The Magic Kingdom - 10/20/2014

[Voicetek]

So my wife and I got back from our week-long Florida vacation yesterday. While we were down in Florida, we visited the Magic Kingdom and also Hollywood Studios. This trip report will just be for the Magic Kingdom. If I feel like it, I might add another one for Hollywood Studios...we will see.

Ok, so we bought our tickets a few weeks ago so we could go ahead and link them with our MagicBands and schedule our FastPasses. We pretty much were able to get everything we wanted, which I figured would be the case for a Monday in October. On that day were were going, they were not doing Mickey's Halloween Party (Thank God), so the park was open from 9 til 11. Unfortunately, the night before we were supposed to go, I could not get to sleep. We had planned on getting up at 8 and getting to the park around 10 and enjoying a good, solid 13 hours in the park. Well...since I couldn't get to sleep, we decided to sleep in just a little bit more. We ended up getting to the park around noon (with me getting 3 hours of sleep, fun stuff!).

So yeah, we get to the park around noon and while on our way to the park, I'm going on and on about how light the crowds should be and how we should be able to ride anything we want and heck, we may not even need to use our FastPasses. Why was I so confident? Well, a couple of reasons. First, I actually visited the park before in October with 2 of my friends. Guess what we did? We rode everything we wanted...multiple times. Second, I did my research. There were numerous articles written by park goers on which times of the year were the best times to go. Third, I downloaded the My Disney Experience app a couple of weeks before we left and monitored the wait times every day for the various theme parks. The average wait times - even on the weekends - were around 20-30 minutes. Not too bad really for Disney. So yeah, I was feeling pretty confident in my knowledge of crowds and wait times in October. Then we actually got the park. Just 3 words: Oh - my - gosh! I had never, ever, ever, ever seen the park so crowded in all of my visits. I have been there in March during spring break, and in the summer time in August and even those times were not as crowded as the day we arrived at the park. It was so packed you couldn't move. It looked as if every child in the United States was there on that day. I just kept repeating to myself, "It's a Monday...in October." It's like I couldn't comprehend the crowds. I immediately got on my Disney app and checked the times. The waits were averaging 50-70 minutes. I couldn't believe it! Thank God for FastPass was all I was thinking.

Well, we just had to make the best of the day. I told my wife that we were probably going to have to choose the rides carefully, only waiting for the ones we really wanted to ride. Then if we had time, we'd ride the others. I'm not going to go into complete detail about every ride we rode or when we rode them, but I will give you a rundown of the rides we did ride. We had FastPassed Journey of the Little Mermaid dark ride, Splash Mountain, and Peter Pan's Flight and thank God for that too because those rides had ridiculous wait times that day. Other attractions we managed to get in were Pirates of the Carribean, Small World, Buzz Lightyear's Space Ranger Spin, People Mover, Tiki Room, Mickey's Philharmagic, and yes, we even managed to squeeze a ride in on the new Seven Dwarf's Mine Train. We chose to pass up some of the other rides like Jungle Cruise, The Haunted Mansion, Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, and Space Mountain. We like those rides, but we like the other more and we had just ridden those last year.

Now let me tell you a story about how we managed to squeeze in a ride on the new Mine Train ride. First, the ride has a lot of down time - for real! I know at least once or twice a day when I was checking my Disney app before our trip, the ride was listed as "Closed." So when we went to check it out, it was closed again. Really? No one knew when or if it would open, so most people had gotten out of line. They had the entrance blocked off and there were just a handful of people willing to spend their time at a $100 per day theme park waiting for this ride to open. I convinced my wife that this would be a good opportunity should they re-open the ride. Since the average wait time that day was around 70-80 minutes, if we could be so lucky to be there when they re-opened the ride, it would essentially be a walk on! So, I talked her into it with the promise that we'd only wait for 15 minutes and move on. Well wouldn't you know it. That was our lucky day! Right at the end of our 15 minutes, the ride started back up and they opened the entrance. We walked right on that ride! So my thoughts about the ride? It was nice, but way too short. There is no way I'd wait 2 hours for that ride. And I was a little disappointed that there was only one indoor scene with animatronics. I feel like there needed to be at least one more indoor section that your rolled through. All in all it was a fun ride, but too short and lacking the story that the old dark ride had. It's a nice addition, but there are other rides at the park that are better.

We happened to get lucky one more time before the night was over. We had just ridden Buzz Lightyear's Space Ranger Spin, and took a ride on the People Mover and were getting ready to experience the Stitch attraction when I decided to check the wait times on my app one last time. I noticed that Splash Mountain had only a 10 minute wait. How was this possible? Just then I heard a parade running. Oh yeah, everyone was watching the parade. My wife and I decided to bypass Stitch and make a mad dash around the park to get to Splash Mountain. Since Main Street was closed, we had to go around the entire park loop. Through Fantasy Land, over through Libery Square and up around by the Tom Sawyer's Island attraction. We ran, and ducked, and squeezed through crazy crowds and finally, at last, we arrived at Splash Mountain. A walk on! What a great ride to finish out the day.

After that we headed towards the exit as people were literally funneled through a teeny, tiny path - the only path they had opened for people to exit. Everything else was roped off for the fireworks. Once we got through the bulk of the crowed we ducked into the shops and used those as a walkway to the exit. A quick glimpse at a few of the fireworks, and it was onto the monorail to start our journery to our car.

All in all we spent around 11 hours in the park, and didn't manage to do everything. It was the most crowded I had ever seen it. I'm wondering if perhaps there was some kind of event going on that week? Heck, it wasn't even a Mickey's Halloween Party night. Maybe people are getting wise to the off season months and choosing to go then? Who knows. Next time though, I think I'll try December again. That, by far, has been the best time I've ever visited there. The first week of December - Nice weather, and short waits. Hopefully it's still like that! Our day in the park was hot, crowded, and crazy, but we still had a good time. We always have a good time at Disney!

