Return to the Laughing Place - August 2017 Pre Trip Report

[rich2820]

Itinerary

OK, so it’s now over a month since we got back, so the pre-trippie has turned into a post-pre-trippie. Anyway, I’ll finish this off as quickly as I can so I can get on with the fun part – the actual trip report.

For me there are several factors that come into play when I put together an itinerary for our Florida trips. First, a couple of things that might have made a big difference didn’t happen after all. Had we decided to stay at a Universal hotel for part of our trip, or had we hired a car for a few days in the middle as I’d once intended, our Universal parks days and Kennedy Space Centre day would have been grouped together. Since that didn’t happen I was free to plan our days as we wished across our two-week stay. For this I was mostly guided by the ‘crowd calendar’ on touringplans.com. We also wanted to visit Universal a bit later in the trip in an effort to avoid the crowds, especially as we weren’t going to buy Express Passes (too stingy) or stay in one of the Universal resorts for free Express Passes (too much hassle). By our second week in Orlando most US schoolchildren would be back at school so I planned to do 2 out of 3 of our Universal days then.

I started off with a rough plan of how we would spend our days and then waited until 180 days (+10) to book our ADRs. After that I had to tweak the plan a little, mainly due to the constraints of Be Our Guest’s limited availability. All of our other restaurants were available on the days that we wanted them.

Putting together the itinerary is my job and I enjoy it, but I also feel the pressure of wanting everything to work out right and for everyone to be happy. So I printed out a list of all of the attractions and got everyone to put a tick against the ones they wanted to experience, and a cross against those that they didn’t want to do. From this I worked out how many days we’d spend at each park and used the list to work out customised touring plans for each day on touringplans.com. If this all seems a bit extreme and over-planned to you, you’re probably right but I enjoy it and it builds the excitement for everyone else too. We try not to stick too rigidly to our daily plans but knowing which attractions we’re going to and roughly when we’re going on them cuts out most of the faffing and arguments for us. Not to mention the fact that using a touring plan almost always cuts down on wait times at the attractions.

Absolutely in no circumstance whatsoever will we wait this long!

[rich2820]

ADRs and Dining

Eating at Disney restaurants has become one of the highlights of our Florida trips and with having the Dining Plan every time it has given us the opportunity to eat at a fair few of the table service restaurants on Disney property. We planned which restaurants we wanted to eat at in much the same way as we planned which attractions we wanted to experience. I wrote out a list of all of the restaurants we’ve eaten at previously and asked everyone to put a tick next to each one they definitely wanted to eat at again and a cross next to those they definitely didn’t want to eat at. In addition I came up with some suggestions of new places to try. At this point we had a list of around 15 or 16 restaurants, which was obviously too many but it gave us flexibility. We always plan the places we want to be and then choose a restaurant in that place, rather than vice versa. The only exception to this is Be Our Guest which we decided to make a priority. So the final list, having slotted restaurant into our daily itinerary, was:

Cape May Café breakfast
Crystal Palace breakfast
Cape May Café dinner
Trattoria al Forno
Be Our Guest
Yak & Yeti
Tusker House
Sci-Fi Dine-In
Teppan Edo
Tokyo Dining
‘Ohana
Chef Art Smith's Homecomin'
Hoop-Dee-Doo Musical Revue (2 TS credits)

Out of all of these the ones that are new to us are Trattoria al Forno, Yak & Yeti, Teppan Edo, Chef Art Smith's Homecomin' and the Hoop-Dee-Doo Musical Revue. I would have preferred to try a few more new ones but everyone has their favourites.

When our ADR day (180 days +10) came around and we made our bookings the only restaurant I had a problem with was Be Our Guest. I had to change the day and time of this meal, and consequently tweak the itinerary to fit it in, but seeing as this was one that everyone definitely wanted I thought it was worthwhile making the changes.

As our countdown approached single figures certain Stitch-obsessed members of the family decided they’d like to have breakfast with Lilo and Stitch at ‘Ohana. If only they’d decided this sooner because, alas, at this short notice there was no availability at ‘Ohana for breakfast during our entire trip. We’d have to stick with plan A and the Cape May character breakfast instead.