We've been home from WDW less than a week, and we already have our next trip planned and booked! Actually, as I mentioned in my most recent trip report, we had it booked the night before we left for our recent Pop Century trip.
The preliminary details: Animal Kingdom Lodge Kidani Villas, one bedroom, savannah view, Saturday, November 1 through Saturday, November 8. Hubby has already declared he will spend a fair amount of his time on the balcony or patio enjoying the view, and while I also will spend some time there I will probably tour parks solo part of the time while he's relaxing.
We've never booked a trip this far out - we usually travel on RCI timeshare exchanges, and available weeks at WDW resorts usually don't show up until three or four months out. Thus, this is the first time we'll have the opportunity to make ADRs at the 180 day mark. Unfortunately, I can't forecast which parks we'll visit on each day since crowd estimates can hardly be considered reliable this far in advance, so I'm limiting our initial ADRs to resort restaurants, mostly at Animal Kingdom Lodge. They'll be so convenient on this trip where usually they are a good piece out of the way. We'll do 'Ohana around 8:30 one evening, hoping we can see the MK fireworks from our table, with the meal being the last item on that day's agenda. We'll do Boma one morning for breakfast; we've only had dinner there and are looking forward to seeing what their breakfast fare is like. We'll also have 5:30-ish ADRs for both Sanaa and Jiko, early enough to have dinner and then park hop someplace for the rest of the evening, and especially convenient for hubby if he spends his afternoons lounging on the savannah. Once we have a better handle on park crowds, I might make a lunch ADR or two at park restaurants that don't fill up fast. And there probably will be no Epcot ADRs at all because the Food and Wine Festival will be in progress and we absolutely adore cruising the booths all day long. Many of you reserve far enough in advance to make ADRs at the 180-day mark; how do you handle in-park ADRs when you don't know where you'll spend each day yet? Or do you just make the ADRs and go where you need to go to use them, crowds or no crowds?
If MNSSHP is still running November 2 and the crowds aren't forecast to be huge, we might get tickets. Or, if MVMCP has started before November 8, we might choose that instead. Or not. This particular week, being in between Halloween and the earliest beginnings of the winter holiday season at WDW, doesn't afford a lot of flexibility where the separate-admission parties are concerned.
We'll most likely fly into MCO and catch the Magical Express to AKL, which means that as much as I would like to spend a day exploring the new Diagon Alley expansion at Universal, it will probably need to wait till another trip. The good news is that we also have tentative plans to return to WDW yet again next February or March, and since I don't like to risk having a flight cancelled due to wintry weather I might try to talk hubby into making that trip on the Auto Train, which I love and he does not. That way we'll have a car and can easily leave the bubble for a day up the highway at the Universal parks. Either that, or we'll look into Mears transportation to and from Universal on one of those trips.
We've invited friends of ours along on the November trip. They've said they probably won't come along - the husband in that couple does not care for theme parks - but we hope they'll change their minds. If they do, we could book them an offsite timeshare to afford them a little privacy, or we could put them up on our sofa, since the AKL one-bedroom units have two bathrooms. I don't mind having our friends sleep on the sofa, but no way I am making four adults over 50 share one bathroom!
I do have a concern about Magic Bands. We already have one each (and could've had two each, but we had them keep the two gray ones that were waiting for us at Pop Century on our recent trip). However, the WDW website wants to give us not one, but TWO more for each of us - one for the AKL reservation, and a second because we have annual passes. How do you all handle this? It seems such a waste to have the Disney people send us a total of four more Magic Bands when we already have some. Is it possible to get them to cancel the new ones, or should we just customize the darn things and forget about it?
Anyway...ADR day is May 5 and FastPass+/online check-in day is September 2. As you can see below, some Mickey Mail has already arrived. I've got the cute little schedule magnet on the fridge to remind us of the fun that's waiting for us this fall.
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