To plan or
not to plan that is the question!
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| source: Orange County Archives |
When we
book a Walt Disney world holiday, we have to plan just a little. Dates,
accommodation, dining reservations, special events etc, we cannot really escape
planning the details that put our trip together (and would we want to?)!
What I want
to talk about is itineraries! When you plan your Disney trip, do you create an
itinerary? Is it set in stone, every minute of every hour planned out to maximize
your time in the parks? Or, is it a little looser? A dining reservation over
here, maybe one or two must do extra magic hours? I have to admit, when I first
started travelling to Walt Disney World over 10 years ago, our itineraries
where set like cement! Though we never went as far as pencilling in the toilets
breaks, we had every day planned from start to finish. These days, things are
much more ‘free spirited’ but we still can’t help putting an itinerary together.
All this
being said, when I travelled to Orlando
The results
where mixed.
I know many
people who do not travel with itineraries, they just get up and go and always
seem to have an amazing time (it’s hard not
to enjoy yourself out there though isn’t it?) and their reports always make it
sound like they had it so easy every day. It felt far from easy. I actually
felt lost without my precious itinerary! As decisive as I can be by partner is
equally indecisive and it doesn’t
make a simple decision as ‘which park shall we go to today?’ any easier. I
started to panic that we might spend too much time in one place, not enough
time in another etc, even when it came to dining with no firm ideas we ended up
in the same place quite a few nights (not that I’m complaining, it was
delicious). It meant that when we finally switched to a thrown together plan (I’ll
get to that next) we finally got to eat at the new places we’d wanted to try
but too late in the holiday to go more than once!
I have a
wide variety of Disney planning tools that I use when planning a Disney
vacation and each one of these help me piece together my holiday. A variety of
dining reservations can be put together after browsing through menus, touring
plans that give me an idea of which parks to avoid on what days, and as much as
I have learnt from experience over the last 10 years, I still find tons of
helpful advice and new ideas on the forums. My days feel much easier when I
have a plan set in front of me. It’s not as set in stone as it used to be, but
just having it there takes away, some
stress.
By the 5th
day of our trip, I grabbed my park hours and started putting something
together. I pulled out a map of International Drive
It all
sounds a little OCD now I’m reading this post back but it really did make such
a difference. Having it all set out and ready meant we knew the night before were
we where off to the next day! What time we had to be up and out for opening and
could look forward to where we were going that night without spending 2 hours wondering
about where to go eat, only to settle for the same place again.
I always
feel as though I do and see more when I have a plan. That first trip back in 2002
was planned like a military operation, we didn’t stop from start to finish and
it was an amazing trip, but looking
back now, everything was so precise that we missed out on a lot. There is such
thing as over planning and we’re careful now not to let our plans take control
of our freedom. Maybe I should stop calling them plans altogether and start calling
them ‘guidelines’? Dining reservations can be moved around during the quieter
seasons and if you wake up one more morning and fancy going to Hollywood
Studios instead of Epcot then do that!
Are your
Disney travel plans set in stone or are you a free wanderer hopping on the
first but that pulls up each morning?
Until next
time,
Sarah
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