Your post kind of freaked me out because I felt like I could have written it myself! I am going the same week as you for the first time since 2007, and I have a TON of theoretical knowledge from doing all this research over the past two years and two cancelled trips (so many videos! So many hours reading everyone’s trip reports and studying up on Genie+!) but very little actual knowledge, so it will be interesting to see where my assumptions and preconceptions were wrong. I have the huge advantage of having been working with @OBNurseNH as my travel agent, and she has been incredibly patient with my millions of questions and also has already set me straight a couple of times, especially about how far apart certain things are and how long things might take, which, as someone much more used to DL, I tend to underestimate.
So, for the exact reasons you mentioned I have decided not to do a daily touring plan, but I have a good idea of what we want to do most days (mine is in a OneNote table!) and I expect we will negotiate everyone’s priorities the night before. Many things may go wrong on this trip, but even I can admit that “not planning enough” is probably not going to be the problem.
But I wanted to ask the same question you did about how much to worry about Rope Drop if we have a fair amount of park time and are planning to use G+. Specifically for AK — the early entry there is at 7, and while my family has always believed in RD and will do OK with arriving by 8:30 for MK, 7 feels like a whole other ballgame. Have folks here done this, and is it really worth it, if I am willing to pay for FOP? (Which, by the way, I would also have to do at 7, right as we are tapping in! That feels like it could be stressful . . .) If I am going to get my family to wake up literally before dawn to get there by RD, I am going to need a reason to tell them why it’s important to do it. And if we don’t do it, is there still a benefit to arriving at 8 or 8:30, or is it like once we have missed rope drop we might as well stack some LL’s and show up in the afternoon?
Thanks for any advice!
My spreadsheet is more about outlining which park(s) on which day, where we plan to eat, and calculating the total trip budget. Any plans I might have in the parks would be in the Lines app…but, we aren’t so regimented. I don’t like doing the parks feeling married to a schedule because I find I am too worried (unnecessarily much of the time) of staying on track that I fail to be “in the moment.” So, for me, the plan for each day serves as a guideline that I rarely would reference once I am in the park. It gives me insight into what I can hope to accomplish, realistically.
If you want to adhere to an actual plan, then G+ will definitely throw a monkey wrench into that. It probably works better if you have either no plan, or follow the idea of having a loose idea of what you want to accomplish.
Anyhow, my spreadsheet is basically broken up into three daily periods, with a note as to plans for food and general goal of that period. Morning, Afternoon, and Evening. I might put for Morning “HS: SWGE” then have DB7 listed for lunch. That is as detailed as my spreadsheet tends to be (other than estimated costs of everything along the way).
My spreadsheet is like yours.
My TP used to be very regimented, and still is on the days we will not use G+ as I have always had great success with them. We just bop through our days never having to think about what to do next.
Doing it more the way you typically do is going to be challenging for me.
My spreadsheets (actually a table in PowerPoint, I am a presentation designer so of course it is in PPT!) are high level. Park hours for that day, hard timed events (airline arrival/departures, ADRs, fireworks if we think we are viewing, etc), and general ideas of blocked time if we are hopping to another park.
By the time we actually take the trip, the plan is memorized and burned into my brain and I don’t need to look at it at all.
I do pull together a Touring Plan for each day. It gives me a game plan but it is a living thing as stuff happens and adjustments are made along the way.
I printed 2 mini-copies and laminated them just so DH and DD didn’t constantly ask me what the plans were. First trip I was spending too much time repeating myself lol. They learned quickly to quit asking me and just look themselves.
I have a daily schedule with park info, hard timings, LL priorities/drops and attractions in rough order.
Tempted to laminate them but that would prevent any alterations and also misleadingly convey a sense of certainty that Genie+ utterly prohibits.
Think I’ll stick with putting them in transparent page protectors.
We do something like this for each day and then rely on a very detailed TP to get us thru the parks. I manage this level of the planning. Once we get to the parks my husband takes over with the TPs we have carefully constructed together the last two weeks.
Try this one:
