Planning for Disney: Developing an Itinerary

 

 The start of our trip is fast approaching and I'm in full Disney Planning Mode! Those who have been privy to this particular penchant of mine will not be surprised to hear that I am currently using fourteen different spreadsheets to sort out this planning. Why do you need FOURTEEN spreadsheets you might ask? Well, have you ever spent $1,000 a day on tickets just to have ten people standing in a central plaza saying, "What do you want to do?" "I don't know. What do you want to do?" Yeah, neither have I. That's cuz I have spreadsheets.

 When you plan out your Disney trip in advance, it gives you the freedom to enjoy your time in the park without the mental exhaustion of trying to figure out what's next, analysis paralysis we call it in my family. I'm not tied to my plan for the most part (we do have some important reservations), but it gives me a guide so I'm not having to figure things out in the moment. I find that exhausting! What do these spreadsheets look like you might wonder? Well I'm glad you asked!

 This is the layout for my day-plan sheets. I put rides in bold that are eligible for Lightning Lane Multipass or Single Pass. I use italics for things we should skip if the lines are 20 minutes or more and come back to them later. Finally, I underlined anything we should drop from the itinerary altogether if we are running behind schedule. The bright purple highlight is a reservation we can't miss. This is a laid back version of my earlier park-planning system. Yeah, you read that right. Back when I took my oldest on his first trip (19 years ago when he was 6), I had our 4-day trip planned out completely in 15-minute increments. It was going swimmingly the first day when we showed up for early entry and headed right to Dumbo. You see, Dumbo was his favorite movie as a preschooler and I was so excited to bring him on it. Then I noticed that the Matterhorn had just opened and had no line so we could just walk on! "What fun!" I thought... We didn't go on another ride until after 4pm that day. Turns out Mom's spreadsheet doesn't know everything and Yeti's jumping out at you while going a million miles an hour on a bobsled through a mountain squashes your interest in rides at all. 

 I've come a long way in my trip planning and spreadsheet design since then! For one thing, I've come to realize that not everyone has the same interests or wants to do the same things. The example above is from our Animal Kingdom Day Plan. I, for one, will not be going on Expedition Everest or Dinosaur as they would seriously damage my body. The kids, though, would love those rides and I want them to get the chance to experience them! So, they'll be heading to the rides while I collect some Wilderness Explorer badges! Hey, everyone is a kid in Disney World!

                 

       

 The most important aspect of this trip is making memories with my family. Sadly, memories are having a really hard time sticking in my head lately. I do, though, have a very visually based memory so pictures are ideal for me. One of the best, most important add-ons we have for our trip is the Memory Maker package. This allows me to download EVERY photopass photo we have taken during our trip. Yes, it will probably annoy the crud out of my family to have to stop every time we see a photographer, but it'll be worth it when I have something to look back on and say, "Look! We did that!" We purchased this upgrade on our last trip as well, but didn't figure out until halfway through our last day in our last park that they had all the photopass locations available on the map in the app! So now I can build these pictures into our itinerary so we don't miss them. We can take a few on our way or in between things and not have to spend a bunch of time hunting them down. Now I just have to coach our group on how to "group up" for a picture quickly!

 As I'll discuss further tomorrow, I'm realizing that I'm going to have to be conscious of my mental as well as my physical capabilities on this trip. With that in mind, a fair amount of my planning was designed with the goal of my husband being able to step in and take over if my brain is on the fritz. One of the things I can't plan in advance is the usage of our Lightning Lane Multipasses while we're in the parks. You see, with these passes you can book three rides in advance, but the rest of the rides will need to be booked in the park, a new one each time you've swiped into one of your booked ones. How do I tell my husband which one to book next when I have no idea what will be available? A decision matrix of course! With a decision matrix, you are posed a simple question followed by what to do if the answer is one thing or another. In this case, I start with "Tiana?" that means, are there any available Lightning Lanes for Tiana's Bayou Adventure? If so, grab them! If not, are there any Lightning Lanes for Jungle Cruise available before 3pm? And on it goes. Once we've either ridden or gotten a reservation for something, you just skip over it. No more in the moment thinking or deciding necessary! I have officially recorded my brain for my husband to follow if I can't.

Here's the Thing: Will this trip be everything I dreamed or expected it would be when the kids were little? No. Will it be better? Maybe? This opportunity is a gift from God and I am not going to waste it on indecision and forgotten priorities. Will we stick strictly to my itinerary? Definitely not. Will it give us an idea of what to do next so we aren't looking at each other blankly and no one wants to make a decision? I hope so!