What do you do on check-in day?

[DisneyGator]

I love reading about everyone's traditions....I am getting so excited! We don't really have any, since we go so often (living about an hour away). When we stay overnight, we will usually get up early and drive over and check in or drop off our bags and head straight to a park (and try to get there as close to opening as possible). Sometimes we will just go to a park for a while and then check into the hotel later. We are going this Saturday and just spending 1 night, but Sat morning AK has EM hours at 7:00 am!! We really want to be there for that, but the crazy thing is that we have to check into the hotel first so we can get into the park for EM hours (I called already and they told me that my confirmation won't be enough to let me in for EM hours)! So this means we will probably be leaving at like 5:15 am!!! Yikes...it will be worth it though....we really want to take advantage of EM since it is probably going to be CROWDED!!

 

[littlered]

We always fly in early, we are usually at the hotel by 10:30-11. We check in, go to room if it is ready, if not we check carry on baggage with bell services and decide what we want for lunch. Sometimes we eat at the hotel, sometimes hop the first bus that comes and eat at park. That really depends on how hungry we are.
In October we were staying for our first time at the Wilderness Lodge so we hopped on the boat and headed to MK and went to Casey's, spent a few hours in the park and then back to the hotel to rest a bit then to DS for dinner and Fantasmic.
We will be arriving in a few weeks to SSR and are planning to go to Casey's for lunch, and let the rest of the day playout by itself.
Only 31 more days:sohappy:

 

[need2go2wdw]

Previously, I avoiding having a park ticket for arrival day--given the shorter time we'd actually have to play, it seemed like a waste to me.

Last summer, we tried something new for us that really made us feel like we're stretching our Disney time...

We live about 6 hours from Orlando, so when we made our trip, we left home early afternoon and went about 4.5 hours to spend the night (this time it was on the beach in St. Augustine--it was great!). It's really good pre-trip stress relief to just get out of town, and stopping for the night enhances our ability to begin relaxing. We used hotel points for a free stay, enjoyed an easy dinner and any local sights, and then got a good night's rest. The hotel provided breakfast the next morning, too!

The next day, we made the last 1.5 hour drive to WDW and arrived around noon, reasonably fresh for checking in and some fun. If we couldn't check in immediately, we had packed pool clothes separately and would change in the dressing rooms near the pool. Since our room was ready, we moved in and were off for a QS dinner and an evening of re-acquainting ourselves with Disney at the MK. Since Disney's price structure can make that extra day's park ticket/meal credit relatively inexpensive, we chose to bank the "extra" TS credit for a special meal (at Cindy's Royal Table later that week).

For us, it felt almost like getting an extra Disney day.

We actually are able to do something like that now since we live only 3 hours away. Before, when living in MI, we would fly in and check in to WDW the same day, usually by noon, and never went to a park that first day because, like you said, it seemed like a waste. Since we are DVC members, we use our points for our stays. As I'm sure all you DVC members, if not everyone else out there, knows that weekend points are about double per night as weekday points...so, staying on weekend days kills me cause I think about how I could get 2 weekdays for the price of the one weekend...anyway, getting to my point, , when we go in May, we booked a Sunday through Friday (all weekday points) and I decided that I'd book a cheap hotel like Best Western for Saturday night and that we'd drive the 3 hours over there on Sat afternoon having that evening to do what we wanted, go to DTD, whatever. Most importantly, it means on our WDW check-in day, we will already be in town, just minutes away from the AKL and we can start our day as early as we want and actually go to a park!