I’m in the beginning stages of planning my first trip on my own (family has planned all our other trips) and I’m wondering how to plan for breaks. I know in the past when we’ve gone with my family, we’ve never taken breaks and I know how exhausted it made us, so I want to make sure that when I plan this trip, I’m scheduling in breaks. We’re staying at Port Orleans Riverside and we’d initially planned on using the Disney transportation, but we will have a car rented, so I’m not sure if it’d just be easier for us to drive if we’re taking mid-day breaks or how much of a difference that would make.
Sorry, I’m a newbie to this whole planning thing, so any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!
Do not drive to MK use wdw transport for other parks its either or. . With regards to breaks it depends on time of year and group make up and length of stay which park do you have hoppers etc. We found if we tried to do rd and take a break in the afternoon we didn’t want to go back. So for us we do rd-3:in MK or 2-close. Park closing time is a big factor also. 1-5 is most popular break time for those that do it.
I usually leave the park right after lunch and then return either for dinner or right after.
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It’s myself, my SO, my ds-10, my dd-13. We’ll be going mid-September this year and we do have the Park Hopper. We’ll be there for a week total (5 1/2 days really if you exclude travel time). We are committing one of those days to Universal, otherwise the other 4 1/2 days will be all Disney. It looks like AK and DHS will likely have shorter hours when we go, but after speaking to my travel agent, we could probably do each of those in half a day and go back in the morning on the day we leave to either or if we feel like we’ve missed something or want to get in extra time at one of those. So, I guess really it probably comes down to when to implement breaks at Epcot and MK, as those days will likely be longer. I know Epcot is the closest park to our Hotel, so we’ll go ahead and do WDW transportation there, but MK does look like it’s a little further. I’ve heard if you take WDW transportation you should account for a 3-4 hour break, which seems really long to me. However, I’ve never done the parks with a break before, so I don’t know what is appropriate. My kids are older, so I don’t think they’d need as long as younger kiddos do, but I want to give both my kids and me and my SO adequate rest time so we’re not dying at the end of the day.
When our family went to MK two years ago, we drove our car to arrive for RD, took our break around 1:00 or so, rode the bus back to ASSports, then came back a little before dinner time. It was nice as we were leaving that night, we were still parked up close to the front, so could walk to the car.
AK river of light evening show will be open then and HS might still have SW fireworks and F! at night. They would be worth seeing
During my recent trip we took breaks in early afternoon, but instead of going back to our resort we instead explored some of the resorts near the park we were at. Ex. when at MK we took a break and visited the monorail resorts. Stopped for maybe 45 minutes and had drinks at the Grog Grotto at the Polynesian resort, then headed back to MK around 4 or so. Provided the relaxation away from the go-go-go of the parks while still experiencing something different then our hotel room.
My kids were that exact age when we went a few years ago. We were there at RD and generally left the parks around 4PM. They never wanted to go back to a park after the break. We had to force them to at least go see Fantasmic. They would prefer to go to the pool and relax. Mind you, it was November and we were practically alone in the parks 
So we did lots of rides.