Touring MK one side at a time?

I’ve been reading a bunch of threads about MK touring plans and I was curious:
Do you think it would be a bad idea to tour one side of the park in the morning and then the other side of the park the second half of the day?
My husband and I are headed there next week with DS4 and DD2. We only have 1 day in MK.
My idea was to go straight to left and visit all of Adventureland, Frontierland, etc. for the first half of the day. We are staying at BLT and plan to go back there after lunch for a nap.
We would then head back to MK around 430/5pm and tour the right side of the park.
It seems efficient in terms of walking but not sure if I’d screw ourselves doing it that way?

We have done it in the past and had no problems. I haven’t looked at the crowd calendar but it should be fairly decent so I think you’ll be OK. Especially with two wee bairns, crisscrossing can be painful.

The only problem I see are the Fantasyland rides like Peter Pan, Dumbo, 7DMT and Mermaid might be more problematic if you don’t hit them first thing. Do you have Fastpasses?

If I did that I would have my FPs for my return.

Well, Mermaid is closed for refurbs and my kids are too small/scared to ride 7DMT - so we don’t have to worry about those! :smile:
We have FPs but can easily swap them out - there is still pretty much full availability for 2/25.
Maybe I will just get afternoon FPs for all of the Fantasyland attractions.

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I think it will work. You’ll want to do the popular attractions first thing in the morning on the left side and then do the things with shorter lines later in the morning. Use your FastPasses for the popular things on the right side of the park, and try to stay as late as possible so you can take advantage of the shorter lines late at night. You will have longer lines for the evening hours.

I’d try making two sets of Touring Plans so you can see what will be possible and what the differences will be. Do one all-day TP with a scheduled break and let the optimizer schedule things for you. Set the ratio of lines vs. walking towards the minimize walking side. That should cut down on some of the criss-crossing. Then do a set of 2 plans - one for morning with only the left side attractions and a separate one for evening with only the right side attractions. It will be interesting to see which scenario will have better numbers.

I’d love to hear how the plans turn out!

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Great idea. I hadn’t even thought of doing two separate plans - one for morning and another for afternoon/evening. Duh! Off to play around with that now.
I will try to put a couple Tmrrwland attractions at the beginning of the day so that the evening isnt overloaded. Stay tuned :wink:

We did 2 days in MK and split the park in half for our two days. It’s kind of the same, only we had more time to play with. I ended up doing a few of the original Fantasyland things along with the Adventure/Frontier/Liberty side. There’s a set of original Fantasyland attractions like It’s a Small World that are right around the corner from Liberty Square.

@SallyEppcot, we did that on our last trip. We ended up doubling up on a couple in Fantasyland because, well, Dumbo is a tradition and we love Little Mermaid. So we did a little cheating.

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Make a Personalized TP with all the activities that you want to do. Put it in your planned “one side” order and Evaluate it. Make a copy of the plan, and then Optimize it. Compare the two results in terms of overall wait time and walking time - you will probably see a significant decrease in waiting time for just a little bit more walking.

Here’s what I came up with:

Morning: (notes: taking railroad around park to entrance when we leave for our nap. Hope to be back to BLT around 1/130 so there is extra time not shown on TP for pit stops, etc.)
http://touringplans.com/plans/print?id=1109467

Evening: (notes: plan on grabbing something to eat and watch parade and wishes closer to tomorrow land so will save some extra time by not walking down main street like the TP indicates)
http://touringplans.com/plans/print?id=1249854

Wishes is at 8:00?

Yes. We will probably grab something to eat in between the parade and wishes - or hop on another ride nearby.

If you are planning on watching Wishes from the front of the castle, it might be a little bit of a pain to fight the crowds back to the Astro Orbiter. Just an observation…

Hey, if you’re going next week, I’ll be there too…we’re doing MK 2/24 split like you, only adventure land and tomorrowland in AM. Not leaving the park, plan a stroller nap in pm with a BOG ADR (yes last day for preordered) for lunch. I’m also balancing trying to generally keep 8 disparate ppl together so have 2 plans I’ve affectionately named “roller coaster crew” and “easy pace crew” that are as synchronized as feasibly possible. This website and forum have sure helped! Good luck you.

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Thanks for looking! My hope is to watch the electrical parade AND wishes as close to Tomorrowland as possible.

Thanks, khayes4! We will be there on 2/25. I will be interested to hear how your plan goes!
DS4 would definitely need to go back to BLT for quiet time so we allotted a good amount of time mid-day for that. They wouldn’t nap for that long but I’d rather allot too much free time than not enough!

Thanks for everyone’s help - especially for suggesting making a morning and evening plan. I don’t know why I never though to do that! Forrest for the trees type thing I guess :wink:

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I always split my TP’s into Parts 1 and 2, or pre and post midday break. We are planning on doing the same you are thinking of on our March trip. It will be crowded, but DH is really tired of the crisscrossing. He also wants the overall experience of enjoying and area of the park for a longer time. Makes sense to me too. We are hitting the headliners on the left side first and saving FPPs for Part 2 (Space, 7DMT and PP) Hoping to pick up more FPP’s, but we’ll see if that works! Let us know how it goes for you!

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It’s so much easier to do it this way with FPP. I get that an optimized touring plan will be even more efficient, but FPP does make it possible.

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Good morning! Figured I would check in and let you know how this worked out. Perfect! We were at MK on 2/25 and worked the left side of the park in the morning. We mostly stuck to the TP I linked to and even rode a couple rides more than once because there were no lines. We walked at a very leisurely pace - stopping to take pics, let my two little kids explore, etc. Because my kids were in such great moods, we ended up changing some of our FastPasses and used them after lunch - dumbo and tomorrow land speedway. I think we ended up leaving MK around 3pm and headed back to the resort for a nap. We got back to MK around 530 and used a fastpass for Buzz (despite the regular line only being about a 15 min wait). We didn’t really follow my ‘Evening’ TP since we had done most of those rides In the afternoon - or my kids didn’t want to attempt them! We had dinner at cosmic rays and then watched the 7pm parade and light show directly in front of the castle - easily getting a spot around 6:50! My kids get scared of the firework booms so we swam upstream after ‘Celebrate the Magic’ and watched Wishes from just inside the park entrance.
A perfect day!

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Oh I’m so glad you had a great day! I was hoping you’d update us. I get so invested in the planning questions!

Do you think you’ll go back someday?

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