PiratesMansion
Well-Known Member
Yep. The needless complexity of WDW is one of the reasons I strongly prefer DLR even though WDW is much closer to me. SO many hoops to jump through, and the need to not just plan, but plan with contingencies. It can feel endless.
In terms of now or later, I am of two minds on that. On one hand, I do think the trip will be less stressful if you wait until your kids are older. But it's also clear that you have been marinating on the prospect of WDW for some time, are in some way ready to go, and finances don't appear to be an issue, so from that perspective you may as well pull the trigger. This doesn't have to be a one-and-done trip and you can always treat this like a trial run and come back another time (though admittedly the ever-rising cost of WDW sure doesn't help with this prospect). Certainly there's something to be said for waiting for circumstances to be more optimal, but there may not be a time when everything aligns perfectly. I'd say that your desire to go is clear, and so if you want to go, I would do it.
One way to try and combat the overwhelming feeling of it all (it won't curb the feeling completely, but it'll help) is to try to plan and play things fairly conservatively. Focus on what you MUST do and not what would be nice to do, because inevitably there will be things you won't get to, or unexpected situations that will come up. It will be busy, lines will be long, children will be children, and everything will be bigger and take more time than you anticipate (Animal Kingdom is perhaps the ONLY possible exception to that depending on how you tour). For that reason, trust me when I say that the moving of the hotels is something that sounds great now, but it will be the last thing you'll want to do mid-trip. The deluxe to mod transfer is part of it, but the bigger thing for me personally is that I just wouldn't move hotels at all within WDW on the same trip unless I had to. It's an unnecessary hassle (at a place that will inevitably throw you several hassles free of charge both in the planning process and in person) for what is likely to be a negligible at best benefit. WDW takes a lot more out of you than DL does, and sooner or later, even with rest days, that will probably catch up to somebody in your group. Thus, anything that might make your trip more stressful is something to be eliminated. As much as pre-planning will help reduce your stress during the trip, it probably won't eliminate it entirely, so playing everything slowly and deliberately even at this point in the planning will help.
It's not just you. It's a big and stressful place, and many of the choices Disney has made have only exacerbated that stress.
