. We tended to use the Quick Service restaurants for lunches and each morning we just had a look on the app for a table service option for dinner. Epcot was great for evening meals as there’s so much choice. We didn’t always have a reservation and always managed to get a table.
Our favourites were – Rain Forest Café in Animal Kingdom, Cosmic Ray’s Starlight Café in Magic Kingdom, Connections Café and Via Napoli Ristorante in Epcot and Backlot Express in Hollywood Studios.
MORE THAN RIDES There is so much more to the parks than rides. We met loads of characters - many had very short queues. The shows were all amazing. We all enjoyed the Festival of the Lion King in Animal Kingdom and I think our absolute favourite was Micky PhilharMagic in Animal Kingdom. The safari is a must do in Animal Kingdom. We did this twice at different times of the day and had difference experiences each time.
The evening fireworks at Magic Kingdom are soooo good. We saw them a couple of times from different places and they were equally good wherever we stood. I have learned since coming home that you can actually watch the fireworks from behind the castle (you would miss the projections on the castle watching from here) but you would still hear he music and see the lasers and fireworks so one to try if you do go.
We spent the whole 2 weeks of our holiday at Disneyworld. We didn’t leave our Disney Bubble. We loved it. We did every ride and show and experience, many of them more than once. We swam and played on the beach and rode the monorail and skyrail. We cuddled and high fived lots of characters and collected autographs. It was truly a magical holiday and I can’t wait to go back in a few years and do it all again.
