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Whaaaat? A getaway to Walt Disney World without kids? Yup. You read that right. I have previously stated, I am a shameless Disney adult and you can judge me all you want but I know what I like and it’s the D…Disney of course! My husband, Brandon, had a work conference in Orlando M-W and I decided to tag along W-M and make a long weekend out of it. It was a much needed vacation (although there was not a ton of relaxing involved lol) to just have some time for the two of us. Here’s everything you need to know about spending 3 days at Walt Disney World (WDW).
The Basics
Getting there: Like I said before, Brandon had a conference that ended Wednesday and I joined him. Brandon caught an uber from his conference hotel to our Disney hotel but I had to figure my way from the airport. Now, WDW used to have the Magic Express which was a complementary bus service form the Orlando airport to your WDW resort hotel. That has now been replaced by The Sunshine Flyer, which is basically the same thing except you have to pay for it ($17) and book separately. No big deal though compared to the $60+ uber. No thank you, ma’am. They were awesome as far as timing. You simply put your flight details online and the bus comes at the right time. You also get email and text reminders and time updates. My flight was delayed and the bus followed my timing. It was really easy to navigate and a great way to get you to the property without costing an arm and a leg. I mean, who wants to blow the bank before vacay has even started?
Our hotel: Brandon and I stayed in the All Star Music Resort which is one of WDW’s value resorts. Aka cheap(er) lol. Honestly, there are muuuuuuuch nicer hotels on Disney property, but, since we were going hard in the parks and mostly just using the hotel for resting, sleeping and showering, it worked for us. Ultimately, the room was clean and air conditioned and there was a cafeteria open until 11:00 pm. All we needed. Another BIG PERK of staying at a WDW resort on property, is the bus system. WDW has buses that come regularly to take you to all of the parks as well as Disney Springs. They do not have hotel to hotel bus service but if you want to go to another hotel you can hop on any bus to any park and get on a bus going the hotel of your choice!
Itinerary
I’ll talk through all the rides and all the food in another blog post buuuut here’s what we did each day…
Day 1:
As I mentioned, I arrived late Wednesday night and met Brandon at the hotel. We popped into the food court grabbed a Mickey ice cream bar and headed up to the room and crashed getting as much sleep as possible preparing for all day park fun!
Day 2:
We reserved Magic Kingdom for day one of parks!
If you’re like “what? reserved?” YES. As of the date of this blog, you need to reserve a park to ensure that you are able to get in. Since the pandemic, Disney (both world and land) require you to make a park reservation to keep capacity lower. If you purchase a park hopper ticket then you are able to park hop after 2:00 pm.
After 4 hours of sleep (thanks time zones, excitement, and an early wake up call!), Magic Kingdom was up first and because we were staying on property we were eligible for early park hours. So naturally we set our alarms for 6:00 am and caught the first bus to Magic Kingdom. It payed off because we were literally the second people in the park. We used this to get on Space Mountain with absolutely no wait. We rocked the crap out of Magic Kingdom and hit literally everything we wanted to. We knew we wanted to (*read NEEDED to*) get on Rise of the Resistance in the Star Wars area (Star Wars Galaxy’s Edge) at Hollywood Studios. So we booked it over to Hollywood Studios and made. that. shit. happen. While we’re waiting, we were able to snag a dinner reservation at Mama Melrose’s Ristorante Italiano for 8:40 which was perfect. After dinner we were wiped so we headed back to the hotel and saved the fireworks for another day.
P.S. This “saving the fireworks” turned out to be a mistake because it poured the rest of the evenings and we only were able to see them on the last day. We definitely limited our options!
Day 3:
Reservation set for Epcot babyay! Now, I LOVE Epcot. It’s definitely the Disney adult park. And yes, yes, yes we ate and drank around the world. Once again, we woke up early and caught those extra hours- mistake number one (more on that below). As you might know, Epcot has a new ride Remy’s Ratatouille Adventure which everyone was literally running to. But here’s the thing! If you want to get on that ride at rope drop take the gondolas into Epcot. They drop you off at the back end of the park literally right next to the ride. More on that later… This day though ended a little crazy. In comes the thunder storms! At about 3 pm the rain came down HARD and we took it as a sign to go back to the hotel room and rest our feet. Yooooo we’re old. We can’t hang on our feet as much anymore. We needed the evening of chilling so we grabbed a pizza from the cafeteria and watched Shang-Chi on Netflix. Hey, mom and dad needed a chill night.
Day 4:
Universal day! I’ll be doing a whooooole blog post about this park all on it’s own. Stay tuned! After Universal we decided to head over to Disney Springs. We wanted to knock out the shopping because at this point we were worried about being dead tired on Monday (Day 6) and the fact that Disney Springs didn’t open until 10 and we were leaving for the airport at 12:30 so with the buses we didn’t want to feel stressed/ hurried. We also ended up ubering home because we were freaking exhausted.
