Our next trip to WDW will be a special one for my 30th birthday and we will also be celebrating some other stuff with this trip. My wife and I aren't "let's eat somewhere special type people". We are more "let's do something ridiculous" type people. We were trying to decide what to do on my actual birthday and couldn't really come up with anything. Then the idea came to us...If we can't pick one favorite thing or park to do let's try to do as much of our favorite things as possible!
The plan is pretty simple. Hit all 4 parks in one day and ride at least two rides at each park. We also want to use some of the more fun forms of transportation. So our general plan is this:
1. Take the bus from the Beach Club to Animal Kingdom in the morning. We typically find Animal Kingdom to be the least crowded buses.
2. From Animal Kingdom take the bus straight to Hollywood Studios.
3. From Hollywood Studios take the boat to Epcot. (this may not be the quickest but we love taking the boat)
4. From Epcot take the monorail to Magic Kingdom (again this may not be the quickest way there but we felt we needed to take a ride on the monorail on a day like this)
We aren't too sure yet how we will plan out fastpasses and which rides we do. We aren't sure if it's better to just use 3 fastpasses as quickly as possible in Animal Kingdom and then make additional fastpasses for other parks as we go. Or maybe to wait to use fastpasses for the middle of the day so we could get on some better rides at other parks.
I'm sure many of you have done a day like this! Any tips?
I've done this twice, solo, and I do indeed have some advice!
1. Your park order looks good to me--I don't think there's a
wrong order, but this is the same order I did on my more recent four park day, for some of the same reasons.
2. BUT, as someone else has mentioned, morning buses for AK are probably going to be the
most crowded this time around. Decide whether you want to ropedrop FoP and/or N'avi River Journey. I did that and it added at least an hour and a half to my morning in my efforts to get to the park gates ahead of opening time--aka an hour and a half less sleep. If Pandora isn't that important to you (or if you can see it on another day), you could probably walk right on rides like Dinosaur and Expedition Everest at rope drop, without having to show up particularly early.
3. I would recommend scheduling out your day and deciding on a "drop dead" time by which you
have to leave each park. As long as you stay on top of it the four park schedule is not difficult, but if you lag on the first two parks you're going to create a problem for yourself. Always allow an hour for park-to-park transfer; it rarely takes that long but scheduling it that way means you'll have pleasant surprises rather than unpleasant ones.
4. Create a short list of priorities for each park, with the understanding that you probably won't do all of them. Schedule your AK fastpasses for as early in the morning as possible, and refresh your FP selections to try to move them up as you finish them. Refresh
MDE constantly on the buses between parks to snap FP for your next stop. I was able to get day-of fastpasses for Toy Story Mania, Tower of Terror,
and the Frozen ride--it can be done!
5. Stay flexible. If you can't get a FP moved up to a time slot ahead of your drop dead time, ditch it and move on. If a line's too long, ditch it and move on.
6. Sneak in your breaks at meal time and on quiet rides. Carousel of Progress may not be on your MK must-do list, but it sure is twenty straight minutes of sitting in the dark.
7. A word of caution: others have advised, and I would have advised in the past, that you should start at whatever park opens the earliest and end at whichever closes the latest. While that's a very practical approach and gives you a safety net if you lag on your expected schedule, it may (if you're park commandos who don't know what's good for you,
like I was on this last trip) lead you to think that it's a good idea to go go go from the moment the first park opens to the moment the last park closes. If you have EMH on either end and AK opens at 8:00 and MK closes at midnight, that is
sixteen uninterrupted hours of park time. Do not do sixteen uninterrupted hours of park time. I did that and I was sick for a week afterward. Even if EMH is available to you, I suggest that you build your schedule to be accomplished in ten hours or less.