Two weeks of Disney
We stayed at Old Key West which has a brilliant location, close to Epcot and Hollywood Studios and just a 15 minute boat ride to Disney Springs. The resort is very spread out and it’s worth bearing in mind it has 5 bus stops, meaning any journey can take a while just to leave the hotel! Staying at Disney you can use their transport to get around (including boats, buses and monorail), which meant for the first time we didn’t hire a car and I can’t say we missed having it. The room (studio) was a pretty good size although a little dated and we would stay there again.
We went to the 4 main parks (most we visited on at least 3 different occasions). I can’t pick out a favourite as they are all so different. Animal Kingdom had an Explorers Book available where the kids could collect badges which they loved. We also did the safari, “It’s a Bugs Life”, Everest a few times, Rivers of Light night show plus so much more. Yak & Yeti restaurant is one of our favourite restaurants!
Magic Kingdom was great for short queues on a lot of the rides as there are so many smaller rides. We found it busier if we wanted to meet the characters here compared with other parks. The firework show here is still my favourite out of all the night time shows and at 9.15pm it wasn’t too late for the kids! Hollywood Studios has a great new addition with Toy Story Mania and more is due to open later this month. There is a heavy Star Wars theme and we regularly saw Stormtroopers marching through the park with shows going on throughout the day. The Frozen Sing-Along was also brilliant (even hubby enjoyed it despite being dragged in) and not in the way you’d expect. There were 2 presenters who were very comical which actually made the show but we all sang along too! Epcot is great, and we discovered a lot more than we usually do because we had time to explore each ‘country’ properly this time. Test Track was a hit with the kids and with fast passes we managed to get on it a few times! We did lots of character meeting around the World Showcase here and the queue times were no more than 20-30 minutes, some much shorter, which was a real bonus.
We also did both of the waterparks and we agreed Typhoon Lagoon was our favourite. The 6 foot wave every few minutes was the clincher! It’s got great areas for smaller children and some rides we could all go on together, but the kids were just happy in the wave pool. We ended up spending 3 days throughout the holiday here! Blizzard Beach was also good, and we loved the surf board type mats which allowed you to go head first down a few of the slides. Unfortunately, the weather wasn’t great the day we visited and after the park was shut for the second time because of lightning we gave up and went back to the hotel early in the end!
The weather was changeable, the first week it was quite overcast with some very heavy showers as there was a tropical storm in the area. It was still warm though and somehow, we managed to dodge the showers (others weren’t so lucky!) We had a few thunder storms and very often the rain was late afternoon. The second week was sunny intervals and it was much hotter and stickier, but we were glad to see the sun! Would I go again at this time of year? Yep! The only day that the weather affected our plans was as mentioned above when we were at the waterpark and we ended up leaving probably an hour or two earlier than we would have liked. Everything else was adaptable around the weather. They do close the water parks and outdoor rides at the main parks if there is lightning, but if we had a fast pass for a ride that was shut we were able to go back later that day instead.
Here are some top tips…
1/ Absolutely book restaurant reservations in advance, we were always seated within 10 minutes of arriving usually quicker.
2/ You can book 3 fast passes per person per day (60 days in advance if staying at Disney or 30 days otherwise). This made such a difference to our day and queue times, take the time before you go to plan your trip
3/ After you’ve used your third fast pass, get onto the App or website to book your next one. Once that one’s been used do the same again and so on. Fast pass queues were very quick compared with standby lines in most cases (if the lines were short anyway, having a fast pass didn’t always help! If the queue was 20 minutes on standby, fast pass would be around 5 minutes, if the queue was 1hr+ on standby you’d probably wait no longer than 15-20 minutes on fast pass) 4/ With free Wi-Fi now available in the parks, I used my phone to check queue times. This meant we could head towards rides with shorter queue times and we could also keep an eye on the busier ride queue times and go to them if we saw them a bit shorter than normal. The longest we queued for anything was 45 minutes which I think is pretty good going in the school holidays! We did also make the decision to avoid any large queues and only went on those rides if we could get fast passes
5/ On waterpark/off-site days get fast passes for the evening shows
6/ If you stay on-site use the Extra Magic Hours – we got so much done during these hours and this is when you could get on those busier rides much quicker without a fast pass
7/ If you need a late check-out room at a Disney hotel, ring housekeeping on the day of arrival (I forgot to ask until 2 days before we left, and they didn’t have any left!)
I hope this gives you a little insight into our 2 weeks, if you are planning to go to Disney please get in touch I’d love to help and watch out for my next blog which will review the restaurants we ate at.