FastPass Day

Monday was our FastPass day, so I'm writing this a few days after the fact, but I didn't want to jump the gun with my Walt Disney Wednesday post.  I'm glad I checked the countdown on my phone, because I originally thought our FastPass day was Tuesday, so I would have done it a day late.  This wouldn't have been the end of the world, but we might not have gotten everything we wanted when we wanted.

Before the actual FastPass day, Bryan and I spent some time figuring out what we wanted and when.  Silly me, I thought this would be a simple enough activity that would take half hour, forty-five minutes tops.  Yeah, that's definitely not what happened.  When it comes to planning things, I need to be able to move things around, so I got colored sticky notes from the dollar store and arranged them on Bryan's wall in his apartment by date and time.  This gave us the ability to move things around to when we wanted them without erasing or crossing things out.

As I wrote things out and tried to figure out when we wanted to do them, Bryan had a map out on his phone (and another one on my phone), figuring out what attractions were close to each other.  The original plan for our first day in Animal Kingdom involved us zigzagging across the park, which didn't seem like the best use of our time.  This especially bothered Bryan who was determined to find a way to maximize our time.  He was a man on a mission, it was great (but also a little frustrating).  Due to this, we kept moving things around to find a way that got us all the rides we wanted, at times we wanted.  It was a mess.  Thankfully, since we had everything on sticky notes, we were able to move things with ease.  In the end, I was exhausted, cranky, and my legs were killing me.  We had a general idea as to when we wanted to ride each ride.  Of course, the times weren't guaranteed because it would be whenever the FastPasses were available, but we wanted to have a general idea.  We also started talking about some of the quick service food places we wanted to eat.  After about two hours worth of work, we had a plan, and we only changed it up a little bit after that.

Monday rolled around, and my original plan was to get up super early and get to work around 6:45ish so I could do our FastPasses, and then I would just do stuff at school for the next hour until students arrived.  Thankfully, Mother Nature was on my side, and originally we had a two hour delay, but it was changed to a snow day.  This meant I could do our FastPasses from home, which was even better.  Let me start out by saying that FastPass day is incredibly stressful!  It was a whirlwind.  Instead of going day by day, I decided to hit all the big ticket, hard to get FastPasses first, which meant I was jumping from day to day, from park to park like a crazy person.  Then, I went back and got the smaller FastPasses that are much easier to get.  It was insane.  I also kept skipping over one day for some random reason, so I had to go back and fix all of that. 

The one thing that I absolutely hated was the tier system in Hollywood Studios.  For those of you who are unfamiliar with how FastPasses work, at Animal Kingdom, Hollywood Studios and Epcot there is a tier system where the most popular rides are considered tier one, while the rest of the FastPass attractions are considered tier two.  When you first reserve FastPasses, you can only reserve one from tier one and two from tier two.  Once you've used all three, you can book more from whatever is left.  With the exception of Star Tours, pretty much all of the rides at Hollywood Studios is tier one, which means you have to choose between Slinky Dog Dash, Toy Story Mania, Alien Swirling Saucers, Tower of Terror or Rock'n'Roller Coaster for tier one, which is an absurd amount for one tier.  Then, there weren't very many attractions we wanted for tier two because I keep reading that FastPasses for shows really isn't necessary.  This leaves a lot that we want to do for Extra Magic Hours, but I'll talk about that in a few weeks when I write about Hollywood Studios.

Overall, Bryan and I are pleased with our FastPass selections.  I'm getting more and more excited about our trip.  We're less than two months from our trip, and everything is starting to fall into place.

Because Christmas is on a Wednesday next week, I won't be doing a Walt Disney Wednesday post.  My goal is to have a post a few days later about planning a vacation in general, but I need Bryan's help for that (he just doesn't know that yet).  So keep an eye out for that post.