WDW has just conveniently offered the dining plan free for our dates. Please pass the mashed potatoes! Suddenly everyone is getting very serious about making reservations because this is a limited offer, and nobody wants to actually pay for those mashed potatoes. Can’t say as I blame them.
The first order of business in sculpting a WDW trip is figuring out how much exactly one wants to do. You could go down there and, with one thing or another, spend a couple of weeks if you wanted to see and do everything from “It’s a Small World” to Cape Canaveral. After all, Universal has 2 full parks (including the new Harry Potter area), SeaWorld has a whole day’s worth, there’s an overabundance of swimming parks (on and off the WDW grounds), plus there’s things like golf and riding horses and racing stock cars… Quite a menu, in other words. Sure, amusement/theme parks are at the heart of the experience, but you are smack dab in the middle of a resort, after all. In the case of the Disney Debate Adventure, I was thinking that this was going to be as much an in-and-out as possible. I don’t have a lot of days off available, for one thing, and the point was fairly pure Disney. By my way of thinking, this is five full days, one each for MK, DHS and AK and two for Epcot. If we had little kids with us, I might adjust that to include another day at MK and go down one at Epcot, but realistically, not even O’C is going to want to ride Dumbo all that many times. And the two Epcot days are, in fact, halves, allowing us a little breathing space in the middle of all of this. Keep in mind that I do Disney commando-style, at least for the first half of the park day. The last thing I wish to do is wait on a line, so I’m willing to prepare and act accordingly. I swear by the touring plans in the Unofficial Guide. They’ve gotten us through in the past, including during the most crowded times, and there’s no reason to believe they won’t work again. Put on your walkin’ shoes, mama, ‘cause we’re a’ headin’ out on foot!
Our first order of business was to find a hotel. The range at WDW is pretty wide. There’s the cheap ones, there’s the moderate ones, there’s the fancy expensive ones. The cheap ones, while having the advantage of price, tend to be the most kid-intense, and while the rooms aren’t terribly different from the most expensive, the hotels themselves have pretty much just basic amenities. So they’re okay pricewise, but they’re nothing special and they have a lot of kids running around (which makes a difference especially when you’re packing into a bus at the end of the day to get back to your hotel). On the other end, given how little time one will spend in one’s room, paying a lot just doesn’t make sense to me. Sure, being on the monorail for MK and Epcot is cool, but if you go to DHS or AK you’re back on a bus, so so much for that. The luxury resorts have great restaurants and character dining, but we could easily schlep over for the former if we wanted it, and we didn’t want the latter, so that was no attraction. So while I was telling the DDA folks that they could stay wherever they wanted, I was recommending a moderate hotel, and the one I was recommending was Port Orleans, which I stayed in ages ago and liked quite a bit. As it turned out, everyone else seems to have followed suit, so that’s where we’ll be. The moderate rooms are about what we pay for debate hotel accommodations, so they’re not terrible.
Next up was getting together on arrival. That one wasn’t so hard. The Downtown Disney area (formerly Pleasure Island) has plenty of restaurants and is easily accessible. Paradiso 37 was the one I chose. It looks casual, fancy drinks with fruit in them, tapas and the like. Sounded just about right, and they don’t take reservations, so we wouldn’t have to worry about when exactly to do what. If someone’s plane is late, so be it. Anyhow, that meet-up will kick things off on the Friday night.
Our next area of analysis was the park to start with. There are two schools of thought on this. One school says that MK is the purest Disney experience, so start with that. After all, MK has wall-to-wall E ticket attractions. I understand this philosophy, but I do not support it, especially if you’ve got noobs on the trip, or, for that matter, kids. If you start with MK, you’ve had the ultimate, and everything else, good as it is, sort of pales by comparison. Parks are not seen in the light of what they are themselves, but as compared to MK, and they inevitably are seen as lacking. They don’t have as many E ticket rides, they’re not as overwhelming, they’re not pure Disney, so they can appear second rate. On the other hand, the other parks, if seen in a vacuum, would blow away pretty much anybody. In fact, even comparing the other parks to one another, one would be hard-pressed to say this one is categorically better than that one. After much discussion on this on our trip listserver, we agreed not to start with MK.
My choice of a starter was Animal Kingdom for a couple of reasons. First, it’s an easy park to do in a day, so you’re not starting with a day of terrible exhaustion. After a little running around early in the day to take in the handful of E tix, it’s a mostly a lot of leisurely walking around taking in the animals and occasionally sitting down to watch a show or a movie. In fact, it closes at 5:00, so you couldn’t kill yourself if you wanted to. It’s also a great place to photograph, and an easy one, although for some reason pictures of the Tree of Life never seem to get it right. Whatever. We did have some discussion that O’C would forgo this park in favor of Cinderella’s autograph, but I think he’s gotten over that. After different initial plans, we decided to go for African buffet for dinner at the AK Lodge, which makes great sense after a day looking at lions and tigers and bears, or at least tigers. And Yetis. Might as well go to a restaurant where lions and tigers and bears (and Yetis) are on the menu.
Early to bed that night (sort of) in preparation for a long day coming up.
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