Helpful Tips

       First off, let me share some things that we did to prepare for our trip. This made our trip so much easier and allows us to make the most out of our time each day. While you can wing it, it does help to plan if you know what park you are going to. Our plan was to go to Epcot on Saturday and Hollywood Studios on Sunday. We also talked about what our must do's were at the park.

       Parks: For both days, we bought Genie+, I have mixed feelings about it but for the two parks that we went to it definitely made it worth it. If you are staying onsite, you can make Genie+ choices right at 7am and you don't have to be in a park. Meaning, while we were boarding and finding our seats we both were trying to snag lighting lanes and the virtual queue for Guardians. We made sure that both of us had the My Disney Experience (MDE) app and that we were linked together. Also we made sure to buy Genie+ BEFORE 7am so we wouldn't have to do it when we were making our choices. 

        Hotel: We stayed at Art of Animation. This resort has been on my bucket list for a while now. I chose it for its theming but also because of access to the skyliner which meant that our travel time was shorter since we did not have to wait for a bus. To save time, I made sure to check us in online using the MDE app. I put our check in time a little after our flight landed. Even though I knew our hotel was not going to be ready, I did this so that we didn't waste any time waiting in line when we got there. 

Saturday

      We caught the earliest flight we could at 7:15 and landed in MCO around 8:30 am. We took a lyft from the airport straight to our hotel. To catch a lyft from the airport is easy, in the app it allows you to pick the terminal and the bay number to pick you up from. When we got to the hotel, we checked our bags at the front and headed off to catch the skyliner. This saved tons of time as we didn't have to make sure we timed it correctly to catch the bus. By riding the skyliner we only had to make one stop transfer stop to get to Epcot.

       Rides: We got to the park around 10:30 am and started walking around admiring the Festival of the Arts. We were lucky enough to snag both a lighting lane (LL) and get into the virtual queue for Guardians. Our queue time wasn't until around 4 and our LL was around 1:30 so we hopped on the app to see what rides had the lowest wait time. A trick with Genie+ is that you can make a second reservation either after you've scanned in your first or two hours after opening time. Therefore, at 11 we were able to snag a LL for Soarin. Since we did this trick, we were able to have two LL for most of the day. This allowed us to ride Soarin, Seas with Nemo, Test Track and Mission: SPACE all before our Guardians LL. After we rode Guardians, we walked around World Showcase with a stop in Mexico. If you know you know. Our last rides of the day were Figment and Spaceship Earth.

        Food: We had lunch at Expressions cafe (mobile order) and had some delicious pizza. A stop at Figment’s Inspiration Station at The Odyssey to have the Rainbow Cider Flight ($10) and the Rainbow Cake with Freeze Dried Skittles ($4.75). I would fly down to Epcot just to get that cake again before the festival ends if I could, it was so delicious. It was so good we circled back around and got one more piece before we left. In Mexico, we got a frozen margarita and some chips and queso! 

        We had called the front desk around lunch time to see if our luggage could get taken to our room since I had gotten a notification that our room was ready and we found out that it had already been taken there! Talk about a game changer, it was so nice not having to make sure to grab our luggage when we got back after being at the park all day. We headed home around 8 because we were exhausted (we had been up since 4 am) and it started to rain a little. We thought about staying for Harmonious but it wasn't a deal breaker for us and we wanted to make sure we would be well rested for Sunday. We caught the Skyliner back home and grabbed a bit from the cafeteria and headed to the room.

Sunday

        We had decided the night before to take it a little more relaxed and not rope drop Hollywood Studios. However, we did still wake up and book our lighting lanes at 7am. Our must dos for HS was Tower of Terror & Rock 'n' Roller Coaster. We also had a reservation for Sci-Fi Dine-In Theater for lunch around 2:30. We mobiled ordered breakfast and caught the skyliner over to Hollywood Studios. FYI the skyliner for Art of Animation is shared with Pop Century. I'm not gonna lie that line seemed crazy long but I promised you it moved fast and we were off the the park in no time.

         We were able to get a LL for Tower of Terror and then our plan was to head to Rock 'n' Roller Coaster after. Unfortunately, Rock 'n' Roller Coast was closed for majority of the day but we held out hope it would come back up before we had to leave for our flight. We were going to do as much as we could until we had to leave around 4:30/5:00 to head to the airport. We rode Tower of Terror three times, Toy Story Mania, Star Tours, Mickey and Minnie's Runaway Railway all before our lunch at Sci-Fi.

       If you haven't gone to Sci-Fi before I would definitely try it out. At Sci-Fi you'll enter the Hollywood-style soundstage as a classic car hop guides you to your very own qutomo-booth or table. You'll find scrumptious items on the menu and scary clips on the screen: attacking aliens, marauding mummies, rampaging robots and more! This is a family favorite to go to when we go to Hollywood Studios. To use, it's the best sit down meal in a park for the price. We both got burgers and fries, with an appetizer of onion rings. It was delicious and we were stuffed aftwards. Something to keep in mind is that you could be sat with another party if there are only two of you but you will still feel like you have your own space in the car. 

       After lunch, we had time for one or two more rides, Rock 'n' Roller coaster was still down but we figured that we would head that way and ride Tower of Terror one more time in hopes that it might open. Let me tell you the Disney God's were looking down at use because right when we got at the entrance of Tower of Terror, Bethany saw that Rock 'n' Roller coaster had a wait of only 30 minutes, which meant it was open! At that moment, we ditched ToT and headed straight to the coaster. While we did not run, we did a super fast walk towards the coaster. We were able to use our LL passes that were given to use earlier and walk straight through. However, it broke down AGAIN right when we were getting close to a row. We decided to wait it out and we waited until the last possible minute to ride it and guess what, we freaking made it! It was the best way to end the trip.

        Finally, we headed back to the hotel, picked up our luggage and headed to the airport. We got there in plenty of time and MCO security was not as bad as it could have been. It only took use about 20 minutes to get through. We got to our terminal in plenty of time and were able to grab some dinner and reflect on how awesome of a trip it was. Will I do it again, 100%. Any trip to Disney is always worth it no matter how short to long it is!