Day 5:
Animal Kingdom reserved for this day! We wised up and slept in a little because we knew we didn’t need to get there super early because there are not many rides there. Once again, mistakes were made. Last time we were at WDW we felt like there was SO MUCH at Animal Kingdom but there really isn’t. But it did allow us to watch the new show- Kite Tales! This show was so freaking cute. I loved it so much. After that we were able to put our name down at the Yak & Yeti, pop on a safari and then our table was ready. It was nice to take a slightly slower day and just enjoy some scenery, people watching and yummy food. Once we could park hop, we headed back to Hollywood Studios to do Rise of the Resistance and Rocking’ Rollercoaster again. Duh- they are the best rides there. Of course we had to wait for our Genie+ return times and we popped into the Frozen Sing-a-long where I proceeded to cry because those kids were just so damn pure and I missed my baby! This long day wasn’t over. This was the first night that the weather looked like it might be able to watch the fireworks but we weren’t 100% yet. So, we headed back to our hotel room for a bit of a chill and waited for the the confirmation that the weather was going to stay away. And it did! So we headed out, put our names in at The Plaza Restaurant and popped in and out of shops until our table was ready. And we had perfect timing with walking straight out of the restaurant to stand to watch fireworks. After we booked it over to Peter Pan (my favorite ride). Perfect ending to a great vacation.
Day 6:
A chill day of sleeping in, packing and Mickey waffles. We took the Sunshine Flyer bus back to the airport and traveled home to see our baby boy 😭.
Highlights
Oh boy! It was such a great few days it’s hard to narrow it all down… but that wouldn’t make much of a blog right? Here’s my top 5 highlights:
- Obviously hanging with my husband, just the two of us. Barf, I know.
- Yooooo the new Star Wars ride, Rise of the Resistance, is friggin fire!! OMG I have no words.
- The delicious orange wine slushy from Epcot. (Food & Ride blog later!).
- Crying to the Frozen sing along (lol, are you a loser like me?).
- Snuggling and watching the fireworks as a perfect ending to a perfect vacation.
Mistakes
Let’s talk about the mistakes we made on our trip. Even the seasoned Disneyland people that we are, WDW is still new(ish) territory for us and we’re still learning how to do this trip the best we can. We actually learned A LOT this time around and next time we will correct our mistakes. Let’s be honest though, we’re probably going to bring kiddo(s) (no I’m not pregnant) next time and that will basically throw everything out the f-ing window.
Ok, mistake number one is kind of not our fault. May was not the best time to come to Florida. We got a lot of rain, like buckets, with thunder and lightning and it kind of ruined most of our nights. I really wanted to see fireworks and we had to wait until the very final night to have clear skies. Additionally, ho. ly. shit. it was hot and humid. Like ew. We got wet one of the days and I swear we didn’t dry for 4 hours. Bleh. We’ve previously gone to WDW in March and that was muuuuuuuch better. Less hot, less humid, less rain. Like I said, this was out of our control as our timing was chosen for us by Brandon’s conference.
On that note, I told you in my packing for Orlando blog to get the dollar tree ponchos. NOPE! They were like crop tops hahahahaha. We ended up spending the $12 each on poncho because oh man did it pour!
Next, we didn’t have our shit together when it came to reservations. We just kind of winged it. This actually turned out ok… we were able to snag an 8:40 reservation at Mama Melrose’s Ristorante Italiano in Hollywood Studios our first night and then were able to get it fairly quickly at both Yak & Yeti in Animal Kingdom and The Plaza Restaurant in Magic Kingdom on our last night. Definitely helped that we were only a party of 2 so we were able to squeeze in a lot of places, but if you have more people in your group, you’d definitely be screwed.
Mistake number 3 was going to rope drop for Epcot. Basically our whole Epcot day was a bit of a clusterfuck. First we woke up super early for rope drop and basically unless you’re going to run onto the Ratatouille ride, there is no need. Why? THE FREAKING FOOD DIDN’T OPEN UNTIL 10:30! WTF??? We were all excited to get at some of the Flower Festival’s food for breakfast (like the cinnamon roll bites! aka a breakfast food) but we couldn’t which was very annoying. We were stuck with Jeoffrey’s coffee and donuts- which, if you’ve never had those donuts, taste like they were made a few days ago and have been sitting out getting stale. Definitely not worth the calories but when you have 3 hours before the food even opens, you gotta do what you gotta do.
Wanna know how I packed for this vacation?
Check out my packing guide here!
Second Epcot mistake (4th one overall) was buying the Genie+ pass that morning. I’ll talk more about that below but basically we ended up not really using it. I think maybe we got one return time all day…kind of threw $30 in the street.
