We headed to Animal Kingdom on our third Disney day. After two days of speeding through lines at Universal with their Express Pass and two days of crawling through Disney lines, we decided to splurge and purchase Genie+ for our Animal Kingdom day. Our priority in Animal Kingdom was Avatar Flight of Passage and that wasn’t even available as part of Genie+. That ride had to be purchased as an Individual Lightning Lane at $20+ per person. There was no way we were paying for that so we opted to try to minimize our overall waiting by spreading out our …

On our second Disney day, we visited Epcot. One of my strongest memories from our first trip to Disney when the kids were 3 and 5 is of them running straight to the Epcot ball to get on line for Spaceship Earth. With no concept whatsoever of what the ride was, they just headed straight to the iconic landmark and got on line… and proceeded to be absolutely terrified of the dark ride and its creepy animatronic people. I seriously thought that was going to be our first and last ride of that entire Disney trip. But my how times …

After two great days at Universal, we headed over to Disney World. We had four days of park tickets (not hoppers) so planned one day per park. Based on the crowd calendars, there were two different options that had us hitting one of the recommended parks on each day. I told the boys to pick Magic Kingdom or Hollywood Studios for the first day and then the rest of the schedule fell into place based on the crowd calendars. They chose Hollywood Studios. Unfortunately the picture perfect weather that we had at Universal Studio was scheduled to take a drastic …

On our second Universal day, we went to Universal Studios Florida. Similar to Islands of Adventure, the park is situated around a lake, making navigation fairly easy. Some of the areas do extend further back from the lake, opening up a little opportunity to get turned around in the streets of New York and Minion Land, but overall it is still really well laid out. We decided to head counter-clockwise in this park, but this time it was not a ride calling our names but a character. As we peered down the streets of Hollywood, we spotted none other than …

We spent our first of two Universal days at Islands of Adventure. The park has 6 main lands – Marvel Super Hero Island, Toon Lagoon, Skull Island, Jurassic Park, Wizarding World of Harry Potter (Hogsmeade), and Seuss Landing. I loved the layout of the park, as everything was oriented in a circle around a lake. I don’t like when parks are sprawling with multiple offshoots because you can easily get lost in the different paths or miss an entire section of the park. With a circular layout, you really just needed to decide which direction to head in and go …