Introduction and Index
Welcome to Florida trip report number 6. If you don’t already know us, here we are in Hollywood Studios during this trip. We are:
Me, Michelle - Orlando / Disney / Universal / USA enthusiast, holiday
planner and trip report writer
DH, Mat - loves Disney and the US, designated driver in Florida, generally happy to go along with whatever I plan for these holidays
DD1, Seren, 12 - Disney and Harry Potter fan, selfie addict, lover of thrill rides and roller coasters
DD2, Freya, turned 11 on the trip - also both Disney and Harry Potter fan, free spirit, errs slightly towards team wimp like her parents
I didn't have time to do a pre-trip report for this trip because when the trip was booked I was really trying to finish off 2017's report which you can find
here, and then getting started on 2018's report which is
here.
So this trip came about while we were still on the last one in August. Mat in particular had struggled with the August heat and crowds and started talking about coming back in the winter next time. The idea of February half term came from somewhere and Mat was really keen to do it because it would be Freya’s birthday at the end of the trip. Seren has been lucky enough to have two birthdays at Disney World and he liked the idea of Freya being able to experience it too. We had also found the parks busier than we had hoped in August. We’d always travelled at the end of the Easter holidays before and not found the parks too crowded. Going at the end of August we’d had expectations that it would be quieter than the rest of the summer holidays because we’d heard that US schools would be back. In reality it felt as busy, if not busier, than our previous trips. We had light-heartedly come to the conclusion during the August holiday that we could deal with heat or crowds and not both, and so our future trips probably wouldn’t take place in August.
Flights and Accommodation
We booked our BA flydrive (Orlando flights and Avis car hire) while we were still at Disney and had six months to plan and save for the trip. We didn’t tell the girls, instead surprising them at Christmas. For us it did feel quite rushed, but we looked at it as a sneaky extra trip, with it only being a week and being so soon after the last one. We knew we wanted to have two days at Universal and visit all four Disney parks so we knew it would be full on. We also knew we wanted to stay at Universal because we love staying there. We had been so impressed with Sapphire Falls when we stayed there in August that it was a very easy decision to make the hotel our base for the week. What we hadn’t taken into account when we booked February half term was that it was Presidents Day weekend at the beginning of the trip. Having done some research, I knew it was going to be busy while we were there and we figured we could protect ourselves to a degree by visiting Universal over that weekend and buying Express Passes. We’ve had Express from staying at Universal hotels for our last four trips and wouldn’t want to visit the parks without them now, especially over a major US holiday. However, when I priced them up, it transpired it would cost more for the four of us to have Unlimited Express Passes for the two days we would be visiting the parks than if I just booked us one night at the Hard Rock (our favourite of the hotels that offer Unlimited Express) giving us two days worth of Express. It was only a couple of months before the trip that I investigated this. I tried to modify the Sapphire Falls booking, but when I priced up the last five nights it was coming up more expensive than the price we had booked all seven nights for when we originally booked. So I left the first booking intact and essentially we had two hotels booked for the Sunday night. We discussed not bothering to move to the Hard Rock, and just checking in to pick up the passes, but we love the hotel and how convenient the walk to the parks and CityWalk is, so we packed up a bag and had a little holiday within the holiday.
Beautiful Sapphire Falls:
Park Tickets
We knew we wanted two days at Universal so bought two day two park hoppers from Orlando Attractions. These were gate ready e-tickets posted to us and as usual Orlando Attractions were great. Universal tickets are really expensive (£821.60 in total) but this was the best price I could find for the tickets we wanted.
We went for 5 day Magic Your Way Disney tickets with park hopper, again best price I could find was through Orlando Attractions (£1460.00 total). We were originally only going to buy four days but the difference between four and five was really not much, just over £100 I think, so we decided to go to a park on the day we travelled home after all, figuring that we’d probably still have things we wanted to do in the parks at that point. I also found that adding on park hopper only cost about £50 more in total, and we weren’t expecting to spend a full day at Epcot. It’s our least favourite park so went for the park hopper thinking we could head over to another park once we’d had enough of Epcot. I bought e-tickets for Disney too and a voucher was emailed to me within 48 hours of purchase. This was a Will Call collection situation but instead I linked the confirmation number to some old Magic Bands we had which worked perfectly and we never went to Will Call for physical tickets.
ADRs
Initially I had a list of about ten of our favourite restaurants at Disney and CityWalk but I cut this right down because of how little time we had, reasoning that with only a week we wouldn’t want to be spending too much time sat in restaurants. Also, with no Dining Plan those Signature restaurants and character buffets in particular are so expensive and this was supposed to be a sneaky bonus trip. In the end we settled on Antojitos and The Cowfish at Universal, and Tusker House, Crystal Palace and Raglan Road at Disney. We can’t go to Orlando and not go to Raglan Road.
Rope Dropping
This trip report title had to involve rope dropping because it was such a big part of the holiday. For those who don’t know, the title is taken from a lyric from Road Trippin’ by my favourite band, Red Hot Chili Peppers.
Obviously we weren’t staying onsite and I made the planning error of not purchasing our Disney tickets until the 30 day FastPass day. I didn’t realise you had to have tickets to make FastPasses until I came to make the FP+s. So for our first couple of Disney days I was making FastPasses at about 28 days out while I waited for the e-ticket. In the event, I don’t think the extra couple of days mattered because I don’t think it’s generally possible to get Flight of Passage, Slinky Dog Dash or Mine Train FP+s at 30 days out, especially during a busy time of year like Presidents Day week. So without FastPasses for any of those three rides, it was always going to be the case that we would be rope dropping those three parks, and to a lesser extent Epcot and the Universal parks. I’m a big fan of easywdw.com and Josh always advises that to rope drop those three rides, you need to arrive by 7.45 am for a regular 9 am open. So this trip was not going to be for the faint hearted and the troops had been briefed about what was expected. We all knew it was going to be early starts, slightly unpleasant rope drops, long days and late nights because with only being there a week and having spent a lot on park tickets, we wanted to make the most of it. Then there was the fact that it was a busy week (spoiler alert, the entire week was busier than we even expected, probably the busiest week we’ve ever been in the parks). It would have been impossible with so little time and such high crowd levels to do everything. However, we knew we could still have loads of fun, and having been to Orlando so many times before, we decided to make sure we just did the things that were most important to us.
I am going to do highs and lows while the holiday is still very fresh in my mind, but then I’ll go back and finish August’s report as quick as possible before coming back to this one.
Thanks for reading along
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Index
Highs and Lows