[Skyrider]

I love going to Disney too but have never gone off season. I agree with everything you said about the new Seven Dwarfs Mine Car Ride. We had two Fast Passes for it and would never wait 2 hours for it. Nice ride but needs to be longer and an extra cave.

[TTD-120-420]

Mickey's Not So Scary Halloween Parties have been very thin crowded all month. It's due to the hard ticket, but it was sold out a few days ago and was still not that busy.

[XGatorHead 8904]

Glad you had fun, even with the crowd! And it sounds like you got very lucky with Mine Train.

My wife and I decided to bypass Stitch and make a mad dash around the park to get to Splash Mountain.

Any decision to bypass Stitch's Great Escape is a wise one, especially to replace it with Splash Mountain.

I'm really looking forward to going down there in December, the week of New Year's. I know it will be insanely busy, but it will be the first, and possibly only chance for the forseeable future, that we'll get to be there as a family around Christmas time. (I was there in December once as a kid, and with the new department I work in requiring everyone to work every day in December and not take vacation days, who know when/if we'll get another chance. I already had the vacation days scheduled before we were transferred so they were grandfathered in for this year!)

[Gabe]

The ongoing Hub refurb will really open up that area of the park when complete. During parade times, there is also a good bottleneck in Frontierland around the rafts to Tom Sawyer Island. Its caused by the Splash/Thunder juxtaposition and the fact that ingress/egress isn't the best around there. Hopefully Disney opens this area up as well.

[RailRider]

As some may have noticed, I plug easywdw.com whenever Disney planning is discussed. Josh at EasyWDW has the best crowd calendars around for Disney World. Here is his recommendation for Magic Kingdom for 10/20

Magic Kingdom: 9am – 12am (Not Recommended)

Magic Kingdom is going to be busy today. Mondays are usually the second busiest day of the week at the Magic Kingdom, second to only Saturdays, for a variety of reasons. First, a lot of people travel over the weekend and visit Magic Kingdom on their first full day. In most instances, that day is Monday. Second, Mondays often feature longer hours, Wishes Fireworks, and Main Street Electrical Parade, when other days during the week have shorter operating hours and don’t offer the Electrical Parade. Anyone who wants to see the evening entertainment will have to visit on a day when it’s offered, like most Saturdays and Mondays. You can do okay if you arrive at the gate by 8:30am and tour efficiently in the morning, but 11am – 9pm is going to be busier than any day this week other than Saturday. The late night is also a viable time to tour as most families will leave shortly after Wishes, if they even make it that far. Head to Tomorrowland after 10pm and Fantasyland after 11pm to find much shorter waits than the afternoon.

By the way the most recommended park for the day was Hollywood Studios.

All in all Im glad you had a good, even if busy time.

Quoted from easywdw.com

Edited October 27, 2014 by RailRider

[Voicetek]

Dang I wish I had checked out that site. We did Magic Kingdom on Monday and Hollywood Studios on Thursday. Sounds like we should have swapped the days. Oh well.

[RailRider]

Hollywood Studios: 9am – 7pm (Not Recommended)

With no evening entertainment at Magic Kingdom, short hours at Magic Kingdom, no evening Extra Magic Hours anywhere, and nothing special happening at Epcot or Animal Kingdom, Hollywood Studios is going to be busier than recommended days during the week. Plus, it’s later in the week, which means most people on a weeklong vacation will already have visited Magic Kingdom and Epcot and they’ll be looking to spend a day at one of Disney World’s less popular theme parks. With nothing specific drawing people to the Studios, it’s not going to be crazy crowded, but it is going to be busier than other recommended days during the week and should be avoided if possible.

[jdawg1998]

Honestly, Magic Kingdom is always crowded. It does get 17+ million guests yearly after all. It's pretty ridiculous how many people go, especially knowing how expensive it is. That's why whenever my family goes, we give ourselves four open days to go to parks. If we didn't do everything at MK one day, we will usually go back after a short day at HS. Utilizing FastPasses doesn't even help us at all most of the time since we go during the summer, so we brave the lines. The good thing about Disney World queues is that they are fun, interactive, and part of the ride itself. Waiting doesn't phase me at Disney; same with Universal.

At least you guys had fun. I remember the last time I went to Magic Kingdom - I slept a grand total of 4 or so hours due to excitement, but I managed to have a great day. I recommend going to Universal now!

[Voicetek]

If we go back down there any time soon and do another theme park, more than likely we will give Islands of Adventure a shot. I don't think they'll ever be a time we'll go down to Florida without doing Magic Kingdom, but we will probably check out Universal too. However, I don't know when the next time we'll be down there will be. We probably won't do another theme park vacation next year since we've done them the past few years in a row. I promised my wife if we did a theme park vacation again this year, that we could try something new next year. So we will just have to see.

[kikid74]

An increasing number of schools are taking off a full week for Fall break. My kids' school switched from a 4-day weekend last year to a full week this year.

[Voicetek]

I don't think anyone needs a full week off school for fall break just two months after returning from summer break and just a month out from Thanksgiving. I worked in an afterschool program with elementary school kids while I was going through college. I was contantly surprised at the number of days they got off during the year as well as the number of early dismissals. One year one school gave the kids Halloween off. Another year one school gave the kids the whole week off for Thanksgiving. It seemed like just about every other Friday there was a school with an early dismissal. And God forbid there was the slightest dusting of snow on the ground, if there was, the schools shut down like it was some kind of nuclear winter.

Now I'm not against giving kids a break now and then, but there is a limit. Schools now adays seem to be pushing that limit.