The most challenging part of planning for the OI Meetup was understanding what was available when and working around that. And since the parks closed to day guests at different times on Fri (7pm) and Sat (8pm), most of it wasn’t even the same between days.
I’ve included screenshots of the details that were sent out 2 weeks in advance here:
These do vary from Meetup to Meetup, so research for the latest, but here are some of the data points we had to keep in mind. (I had to write out a chart to try to keep it straight and still struggled!)
Most shows and 2 rides (Woody Woodpecker and Bilge-Rat Barges) were not available during the Meetup so needed to be done before official park close. And the daytime showtimes still hadn’t been updated when we headed out for our vacation that I could find so that was last minute info to wrangle.
Other than Bonus Bites, the unlimited free food/drink service started one hour after parks closed (which is when Bonus Bites closed, but they did run out of some/most items at some locations before that from what I heard). Then the restaurants close one hour before the end of the meetup, but food carts are open right until the end. But some did run out of select items before that.
And it was a bit unclear what counted as a food cart. I think Florean Fortescue’s Ice-Cream Parlour was open right until the end, but it always had a pretty good sized line, so we made the tough call to skip it. Also some places that only served beverages, even if they were in a building rather than anything remotely cart-like, stayed open.
Also, certain rides had to stop running at midnight both nights due to noise ordinances, which means they had to close the queues early enough for them to clear. The rest mostly ran up until the end, but the queues were closed in time for them to clear by the end of the event, so there was some ambiguity there to deal with.
And some things had special hours. Like the Mummy queue was completely closed for the first hour after park close (per the email, but not noted on the map).
And the cut across between parks was not open until an hour after park close. We were allowed to exit and re-enter the other park during open park hours, but not sure about that hour gap in between.
It was just A LOT to try to factor in and keep in my head (along with all my inside/outside/seat config data points)!
If you come fairly regularly and are mainly using this as a chance to ride with short waits, this is probably less of a concern, but did us not having been in a number of years, it made it challenging to try to cover a broad array of things.