And lastly… mistake number 5, we highly under estimated Hollywood Studios. To be fair, last time we went to WDW, the Star Wars area was still under construction and Toy Story was brand new and we kind of stayed out of it (it was swarming with kiddos), so, it was pretty much Tower of Terror and Rocking’ Rollercoaster and then a bunch of shows. So this time we only really budgeted 1/2 a day there. Additionally, before our trip, we felt like we were going to do at least a 3/4 day at Animal Kingdom and…well… we didn’t. We ended up being stuck there until 2:00 pm because you can’t park hop until after then so we put our names in to a sit down restaurant and waited. If we were to do it again, we would’ve reserved Hollywood Studios instead of Animal Kingdom as our reservation and park hopped to Animal Kingdom.
Genie+
If you’ve been to WDW or Disneyland before, you might remember Fast Passes. Well, this is the new system. TBH it’s almost exactly the same concept except it’s all done digitally now aaaaand you have to pay for it (ugh). Here’s how it works: you purchase Genie+ for every person each day you’d like to use it at the parks. It’s $15 per person per day. This pass is connected to your park ticket and you can access it on your WDW app. From here you are able to digitally get a return time for various rides throughout the parks. For example: if you want to ride Peter Pan but don’t want to wait in the long line, you can get a return time for later in the day and go into a different (shorter) line, called the lightening lane, when you return later. It’s a pretty good system that allows you to ride as many rides as possible. However, my in-laws are planning a trip to Disneyland with my niece and nephew and it’s tough because it’s all digital. They are tech savvy people but it’s still a 100% app system which can trip up… shall we say… the more mature generation.
Here’s the downside…
- You have to pay for it each day. So for Brandon and I it was $30 everyday we wanted to use it. It’s a bit frustrating when you’ve already spent so much money on tickets…
- …On top of that, there are certain rides that you have to pay an additional $10 per person PER RIDE to get in the lightening lane. These are the big popular rides like Rise of the Resistance.
- There are some parks where you actually might NOT need the Genie+ system. We purchased it the morning we went to Epcot and then all the lines were so short because we were there at rope drop and there was basically no line for anything (you couldn’t use it on the new Ratatouille ride). So, it was basically $30 down the drain. In the future, I would wait to purchase Genie+ until you need it- you can purchase it at any point in the day, so save yo money if you don’t need it.
Even after all of this I do think Genie+ is worth it. Just keep your money until you actually need to use it.
What I Bought
I actually feel really good about the merch I bought. All things I love and only one impulse buy (the mug #guilty). One thing I love about WDW is that there is not a ton of merchandise that you can’t buy at Disney Springs so we were able to scope out all the stores and think on things then make a decision before purchasing. There’s also a lot you can buy at shopdisney.com so you can think even longer! There’s some home things that I wanted to think about because I don’t know what’s going to work in the new house.
(I linked as much as I could but there are some things that you can only purchase at the park)
- Icabod & Mr. Toad pin
- WDW 50th pin
- “Adventure is Out There” Up mug
- Mickey t-shirt
- Basin balt salts
- Basin bath bombs: Bombshell, Pink Sugar, Evening Woods, Pink Sands, Japanese Cherry Blossom, Lemongrass
- Mary Poppins Christmas ornament
Costs
Ok but like… how much does it really cost to visit Walt Disney World? Real talk here… Brandon and I DID NOT go in with a budget. We just lived our lives and ate what we wanted and bought what we wanted. I am very good at not just buying things willy-nilly but we were definitely on vacation.
I’ve broken down all the costs below so you can get a REAL LIFE view of it. #transparency
*This does not include anything from Universal Studios Floria. I’ll do another blog post that includes all that info!
**This does not included flights because Brandon got there with his company and I was able to cover all my flights with saved up Chase Sapphire points from not traveling the last 2 years…
Here’s how it breaks down:
- Hotel & tickets: All Star Music Resorts; 5 night stay, 2x 3-day park hopper tickets- $1,978.10
- Food & Bev: Mostly snacks and quick service, 3 sit down restaurants- $607.00
- Souvenirs: For everything mentioned above- $128.45
- Transportation: Sunshine Flyer & Ubers(+tips)- $64.97
- Genie+: 2 days of Genie+ for 2 people- $63.92
All of this makes a grand total of… drum roll please… $2,842.44
Not too shabby! If you were trying to go more on a budget I would suggest doing an instacart delivery to your hotel room for breakfasts and snacks. Brandon and I are more on the snack and eat whatever we want on vacation type people, but there was definitely room for saving money. Of course souvenirs are optional. The other thing to look our for is hotel deals. We actually got a bit of a deal with a 5 night stay because we booked directly through WDW. Keep eyes out for deals through AAA, Disneyworld or sometimes Costco.
Overall, this was a fantastic trip of pure Disney magic. I wouldn’t say it was… relaxing lol, but it was definitely fun to do something that Brandon and I did before we had a kid.
