We started the morning of our third day in Magic Kingdom and headed to Hollywood Studios a little after noon.  For our family, Hollywood Studios holds the least interest.  The boys aren’t huge Star Wars fans and Tower of Terror is definitely out as a ride option.  (They do thrilling but not scary.)  But we have to balance that with the fact that their absolute favorite ride in all of Disney World is there, Toy Story Mania.  So skipping it entirely wasn’t an option.  We figured a half day would be fine. JB had used a birthday gift card to …

One of my regrets from our first trip to Disney was not spending enough time in Epcot.  I was pleasantly surprised at how interested the boys were in exploring the countries and how much time we could have spent there.  I wanted to avoid making this mistake again but with limited days and lots of ground to cover, I was left with roughly 8 hours there.  We arrived around 1:00 and planned to stay for Illuminations at 9:00.  That seemed like ample time to ride a few rides and wander around the countries.  But as they say, the best laid …

In order to fit in a full day at Animal Kingdom and still get to see all the nighttime shows in the other parks, we split our Animal Kingdom time into two days.  We spent about three and a half hours there in the morning on the second day of our trip and then returned for our last morning of the trip.  On our first visit, we had lunch reservations and FastPasses in Epcot for later in the day so we headed straight to Expedition Everest when we arrived at Animal Kingdom to try to take advantage of lower early …

Since Magic Kingdom has the most rides and the most ground to cover, I decided to use the Touring Plans website to map our a general path through the park.  I had never used it before and was really impressed.  I input our Fast Passes and lunch reservation times, told it what rides we wanted to ride, and it automatically calculated the best route to take through the park to maximize rides and minimize wait time and walking.  We are definitely not the type of family to follow a minute by minute schedule through Disney World, but I liked having …